As It Comes

I am watching, in horror. Will Issac hit New Orleans head on, a town I love with all my heart—despite never having lived there? Will it swing west, hitting Chauvin and Houma and Thibodaux and LUMCON—one of the prettiest places on the planet I’ve ever seen? With Katrina, seven years ago tomorrow, I didn’t have the curse of watching before it struck. Seven years ago today, we were in the midst of our own storm aftermath—with no power for a week and temperatures above 100 degrees. It was only afterwards I saw.

And having been back down to NOLA a half-dozen times since Katrina, I wonder about the new levees and flood walls and pump houses. Will they work? Will they hold? Will it save the city that has JUST started to bounce back from Katrina and the BP oil spill?

My horror is a palpable thing my husband and children can feel. They’ve been to NOLA now. They’ve seen it—how unique and important and damaged it all is. They now feel the bowl, instead of just understanding my words about the city being in a bowl. They can see the choppy waves on the Lake Pontchartrain of their memories. They understand the surge will rush past the barrier islands and into the bays, then wind its way through the bayous and manmade canals from high-pressure oil lines. Then the surge will wash away more land, fill more wetlands with life-killing sea water. Then it will run up the industrial canals and the lakes and the spillways.

And all to "control" the Mississippi.

But, this time, I am also conflicted. The same storm path that will inundate Louisiana with up to twenty inches of rain will also push the storm into my neck of the woods in Missouri. Rain. Days and days of rain. We will not get twenty inches (although we could use it). But will we get an inch, two, five? Any drop of water upon the ground is a welcome sight these days, but we would need ten days straight of rain to catch up to where we’re supposed to be.

Our dying willow tree.

 We’re in the worst drought in over fifty years. The highest category in droughts is D4- Exceptional. That’s where we’re at. The grass is dead. The trees are dying—everywhere the trees are dying. Everywhere around us it looks like fall, with brown, dried leaves littering the ground, and yet the temperatures are still well into the mid and upper 90s. The crops were an utter failure. We will have massive corn shortages and massive soybean shortages and we already have a hay shortage for cattle feed that exceeds a million bales. Farmers are selling their cattle for a loss just to be rid of them before the winter—when they will not be able to feed them. Earlier in the summer, rural houses on wells found themselves drying up, but now, within the past two weeks, small towns around us have started to have pump failures and water losses. We’ve had water restrictions and fire bans since June.

Photo Source

This has not been a summer with BBQs and sprinklers and fireworks. None of these things have been an option for us this year. The idea of water-- four days of rain filling the cracks in the hard packed earth of my backyard and possibly saving the willow in our front yard-- is something I can’t help but crave.

These two wildly disparate sets of emotions make my stomach sink, and I don’t know how to reconcile it. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps this type of thing isn’t supposed to be reconciled. Perhaps this is the way one is supposed to feel as they see the weather harm another and pray that it helps them.

New Orleans 2011

Two weeks ago the guys and I were leaving for New Orleans. That’s enough time for the memories of the trip to start accumulating that daily life haze. I better write this all out before I lose it.

So, while I was going down to work, the boys went down to play. And learn a little bit. But mostly play.

This is what I was doing.

And play they did:

That's not to say that I didn't have some fun. I did. As per my usual in NOLA, it revolved around coffee and food:

We learned as well. The boys learned what the effects of a category 3 hurricane can do to a historic city. They learned about the ecological effects on Lake Pontchartrain. They learned why New Orleans is special, and worth saving. 

I learned that there are, six years after Katrina, houses coming back in the Lower Ninth. And people in Saint Bernard parish.

I do not support misery tours, and I won’t take pictures of other people’s property without their permission. This means that I have to give you my feeble attempt to paint the scene. The last time I was in the Lower Ninth it was filled with waste high weeds, debris of lives left over from the haphazard bulldozers, and silence. I cannot say that it is filled with sounds and people now, because that would be a lie, but there are houses. And sometimes there are streetlights. There are still waist-high weeds on many plots, but there are also street signs and pavement (more often than not). Sprouting up in patches, trying to bleed together into blocks and neighborhoods, are houses.

The structures are some of the wildest amalgamations I’ve seen. Bright colors and the shotgun style-- so indicative of the neighborhood before Katrina-- meshes with stilts and pilings, category 3 (supposedly) structural integrity, and energy efficiency. Rooftops are lined with row after row of solar panels. Cars are parked underneath living rooms and kitchens—more like what you see in beach front properties or wetland camps. Everywhere I go, people claim it’s Brad Pitt’s doing. I don’t know if they’re right. I do know that they make shake their heads in confusion when they say this, but they do not complain about him, at least not in my presence.

In Saint Bernard I was shocked to see strip malls open again. New stores. Cars parked in front of houses that were, four years ago, often still filled with mildew, or stripped down to the studs and bleached, awaiting the contractors that may or may never come.  Near where we volunteered at Emergency Communities, there is now the Community Center the residents were only beginning to discuss while we were down there seven months afterwards. I did not see a single FEMA trailer. I did not see those hateful blue tarps.

That’s not to say that everyone has come back. There are plenty of empty tracts of land. There are ghostly silent shells of homes. There still looms the ever-present oil refinery in the background, spitting out smoke and fire and a noxious smell, just like clockwork. The streets near the levee walls on the industrial canal are still shockingly bare.

And yet, I can feel it. I can hear it. I can start to see it. The streetlights through the Lower Ninth on Claiborne all bear signs stating “Breathing Life into the Lower Ninth”. It gives me hope—not just for NOLA, but also for Joplin. For rebuilding everywhere. For overcoming.

Five years later…

This final post is part six in a series of posts leading up to the five year anniversary of hurricane Katrina on August 29th

Poverty Point, Louisiana: How can you not love this place?

These posts were hard to write. I sat in the moonlight on the patio last night, wondering whether or not they should have been posted at all. Sometimes I feel as if I do not do it all justice—it feels as if I glossed over my emotions, the depth of the destruction, the feeling of the town, the smell of the toxicity of Murphy oil…And sometimes I feel as if I have said too much, felt too much, treaded in a place where I had no business being.

I know that, in the grand scheme of things, my experiences are not that significant. I did not live through the storm; I do not work on a daily basis to rebuild the city. I haven’t even spent enough time on the coast of Mississippi to describe their point of view.

Yet my experiences changed my life forever. Loose ideals and vague beliefs in humanity, conceptualizations of courage, bravery, and endurance, the perceived role of governments, the effects of socio-economic status, they all gelled and solidified in New Orleans. I am who I am today because of that place.

In 2008, all hell broke loose in our family. We were struggling, trying to survive. What was supposed to be an annual pilgrimage to NOLA did not end up being so.

In many ways, I still cannot believe that I am not going to be down there on the five year anniversary.

J and I have agreed: our next family vacation (hopefully, next year) will be a remake of the Mississippi river trip. Even K is excited about this. I think it is important for my sons to be exposed to the Southern culture, the music, the bayous, the bay. K is excited about the Gibson Guitar factory. Ant is excited about the food. J does not know what to expect—he’s never been that far south before.

And the hurricane. And the oil. We will be living with the effects of these for decades to come. My children need to see what became of the hurricane and the oil.

If anyone ever asks me where I think I will retire, where I think I will live, NOLA is high on my list. After the kids are grown, I think it is quite possible that J and I will move down there and settle permanently.

Despite the hurricane, I love that town—my love of the place grew immensely after hurricane. For those of you who think that, or have said that, in essence, the city should be razed and the people relocated, I only have one thing to say: People who live in New Orleans rarely move out of New Orleans, and there’s a reason for that. Go down there yourself, and see all of the reasons why the city should be saved.

The River, the Bayou, the Bay

This is part five in a series of posts leading up to the five year anniversary of hurricane Katrina on August 29th

Left- Murphy Oil-- another spiller


Twenty-one months after the hurricane, we headed down once more. This time, it was more than New Orleans. We would be looking at river control, levees, and especially, Terrebonne Bay.

That’s not to say that we wouldn’t be heading to New Orleans for several days, however.

By this time, there were books, articles, academic texts to read, absorb, pick apart. Somewhere in that mess, I read a line that changed me. I have to paraphrase for you here, because I can no longer find the paper, but it said that eight weeks of Iraq (war) spending would fix the wetlands problems in Louisiana, and would stop another disaster of the magnitude of Katrina from effecting Louisiana.

Two months. Eight weeks of war spending in Iraq. That’s all it would take, if we, Americans, thought it important enough.

And then I saw the bayous, the sinking wetlands, the weakened barrier islands and the river control system with my own eyes.

In 1927 the Mississippi River flooded in a way that few of us can envision today. Levees were a private affair back then, and most were inadequate to a 500 year flood. In the spring of 1927, it wouldn’t stop raining. Several cities along the river, in multiple states, were inundated.

Controlling the Mississippi became a big priority, but I won’t bore you with the engineering behind it. What everyone does need to understand, however, is that when the levees went up to today’s levels, they began channeling the river. The river channels so much now, that the water from the Mississippi actually shoots out into the Gulf, instead of dissipating throughout the delta as it once did. The river, which built the state of Louisiana over eons of time, starting shooting all of the land-building mud and silt over the continental shelf—where it does not build land. With the lack of silt and mud deposits, the wetlands salinate, flood, the grasses die and the trees die off, the animal and marine life leave.

Instead of massive amounts of wetlands that help buffer places like New Orleans from giant storms like Katrina, there is more ocean.

Here’s another thing I read: 75 years of river control erased 2500 years of land building by the river.

One more thing: every day we lose a football field’s worth of wetlands.

On the river trip, we went to some of the most amazing places I have ever seen. Have you seen a bayou? Have you seen the wetlands? Have you been in Terrebonne Bay, riding in a shrimp trawler, watching porpoises swim beside the boat? Have you walked along the beach of a barrier island? Have you watched the sun go down over the Gulf?

And this is what we are losing-- this land lost is what aided and abetted Katrina in drowning NOLA and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

When I heard that this year’s oil disaster had hit Cocodrie, Louisiana, and they had to lay down hard boom to keep the oil at bay I cried. How much more could this place take?

We spent another several days in NOLA that time around. People were starting to come back to the Lower 9th ward—we met with an advocate that I will never forget. We met with her in a computer lab that she had set up especially to help former residents start the trek up the paperwork mountain on the road home. She had hope, and yet, she was cynical. She looked at me and I looked at her, and we both understood each other. I like to think that it made her feel better that someone from the outside understood.

She wrote us a letter, thanking us, several weeks after our trip. It was one of the kindest things I had ever read.

After we met with her, we made another trip to the place that had torn me up so badly two months before. This time I was prepared—steeled against the quietude.

Some of the students with us, students who had been down to volunteer (either with our class or on their own) within months of the hurricane; they had not been back to see this yet. It hit them hard.

Imagine: you met some of these people, and now all traces of them are gone from the landscape. Or, you helped them gut their house over a year ago, and it still stands in the same condition today.

We sat together crying. We walked the streets together, astonished. And then, we came across the first FEMA trailer to be seen.

It was an older woman—a mother of the civil rights generation. She was warm, welcoming, and ready to talk to us about how the neighborhood had been. She didn’t have the answers on how to make the neighborhood into something again, but she was there. She was doing her part. She was ready to welcome her neighbors home, if they were able to make it back.

She did her part to bring us back from despair. She radiated calm, courage, hope. She lifted all of our spirits just by being present. She showed the potentials, the possibilities that might still exist for this ravaged town.

It is a superpower that I wish I possessed.

Mississippi Queen

This is part four in a series of posts leading up to the five year anniversary of hurricane Katrina on August 29th

It was a year since I had last been down there and nearly 19 months since the hurricane. We were heading down, D and I, for a site visit (another course was in the works, this time about the Mississippi river) and there was the Gulf South Service Learning conference. It was, appropriately, held in New Orleans that year.

We drove down the River Road, through Memphis, the delta, the Trace. I stood on the bluffs in Natchez, watching the sun set. We traveled along the river and the levees, sometimes completely cut off from the known world. It was beautiful and green and warm—it wasn’t that way in the Lou yet- too early in the spring. I fell even more in love with the South, the delta, the people--with Louisiana.

I was antsy, though. Itchy. I had to get back to New Orleans. I had to see what had happened since I was there last. I had to see what progress was made. I had eaten up every little bit of news that had come our way. I had watched the Spike Lee documentary—forced J to watch it with me.

“Sarah,” he said to me, after hours of viewing and me crying silent tears, “I think I get it now. I think I do. It never ends.”

When we hit NOLA, we were supposed to attend some pre-workshops for the conference. Before we had left, I had been incredibly excited about the workshops in which we had planned to participate. By the time we got down there, though… by the time we checked into the room, I had to leave. I had to see the city. I couldn’t help myself. Fortunately, D understood. She watched me head out—she was staying—knowing that I needed some time to process for myself.

The warehouse district was back up and running, and there were people on the riverwalk. Our hotel was right across the street from the Convention Center, and that was tough, but it was cleaned up, refurbished, yet not quite active again. Starbucks had opened up, only for 6 hours each day. The ladies working there told me that the company had been excellent to them—paying them when they couldn’t work; carrying their benefits for them even though they were not working 40 hour shifts yet.

The French Quarter was opening back up. Café Du Monde and the French Market were alive again. I could feel the hope bubbling up inside me. I knew it wouldn’t be this good in the Lower 9th or in St. Bernard, but hey—look at how much had been done here! Look at how things had progressed! There were tourists- real tourists! Not just college kids who were walking around the quarter disconcerted by the juxtaposition of volunteer work gutting homes and then the lure of Bourbon Street.

I made my way over to Claiborne, so that I could take the long way over to the Lower 9th, to Arabi, to the places that had been so horrible and desolate (imagine hearing nothing: no birds, no bugs, no traffic, no people) and devastated a year before. Maybe it would be better. Maybe the people had returned—begun cleaning up their houses, rebuilding their lives. Maybe the road home that we all kept hearing about was working.

As I made my way through the districts and wards on my way out of the French quarter, however, progress slowed and slowed and then stopped altogether. Finally I was in the Lower 9th—staring at the levee wall that had collapsed and the place where the barge (so often shown on the news) came over. It was quiet. There were no FEMA trailers. There were also no houses. They had been bulldozed—most without the owner’s consent.

I stood in a sea of pile-ons where houses once stood and thigh high weeds. Sometimes you could make out a porch or a sidewalk or a driveway. Several blocks over there were still a few houses standing—three or four only. I made my way over in the car—only to find out it was a film set. A film set!

I drove back to the levee—with the levee wall that looked just the same as the old levee wall. I could tell what road I was on only for the fact that some conscientious citizen had painted them on boards and posted them to the telephone poles where street signs were missing.

I sat there, and tried to call my husband on my cell. No service. Still. It was me- alone. I was alone in the desolate place—a place that had once been filled with shotgun houses painted in bright colors. A place that had been full of people, and babies and kids playing and the older generations sitting on front porches talking with neighbors in the evenings.

And I was angry- so angry! I had no right to be angry—it hadn’t happened to me. I had not been displaced, or lost my house or loved ones. But I was so very angry with the fact that nothing had been done—other than to bulldoze people’s private property to clear it for green space—that I stood there, rigid, facing the levee wall.

And then I let it all pour out of me. That wall took the brunt of my anger. My shouted words echoed in emptiness that few could ever really imagine.

During that weekend in NOLA, I did take some people from the conference to see what I had to show. Explaining where we had been, what we had done, showing how the tent city that had been before had moved to a more permanent building in the Lower 9th, but the mission was still the same. This helped.

The houses were gone in the Lower 9th. The trash, for the most part, was cleaned up in St. Bernard. You could drive on both sides of Claiborne now. Yet, it was still empty—devoid, waiting.