If you had never been to Louisiana before, you might drive through the southern countryside today, passing sugarcane fields and oil refineries, and across bridge after bridge spanning a seemingly endless swampland, without too heavy of a reminder that just last fall, nearly all seemed lost. While all is not normal or pristine, you can visit the occasional small town that survived or is rebuilding. And you can even drop in on New Orleans, with its ample supply of “I Survived Katrina” T-shirts in the French Quarter.

I suppose looking back at the chaos and the past five months of recovery, the ongoing battle for normalcy is beginning to weigh in favor of the people.

As a staff member of the Equine Health Studies Program at Louisiana State University, the hurricane experience was very close and very real to me and the entire team of faculty, staff, and students at our hospital. Having waded through muddy streets in search of lost horses, and having stood in the middle of a once-vibrant city that became abandoned neighborhoods without another human being around for miles, we gained a unique understanding of quiet desolation. Those temporary feelings of helplessness combined with the overwhelming anxiety of uncertainty have been branded in our minds forever.

But the awesome power of nature brought more to Louisiana than just a lot of water. The extreme devastation brought on by that unprecedented season of storms paled in comparison to the opportunity for goodness that was unveiled in simply coming together as people helping people. It has been a process recovering from that time, to be sure, but a process in the right direction.

I spent an evening last weekend at Evangeline Downs in Opelousas, La. It was Premier Night for Delta Downs, one of two racetracks heavily damaged by the hurricanes that forced the tracks to hold race meets elsewhere. It was an incredible evening with a sell-out crowd, huge fields, and some of the best racing I’ve seen in Louisiana. A Louisiana homebred, Happy Ticket, a former Breeders’ Cup contender, stole the show. There was the occasional comment about pastures coming back and some talk of how the sugar cane crop survived and what prices might yield this year, but the focus was on the horses. There was joy in racing and being together as horsemen