I’m running a little behind here, nearly 2 months after returning from bayou country. But, finally, this is my last posting. And, if you read on, the pictures! Readers of my previous trips’ accounts will be familiar with what was a more daily set of dispatches. Each leg of the trip was summarized with a quick dashboard up top: usually the date, the termini town names, distance traveled and the principal routes and places traversed. Then I’d share, very much in current blogday fashion, my observations and musings from each day’s miles while behind the wheel.
I didn’t do that much this trip. Partly that is because age tends to make simply recounting a day’s events without a whole lot of other context meaningless for others to read. (It’s precisely that solipsism that makes me inclined to eschew blogs.) But it was also because I didn’t take very interesting roads to and from New Orleans. Normally on my long road trips the route and the journey themselves are a central part of the experience. But I was trying to maximize my time at destinations and not on the road. I raced through the three legs of the trip on the way down, and the two returning, covering more than 3,350 of my 3,500 miles in just 5 days.
It’s easy with that kind of schedule to focus on putting as many miles behind you as quickly as possible each day. And it’s easy to forget that, fundamentally, you’re on vacation, life is short, and who know when you’ll pass by this way again. There were a few things I almost missed.
* * * * *
In Asheville, NC, I stopped for a longer lunch than I normally might have. Asheville has a surprising concentration of tasty, locally brewed beer. And pleased that I did as I discovered Catawba Valley Whiskey Brown, aged in Tennessee whiskey barrels before it’s served. It has lovely hints of bourbon (except that it’s Tennessee whiskey and not Bourbon County, Kentucky, whiskey) but made for a frustrating lunch since I couldn’t have another one before getting back in my car (and it’s not sold in bottles).
* * * * *
For a few stretches, to break up the monotony, I pulled off of interstates in favor of two-lane roads. US 221, through western Virginia, satisfied my occasional need to feel like I’m in high-speed driving school: careening on winding highway roads up mountain switchbacks around hairpin turns, and down again on the far sides. It sure beats the mind numbingly gradual geometry of most interstates. Not that my car is particularly well-suited for high-performance driving, such as it is. A 1991 Corolla with nearly 153,000 miles, the sturdiest piece of it, undoubtedly, is the muffler I replaced the week before I left.
* * * * *
I stopped in Tuskegee, Alabama, to see the university and the town’s important national sites. The George Washington Carver Museum was disappointing. It was encyclopedic but poorly interpreted. With an interest in public health history, I asked around about sites that were associated with or explained the Tuskegee Experiment. Poor word choice on my part. Everyone thought I was referring to the Tuskegee Airmen Experiment, so called, in which the military endeavored to study whether or not blacks could be trained as pilots for the war effort. In time, over 1,000 black pilots passed through Moton Field near the university and moved into flying roles in Europe and over the Pacific—though never in combat, always in support.
But the experiment I was wondering about was the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment which, for forty years beginning in the 1930s, recruited black sharecroppers from around the university who had contracted syphilis and observed them longitudinally to understand how the disease progressed and spread, untreated. The experiment began before antibiotics were in wide use and treatments for the disease were of questionable help and, often, toxic. But inexplicably, even after penicillin became widely available during World War II, it was not used to treat any of the participants. The least cynical interpretation of this would have required that a control group of patients being observed receive the drug to understand the differences and adhere to some modicum of scientific method. It apparently never happened and, more startlingly, continued into the early 1970s. If there is a way to view it as anything other than cynically and suspiciously, the uncovering of what happened at Tuskegee gave rise to the modern notion of requiring the informed consent of patients participating in medical experiments, and the requirement that research institutes submit their ideas for use of people to the rigors of review boards in advance.
No one I asked in town knew anything about it. And I got some awfully weird looks.
* * * * *
On the day I left New Orleans to return home, I set out before dawn under ominous storm clouds that were just coming into relief in the brighteneing sky. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to be a day that dozens of tornados marched eastward across the southeast, including the one in Enterprise, AL, that led to the collapse of a school roof on shelter-seeking students. As I darted east-northeast at roughly 60 mph, I listened to Emergency Broadcast System alerts over the radio that talked about imminently forming funnel clouds or actual tornado sightings. Coordinates were given in the form for county and town names. Eerily, they were names I recalled passing through an hour or two before.
Toward mid-morning it was a torrent and I suddenly wondered if I was still keeping ahead of the storms. The names of counties and towns I heard on the radio alerts no longer sounded familiar. I was torn between keeping on at a clip or stopping to see if I could find on my map where the tornados were seen. I imagined what a pinball bouncing around under a glass pane must feel something like I did skipping from town to town generally eastward but veering here and there to shorten distances and avoid the front bearing down from behind.
Morning passed into afternoon and, while the rain continued, the soup of instability lessened as the day heated the air and equalized the differing temperatures the led to the atmosphere’s instability. The alerts slacked off. I drove less aggressively. I felt safe enough to finally stop and have lunch at around 4pm. I was relieved but not a little sad that I didn’t get to see a tornado, at least from afar, which I never have.
* * * * *
But the most poignant reminder for me of how important it is to slow down and take in what’s around me was near the very beginning of this journey. Not two hours into my trip on my very first day leaving New York, I was squeezed off of the highway in central Pennsylvania by a detour of continental proportion. Just west of the Lehigh Valley on I-78, about 100 miles of the interstate was closed because of the Valentine’s Day blizzard (it was a blizzard in these parts) that blew through the day before. Somehow I had missed this little news story (more than a thousand stranded, National Guard delivering food and water by snowmobile, etc.) when I set out and now I was creeping through Amish country on bleak, ice-encrusted county roads at about 10 mph. I fumed at the prospect of missing dinner in Roanoke.
When traffic eased and the roads opened up about 5 hours later, I was consumed with the need to somehow make up time. My driving day was two-thirds over and I hadn’t rolled through half of the miles I needed to. After consulting a map, I plotted a beeline—to the extent that’s possible in western PA—for the nearest interstate about 50 miles away and raced along to try to make up time. Suddenly I was driving through the thicket of crossroads that is Gettysburg, PA. Hmm, I thought to myself, I’ve never actually been to Gettysburg. That, despite believing that the Gettysburg Address is one of the finest pieces of oratory I’ve ever read or heard—parsimonious, patriotic and evocative. Snippets began to run through my head and I could feel a smile creeping onto my face. But before I knew it, I had crossed out of town and into the county. Just like that, I passed through the spot where, in two-and-a-half days of fighting, upward of 6,000 Americans died—3,100 of them ostensibly fighting for the Union in the cause which, Lincoln said, displayed the men’s last full measure of devotion.
About a half-mile beyond town I slowed and pulled to the side of the road to collect my thoughts for a moment. I swung a U-turn and my engine whined back up a hill that was the same one the Union army first saw the Confederates approaching from the northwest. At the top were statues and bronze plaques and other commemorations. I sat in my car staring out across the perfectly snow-glazed fields toward a ridgeline in the north. I got out and walked a few hundred paces in different directions taking it all in. And then it hit me. On my iPod I had Sam Waterston reading the Gettysburg address.
Yes, I’m that much of a nerd.
I returned, cued it up, and listened to Sam read it a few times before finally pulling out and pressing on for dinner. It seemed altogether fitting and proper.
Thanks for reading along.
********************************
Here are the pictures from the trip (with no need to sign in).
And, finally, here is the summary of legs from the trip for those of you who love this part best:
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Leg 1
Just the facts, ma'am:
NYC to Roanoke, VA
505 miles through NJ, PA, MD, WV and VA
via I-80, I-287, I-78, US 222, US 30, I-81 and I-581
Monday, February 19
Leg 2
Just the facts, ma’am:
Roanoke, VA to Meridian, MS
751 miles through VA, NC, TN, AL and MS
via VA 419, US 221, US 70, US 74, I-75, I-24, I-59
Tuesday, February 20
Leg 3
Just the facts, ma'am:
Meridian, MS to New Orleans, LA
425 miles through Vicksburg (MS), Waterproof (LA), Black Hawk Plantation, Morganza, Baton Rouge & New Orleans
via I-20, US 65, LA 568, LA 15, LA 1, US 190 and I-10
Tuesday, February 27
Leg 4
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans to Venice, LA, and back through Plaquemines & St. Bernard Parishes
183 miles through (to name a few, because they’re so great): Belle Chasse, Concession, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Ironton, Point Celeste, Happy Jack, Potash, Port Sulphur, Tropical Bend, Empire, Buras, Fort Jackson, Boothville, Venice, Pointe a la Hache, Cop Land East (yes, really… more later), Nero, Promised Land, Stella, Port Nickel, Braithwaite, Violet, Meraux, and Chalmette
via US 90, LA 23, Tidewater Road, Pointe a la Hache Ferry across the Mississippi, LA 39 and LA 46
Thursday, March 1
Leg 5
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans, LA to Charleston, SC
830 miles (a new personal one-day, one-person record) through Mobile, Montgomery, Tuskegee, Macon, Augusta, and Columbia
via I-10, I-65, i-85, US 80, US 129, GA 44, I-20, I-26
Sunday, March 4
Leg 6
Just the facts, ma'am:
Charleston, SC to New York City
814 miles through
via I-26 & I-95 (boor-RING!)
Total for trip: 3,508 miles
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Monday, April 2, 2007
New Orleans – A Little Credit Where It Is Due
Note: many of you have asked when I’m coming home. I’ve been home for weeks. Each of these entries was started while I was down south and I’m finishing them up and sending them along as I have time. It’s just been easier to keep them in their current tense. -mf
I came down here with the hope of being useful, and not necessarily comfortable. I’ve been lucky to find the latter; I’m still wondering about the former. It turns out that several of my friends and colleagues from New York are down here now in a variety of useful capacities. I beg your patience for a few paragraphs and hope you’ll read along while I crow about them a little bit.
Alain was a transplant about eight years ago. We knew each other at the Parks Department before he left to hone a craft that is also his passion: cooking. He’s been conjuring up dishes with Emeril for years now, and introducing neophytes to superb, off-the-beaten track meals in and around New Orleans for as long. I can’t recommend highly enough, thanks to him, The Longbranch in Abita Springs, just north of Lake Pontchartrain. And, if I lived in New Orleans, the Dellachaise would be my steady haunt and I’d be proud to have the stool next to his.
Philip, who would still be a mensch and a hochem even if he didn’t look like he was plucked from Central Casting for the role, arrived a week before Katrina hit in order to help run the Jewish studies program at Tulane. Both Philip and Alain found themselves driven from their adopted city for several weeks after the storms. Both have returned.
Juliet, who along with Philip has been the reason for most of my comfort as my hosts, shifted from raising money for important civic causes in New York to doing the same in a place that’s not half the city it used to be, at least by the numbers.
Olivia is a former classmate who helped get the High Line off the ground, as it were, in New York. Now she’s putting her knowledge and chutzpah to work on exploring the thicket of urban planning challenges confronting a city that is contemplating how or whether to rebuild entire square miles of communities.
I’ve known Paul since high school. And, as long as I’ve known him he has focused on environmental issues in one form or another. He left work as an attorney for the Federal government in order to lobby and advocate for the replenishment of the freshwater wetlands at Louisiana’s threshold on the Gulf. These critical ecosystems may be more instrumental in buffering southern Louisiana from hurricane storm surges than any levee ever could be. A whole other entry could be written about how fragile these wetlands are, how quickly they’re disappearing, and how relatively easily they could be restored for manifold benefits.
Michael is a friend and former colleague who was working on small business assistance issues in New York. He’s now doing it for the whole of the state of Louisiana. With a skeleton staff and a network of community-based organizations, he’s endeavoring to deliver aid to thousands of small businesses in the southern parishes of the state.
And I had the great good fortune of being introduced to Robin briefly a year ago back in New York. She has since made a home in New Orleans running a community-based organization focused on workforce and small business development. Our mutual acquaintance reminded me of the connection before I left for New Orleans—and it made for a singularly rewarding experience as a result.
I spent a week with her team reviewing small businesspeople’s applications for state aid to help them get their livelihoods back in order, and to help to return New Orleans and the southern parishes’ neighborhoods and towns to some semblance of order. It was not sexy work. Robin and her team had spent the previous several weeks directly visiting business owners in their communities to sign them up for the assistance. With every intention to be fair and accountable, the grant process requires a good deal of documentation of the affected businesses’ status and their financial affairs in order to be considered. Many applicants had their files and papers swept away in a torrent or disintegrated by mold and mildew after weeks of sitting in flood waters and the sticky, torrid weeks the followed.
Many applications were taken with incomplete documentation while business folks looked for alternative ways to corroborate their plights. A lot of what I spent my time doing was slowly, iteratively reaching out to those folks, checking on how they were doing collecting information from other sources, strategizing on creative but appropriate ways to otherwise document claims, and sometimes just listening to what they were going through. As I’ve mentioned before here, I was so often floored and inspired by the tenacity and resilience of a goodly number of these hardy folks who were already back on their feet. But almost as frequently, I heard from folks who lost everything, still had nothing, and were looking for some way to get a toehold to begin building a business again. A few hundred dollars for a new stove in a juke joint in Plaquemines. A thousand dollars to buy a few new steam cleaning vacuums for a business with no shortage of potential customers now in Metarie. Grant funding to pay off a loan to repair a fishing boat in Venice and substitute the shame of a handout for the shame of debt.
Robin was the glue that held a small but diligent team together. Two people in particular were really something to see.
From the desk where I sat for a week, I listened to a young woman named Linda who followed up with every applicant whose file was incomplete and who mainly spoke Vietnamese. These were business owners from the Vietnamese enclave of Village de l’Est in eastern New Orleans, or Vietnamese fishermen and –women from the southern parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard. Hour after hour, she dialed numbers, tried to find the right person to speak to about the application, and then patiently asked for the same information in their native tongue in a variety of permutations: tax forms, receipts from fish sold at the docks, proof of paid employees. Sometimes teen-aged children were the conduits Linda worked through to get their parents to understand what was needed and how quickly it must be submitted. Hours of plaintive requests in Vietnamese were peppered with English-only terms like “ten-forty” or “ten-ninety-nine” or “trip tickets”. I’ve heard that the organization I was working with wound up submitting over 700 completed applications for aid to the State of Louisiana on behalf of small businesses. The Vietnamese business community owes no small debt of gratitude to Linda for helping to make sense out of the forms and hurdles they had to contend with to get help.
Even more remarkable is Jeremy.
Jeremy is perhaps the most unassuming, go-along get-along guy I’ve ever met. He’s a fellow Wagner graduate whom I had not met before arriving in New Orleans. Nothing seems to bother him and, when it does, it doesn’t seem to for long. In the span of just a few months, this lanky Texan who made his way to New Orleans via New York (Sunnyside!), became perhaps the least likely but most authoritative representative of the Vietnamese fishing boat crews in the southern parishes. So well did he know many of the fishermen’s cases that he would often overhear Linda speaking to a particular applicant over the phone, remember the sticking point from when he was down in their far-flung fishing community weeks before taking the application originally, ask Linda for the phone and, in a loud and enunciated voice say things like “Hi, it’s Jeremy. Jer-e-meee. You know, the tall guy. The tall white guy. Jer-e-mee…” And, sure enough more times than not, there was eventual recognition on their part. Suddenly they remembered all the things that Jeremy had spoken to them about while he was down in Venice or Buras or Pointe a la Hache and then Linda was able to quickly follow up with them. Robin says that no one knows the Vietnamese fishing community better than Jeremy at this point. She told me stories of how he’s been invited out on week-long fishing trips by many of them (which he’s graciously offered to let me join in on in August). In one remarkable conversation which I will not soon forget, Jeremy heard Linda struggling with one applicant on the phone as they strategized about how to get 20 or 30 pages of documentation to our office in a day or so from 70 miles away in the trafficlight-watertower whistlestop of a town that is Boothville, LA. He took the phone from her, cheerfully reminded the applicant who he was and, after recognition, said “Mr. Lee’s Market has a fax machine… Mr. Lee’s Market… You know where it is?... Mr. Lee’s… You know: go to the end of the long road, make a left, then another… Mr. Lee’s… He has a fax machine there he’ll let you use. OK, great! Good luck!” And that was just one of several like that.
* * * * *
When I first arrived in New Orleans, I went straight to a friend’s office in government. There was a conference room that was wired with a few rows of phones that had clearly been installed hastily post-Katrina and were still in use. Wires came up over the edges of desks in a way that bespoke the system being slapped together quickly. The phones themselves were older-fashioned push-button tone phones of the type you might have had in your house 20 years ago, before cordlesses and solid-state electronic systems. I was waiting for Barney Miller to stick his head into the room. It was eerily reminiscent of many New York City offices in the weeks after 9/11. I sat down in New Orleans at one of these phones and just the sound of the touchtone buttons reminded me of the old phones that we had to make do with for a few months before our systems were replaced in 2001 after the World Trade Center fell. My heart raced a little bit to remember what it was like to be set back a few decades technologically, how humbling it was more than 5 years ago, and how real all this actually is in New Orleans 18 months on.
Even the hallways in the building I finally wound up working in had that institutional ammonia-marble-glazed cinderblock smell of an old school or government building. It reminded me of NYC’s Public Health Laboratories building that my agency retreated to when we were displaced from Lower Manhattan. And the acrid smell of toner burned onto paper from copying machines. I don’t know why, but we used so many damn copiers after 9/11—more than I felt like we ever did before—and damned if this place didn’t smell exactly like that. Smells are powerful memory joggers. My throat tightened a little and my peripheral vision blurred. It smelled like an emergency to me in New Orleans.
I came down here with the hope of being useful, and not necessarily comfortable. I’ve been lucky to find the latter; I’m still wondering about the former. It turns out that several of my friends and colleagues from New York are down here now in a variety of useful capacities. I beg your patience for a few paragraphs and hope you’ll read along while I crow about them a little bit.
Alain was a transplant about eight years ago. We knew each other at the Parks Department before he left to hone a craft that is also his passion: cooking. He’s been conjuring up dishes with Emeril for years now, and introducing neophytes to superb, off-the-beaten track meals in and around New Orleans for as long. I can’t recommend highly enough, thanks to him, The Longbranch in Abita Springs, just north of Lake Pontchartrain. And, if I lived in New Orleans, the Dellachaise would be my steady haunt and I’d be proud to have the stool next to his.
Philip, who would still be a mensch and a hochem even if he didn’t look like he was plucked from Central Casting for the role, arrived a week before Katrina hit in order to help run the Jewish studies program at Tulane. Both Philip and Alain found themselves driven from their adopted city for several weeks after the storms. Both have returned.
Juliet, who along with Philip has been the reason for most of my comfort as my hosts, shifted from raising money for important civic causes in New York to doing the same in a place that’s not half the city it used to be, at least by the numbers.
Olivia is a former classmate who helped get the High Line off the ground, as it were, in New York. Now she’s putting her knowledge and chutzpah to work on exploring the thicket of urban planning challenges confronting a city that is contemplating how or whether to rebuild entire square miles of communities.
I’ve known Paul since high school. And, as long as I’ve known him he has focused on environmental issues in one form or another. He left work as an attorney for the Federal government in order to lobby and advocate for the replenishment of the freshwater wetlands at Louisiana’s threshold on the Gulf. These critical ecosystems may be more instrumental in buffering southern Louisiana from hurricane storm surges than any levee ever could be. A whole other entry could be written about how fragile these wetlands are, how quickly they’re disappearing, and how relatively easily they could be restored for manifold benefits.
Michael is a friend and former colleague who was working on small business assistance issues in New York. He’s now doing it for the whole of the state of Louisiana. With a skeleton staff and a network of community-based organizations, he’s endeavoring to deliver aid to thousands of small businesses in the southern parishes of the state.
And I had the great good fortune of being introduced to Robin briefly a year ago back in New York. She has since made a home in New Orleans running a community-based organization focused on workforce and small business development. Our mutual acquaintance reminded me of the connection before I left for New Orleans—and it made for a singularly rewarding experience as a result.
I spent a week with her team reviewing small businesspeople’s applications for state aid to help them get their livelihoods back in order, and to help to return New Orleans and the southern parishes’ neighborhoods and towns to some semblance of order. It was not sexy work. Robin and her team had spent the previous several weeks directly visiting business owners in their communities to sign them up for the assistance. With every intention to be fair and accountable, the grant process requires a good deal of documentation of the affected businesses’ status and their financial affairs in order to be considered. Many applicants had their files and papers swept away in a torrent or disintegrated by mold and mildew after weeks of sitting in flood waters and the sticky, torrid weeks the followed.
Many applications were taken with incomplete documentation while business folks looked for alternative ways to corroborate their plights. A lot of what I spent my time doing was slowly, iteratively reaching out to those folks, checking on how they were doing collecting information from other sources, strategizing on creative but appropriate ways to otherwise document claims, and sometimes just listening to what they were going through. As I’ve mentioned before here, I was so often floored and inspired by the tenacity and resilience of a goodly number of these hardy folks who were already back on their feet. But almost as frequently, I heard from folks who lost everything, still had nothing, and were looking for some way to get a toehold to begin building a business again. A few hundred dollars for a new stove in a juke joint in Plaquemines. A thousand dollars to buy a few new steam cleaning vacuums for a business with no shortage of potential customers now in Metarie. Grant funding to pay off a loan to repair a fishing boat in Venice and substitute the shame of a handout for the shame of debt.
Robin was the glue that held a small but diligent team together. Two people in particular were really something to see.
From the desk where I sat for a week, I listened to a young woman named Linda who followed up with every applicant whose file was incomplete and who mainly spoke Vietnamese. These were business owners from the Vietnamese enclave of Village de l’Est in eastern New Orleans, or Vietnamese fishermen and –women from the southern parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard. Hour after hour, she dialed numbers, tried to find the right person to speak to about the application, and then patiently asked for the same information in their native tongue in a variety of permutations: tax forms, receipts from fish sold at the docks, proof of paid employees. Sometimes teen-aged children were the conduits Linda worked through to get their parents to understand what was needed and how quickly it must be submitted. Hours of plaintive requests in Vietnamese were peppered with English-only terms like “ten-forty” or “ten-ninety-nine” or “trip tickets”. I’ve heard that the organization I was working with wound up submitting over 700 completed applications for aid to the State of Louisiana on behalf of small businesses. The Vietnamese business community owes no small debt of gratitude to Linda for helping to make sense out of the forms and hurdles they had to contend with to get help.
Even more remarkable is Jeremy.
Jeremy is perhaps the most unassuming, go-along get-along guy I’ve ever met. He’s a fellow Wagner graduate whom I had not met before arriving in New Orleans. Nothing seems to bother him and, when it does, it doesn’t seem to for long. In the span of just a few months, this lanky Texan who made his way to New Orleans via New York (Sunnyside!), became perhaps the least likely but most authoritative representative of the Vietnamese fishing boat crews in the southern parishes. So well did he know many of the fishermen’s cases that he would often overhear Linda speaking to a particular applicant over the phone, remember the sticking point from when he was down in their far-flung fishing community weeks before taking the application originally, ask Linda for the phone and, in a loud and enunciated voice say things like “Hi, it’s Jeremy. Jer-e-meee. You know, the tall guy. The tall white guy. Jer-e-mee…” And, sure enough more times than not, there was eventual recognition on their part. Suddenly they remembered all the things that Jeremy had spoken to them about while he was down in Venice or Buras or Pointe a la Hache and then Linda was able to quickly follow up with them. Robin says that no one knows the Vietnamese fishing community better than Jeremy at this point. She told me stories of how he’s been invited out on week-long fishing trips by many of them (which he’s graciously offered to let me join in on in August). In one remarkable conversation which I will not soon forget, Jeremy heard Linda struggling with one applicant on the phone as they strategized about how to get 20 or 30 pages of documentation to our office in a day or so from 70 miles away in the trafficlight-watertower whistlestop of a town that is Boothville, LA. He took the phone from her, cheerfully reminded the applicant who he was and, after recognition, said “Mr. Lee’s Market has a fax machine… Mr. Lee’s Market… You know where it is?... Mr. Lee’s… You know: go to the end of the long road, make a left, then another… Mr. Lee’s… He has a fax machine there he’ll let you use. OK, great! Good luck!” And that was just one of several like that.
* * * * *
When I first arrived in New Orleans, I went straight to a friend’s office in government. There was a conference room that was wired with a few rows of phones that had clearly been installed hastily post-Katrina and were still in use. Wires came up over the edges of desks in a way that bespoke the system being slapped together quickly. The phones themselves were older-fashioned push-button tone phones of the type you might have had in your house 20 years ago, before cordlesses and solid-state electronic systems. I was waiting for Barney Miller to stick his head into the room. It was eerily reminiscent of many New York City offices in the weeks after 9/11. I sat down in New Orleans at one of these phones and just the sound of the touchtone buttons reminded me of the old phones that we had to make do with for a few months before our systems were replaced in 2001 after the World Trade Center fell. My heart raced a little bit to remember what it was like to be set back a few decades technologically, how humbling it was more than 5 years ago, and how real all this actually is in New Orleans 18 months on.
Even the hallways in the building I finally wound up working in had that institutional ammonia-marble-glazed cinderblock smell of an old school or government building. It reminded me of NYC’s Public Health Laboratories building that my agency retreated to when we were displaced from Lower Manhattan. And the acrid smell of toner burned onto paper from copying machines. I don’t know why, but we used so many damn copiers after 9/11—more than I felt like we ever did before—and damned if this place didn’t smell exactly like that. Smells are powerful memory joggers. My throat tightened a little and my peripheral vision blurred. It smelled like an emergency to me in New Orleans.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
In New Orleans – Muses & Mailboxes
It surprises me how utterly comfortable I feel here. Part of it is the extraordinary hospitality of my hosts and the comfort of their situation. I’ve been given the run of well-stocked home for the price of occasionally loading the dishwasher. There’s the rear deck I’ve gushed over and the front porch that I covet. I sleep on a queen-size bed in my own bedroom, with my own bathroom. It’s been 72 and sunny every day I’ve been here. I mean, this isn’t really hard to adapt to.
There are many, many wonderful things about New Orleans that I’ve discovered in my short time here.
Noise is noticeable here, because it’s rare. I’ve heard a single car alarm in 8 days and it was, well, alarming.
There are a handful of wide, median-planted parkways here that remind me of those ringing Chicago—Diversey, the Plaisance, and the grand western district boulevards. The grandest I’ve seen here are Napoleon and a stretch of Camp. But one particularly dramatic, if underappreciated intersection is up in Mid-City neighborhood at the intersection of Canal and Jefferson Davis Parkway. Both are wide, greened, and not particularly trafficked. A grassy berm runs through the center of each, bracketed by dead-straight lines of craggly live oak lined up like massive soldiers with afros canopying the roadways that run down the margins of Jefferson Davis. For their width, the roads are quiet here. Stately. What passes for tall homes in New Orleans line each side of the parkway. Some have seen better days, but it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to walk out onto each day from home.
Don’t call these linear oases medians, though. Down here they’re called the neutral ground. Historically, these wide boulevards divided the various ethnic quarters of the city, among whom there was no love lost—the French, the Spanish, the Americans. They were also the places where commerce among these merchandizing factions could be carried out easily, or at least ambivalently. Now, most neutral grounds mask a complicated system of drainage ditches and canals that try to soak up ground water, rain water and river water and defy nature by pumping it up and over levees to Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans’ subway.
I have fallen head over heels and utterly in love with the live oak. I think it is the reason I most love walking in New Orleans. They are everywhere the way London planetrees are in New York, or chestnuts are in Paris. If it is not the official tree, it should be and it’d be hard to imagine a more handsome candidate. Handsome and yet zany. Each has a crown of contorted branches spiraling away from its trunk in unique directions. They belong in Oz or among the hobbits. If a tree could be animated, the live oak should be it.
**END ACID TRIP HERE**
There is an easiness in doing things here. It’s taken me awhile to begin to understand why things seem so much simpler here. Part of it is scale. Several people here—those that have moved from New York, anyway—describe New Orleans as a small town that has gotten even smaller since the storms. It’s worth putting in perspective that, depending on which of the competing voices you listen to, there are roughly 200,000 souls in the city right now, down from something north of 400,000 before the storms. That’s 2.5% of New York City’s population. It’s about the number of people that live in Astoria. You get home from work in 15 minutes, with traffic. Visiting friends can take as little as 5 minutes in car. (People in Park Slope may not appreciate how important this can be.)
There’s also no pretension here, at least not that I’ve been able to detect. One bar I was in, typically, had a mix of folks in suits, some young hip cats, one rotund biker cum bandana, and some restaurant workers just coming off a shift somewhere. There was a drunk in the corner whom I suspect was going to be sleeping outdoors that night—as he probably did most nights. If a few guys in tuxes showed up I doubt anyone would have remarked. For all of New York’s permissiveness and its prideful position at the avant-garde, it is also fussy, cliquey and picky about whom it thinks is hip or revered. I’ve found none of that here.
In the fancy coffee shop I was in a few afternoons ago, the proprietor himself was waiting on customers, one of whom was the grease monkey from the repair shop across the way—also an owner of his shop, from what I could tell from the familiar, easy conversation they struck up with each other. This is an incredible town for small businesses. I’m told chains and franchises do exist but I have not come across them, yet. I’m not sure why they haven’t gotten a toehold here yet, at least outside the tourist quarter. There is none of the discourse on the suburbanization of the city like what is heard right now in New York with neighborhood institutions closing up left and right in favor of banks, drug stores, and Barnes & Nobles. It will be interesting to see how rebuilding, repatriating, and reinvesting will change custom in the neighborhoods here.
There are also little, endearing things that make it a treat to wander around lost: a series of streets named for (you eventually realize) all nine muses: Cleo, Urania, Calliope, Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, Tepsicore, Thalia and Polyhymnia. Another, I’m told, is a series of Napoleonic battles. My European history sucks so I can’t remember if that’s Jena, Cadiz, Bordeaux and Valence or not.
But there is also a good deal wrong here. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that half the city is gone.
I haven’t seen any of the crime that has been so spectacularly covered in the national press. Not that isn’t here, nor that it isn’t a great concern to everyone here, well-heeled and scraping by alike, but it hasn’t been something I’ve encountered.
Far more troubling is the sense of neglect in not only those places that were scraped off of the map, but also those that are largely functioning again, despite woeful infrastructure. There is ONE well-paved road in New Orleans. I haven’t found it or driven on it, yet. But I heard the d.j. on one of the local stations talk about it this morning. I sent her an e-mail to ask about it.
I’m going to take a guess and say that one-third of the intersections in the City are missing their street signs. Not just one or two from a couple of the corners, but entire intersections, some of them major, without any identifying marks. It leaves outsiders feeling very lost. Thankfully, New Orleans is a grid of sorts—irregular because of it’s historical development in the footprints of long narrow plantations that radiated away from the curving Mississippi—but a type of grid nonetheless. That fact, and a decent sense of direction, are the only things that made me feel reasonably confident about driving by myself here. If New Orleans is intent on keeping visitors in the principal tourist areas, this is one way to ensure it.
Virtually every traffic signal is missing one or all of the visors over the red, yellow or green lenses.
There are no mailboxes. All them were apparently removed after the hurricanes and have not been replaced. (Now you know why none of you received any postcards.)
The cops apparently can be rented for weddings. I was walking from the house to the local commercial strip on Magazine Street the other night and heard a siren wailing several blocks away—continuously for several. I noticed it not just because it may have been the first one I was conscious of at all in NOLA, but because it seemed to go on for so long without moving about the neighborhood. (You know how you can tell where cop cars are going based on the familiar Doppler effect—where the siren seems to change pitch as it approaches and then recedes.) Slowly, it became gradually louder. I looked down a long street in the general direction of the noise to see flashing blue lights turn up several blocks away. A police car inched closer, full blare, and eventually pulled up into the block I was standing in. Behind it followed two shiny white stretch limos and a minibus full of penguined passengers. A second police car with strobing lights brought up the rear. All told, the 5 vehicles extended the entire block. I finally realized I was standing in front of a church. The cops stationed their vehicles at either end to prevent cars from passing through the block while the wedding was in process. I asked the cop at the front, now out of his car and helping to divert traffic around the block, what determined whether someone got the perk of a police escort and the consideration of a closed street. “You gotta pay da money,” he responded automatically, as if the answer could not be more plain. What kind of message does that send? That if you’re rich enough, the police can work for you? But if you’re poor, maybe not? That struck me as particularly pernicious in a town struggling to assert its law and order bona fides. If I were in charge, that’d probably be the first thing I’d change. And I’m sure it’s the first thing I’d get fired for doing.
In a town with unpaved, unsigned roads controlled by denuded traffic lights and patrolled by uniformed, armed wedding ushers, the Department of Parks & Parkways somehow finds it necessary to pay a contractor—a group of three people, actually—to rove around Juliet’s neighborhood in search of tree stumps to grind down with a fancy remote-controlled, tractor-treaded tree stump grinder the size of a small SUV. Fancypants. It’s a lovely service, actually. But that tree stump in the vest-pocket park next to her house could have stayed there another 50 years without being a problem at all. In a city with far more dire needs, this is the last one I’d be funding with scant resources.
There are many, many wonderful things about New Orleans that I’ve discovered in my short time here.
Noise is noticeable here, because it’s rare. I’ve heard a single car alarm in 8 days and it was, well, alarming.
There are a handful of wide, median-planted parkways here that remind me of those ringing Chicago—Diversey, the Plaisance, and the grand western district boulevards. The grandest I’ve seen here are Napoleon and a stretch of Camp. But one particularly dramatic, if underappreciated intersection is up in Mid-City neighborhood at the intersection of Canal and Jefferson Davis Parkway. Both are wide, greened, and not particularly trafficked. A grassy berm runs through the center of each, bracketed by dead-straight lines of craggly live oak lined up like massive soldiers with afros canopying the roadways that run down the margins of Jefferson Davis. For their width, the roads are quiet here. Stately. What passes for tall homes in New Orleans line each side of the parkway. Some have seen better days, but it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant place to walk out onto each day from home.
Don’t call these linear oases medians, though. Down here they’re called the neutral ground. Historically, these wide boulevards divided the various ethnic quarters of the city, among whom there was no love lost—the French, the Spanish, the Americans. They were also the places where commerce among these merchandizing factions could be carried out easily, or at least ambivalently. Now, most neutral grounds mask a complicated system of drainage ditches and canals that try to soak up ground water, rain water and river water and defy nature by pumping it up and over levees to Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans’ subway.
I have fallen head over heels and utterly in love with the live oak. I think it is the reason I most love walking in New Orleans. They are everywhere the way London planetrees are in New York, or chestnuts are in Paris. If it is not the official tree, it should be and it’d be hard to imagine a more handsome candidate. Handsome and yet zany. Each has a crown of contorted branches spiraling away from its trunk in unique directions. They belong in Oz or among the hobbits. If a tree could be animated, the live oak should be it.
**END ACID TRIP HERE**
There is an easiness in doing things here. It’s taken me awhile to begin to understand why things seem so much simpler here. Part of it is scale. Several people here—those that have moved from New York, anyway—describe New Orleans as a small town that has gotten even smaller since the storms. It’s worth putting in perspective that, depending on which of the competing voices you listen to, there are roughly 200,000 souls in the city right now, down from something north of 400,000 before the storms. That’s 2.5% of New York City’s population. It’s about the number of people that live in Astoria. You get home from work in 15 minutes, with traffic. Visiting friends can take as little as 5 minutes in car. (People in Park Slope may not appreciate how important this can be.)
There’s also no pretension here, at least not that I’ve been able to detect. One bar I was in, typically, had a mix of folks in suits, some young hip cats, one rotund biker cum bandana, and some restaurant workers just coming off a shift somewhere. There was a drunk in the corner whom I suspect was going to be sleeping outdoors that night—as he probably did most nights. If a few guys in tuxes showed up I doubt anyone would have remarked. For all of New York’s permissiveness and its prideful position at the avant-garde, it is also fussy, cliquey and picky about whom it thinks is hip or revered. I’ve found none of that here.
In the fancy coffee shop I was in a few afternoons ago, the proprietor himself was waiting on customers, one of whom was the grease monkey from the repair shop across the way—also an owner of his shop, from what I could tell from the familiar, easy conversation they struck up with each other. This is an incredible town for small businesses. I’m told chains and franchises do exist but I have not come across them, yet. I’m not sure why they haven’t gotten a toehold here yet, at least outside the tourist quarter. There is none of the discourse on the suburbanization of the city like what is heard right now in New York with neighborhood institutions closing up left and right in favor of banks, drug stores, and Barnes & Nobles. It will be interesting to see how rebuilding, repatriating, and reinvesting will change custom in the neighborhoods here.
There are also little, endearing things that make it a treat to wander around lost: a series of streets named for (you eventually realize) all nine muses: Cleo, Urania, Calliope, Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, Tepsicore, Thalia and Polyhymnia. Another, I’m told, is a series of Napoleonic battles. My European history sucks so I can’t remember if that’s Jena, Cadiz, Bordeaux and Valence or not.
But there is also a good deal wrong here. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that half the city is gone.
I haven’t seen any of the crime that has been so spectacularly covered in the national press. Not that isn’t here, nor that it isn’t a great concern to everyone here, well-heeled and scraping by alike, but it hasn’t been something I’ve encountered.
Far more troubling is the sense of neglect in not only those places that were scraped off of the map, but also those that are largely functioning again, despite woeful infrastructure. There is ONE well-paved road in New Orleans. I haven’t found it or driven on it, yet. But I heard the d.j. on one of the local stations talk about it this morning. I sent her an e-mail to ask about it.
I’m going to take a guess and say that one-third of the intersections in the City are missing their street signs. Not just one or two from a couple of the corners, but entire intersections, some of them major, without any identifying marks. It leaves outsiders feeling very lost. Thankfully, New Orleans is a grid of sorts—irregular because of it’s historical development in the footprints of long narrow plantations that radiated away from the curving Mississippi—but a type of grid nonetheless. That fact, and a decent sense of direction, are the only things that made me feel reasonably confident about driving by myself here. If New Orleans is intent on keeping visitors in the principal tourist areas, this is one way to ensure it.
Virtually every traffic signal is missing one or all of the visors over the red, yellow or green lenses.
There are no mailboxes. All them were apparently removed after the hurricanes and have not been replaced. (Now you know why none of you received any postcards.)
The cops apparently can be rented for weddings. I was walking from the house to the local commercial strip on Magazine Street the other night and heard a siren wailing several blocks away—continuously for several. I noticed it not just because it may have been the first one I was conscious of at all in NOLA, but because it seemed to go on for so long without moving about the neighborhood. (You know how you can tell where cop cars are going based on the familiar Doppler effect—where the siren seems to change pitch as it approaches and then recedes.) Slowly, it became gradually louder. I looked down a long street in the general direction of the noise to see flashing blue lights turn up several blocks away. A police car inched closer, full blare, and eventually pulled up into the block I was standing in. Behind it followed two shiny white stretch limos and a minibus full of penguined passengers. A second police car with strobing lights brought up the rear. All told, the 5 vehicles extended the entire block. I finally realized I was standing in front of a church. The cops stationed their vehicles at either end to prevent cars from passing through the block while the wedding was in process. I asked the cop at the front, now out of his car and helping to divert traffic around the block, what determined whether someone got the perk of a police escort and the consideration of a closed street. “You gotta pay da money,” he responded automatically, as if the answer could not be more plain. What kind of message does that send? That if you’re rich enough, the police can work for you? But if you’re poor, maybe not? That struck me as particularly pernicious in a town struggling to assert its law and order bona fides. If I were in charge, that’d probably be the first thing I’d change. And I’m sure it’s the first thing I’d get fired for doing.
In a town with unpaved, unsigned roads controlled by denuded traffic lights and patrolled by uniformed, armed wedding ushers, the Department of Parks & Parkways somehow finds it necessary to pay a contractor—a group of three people, actually—to rove around Juliet’s neighborhood in search of tree stumps to grind down with a fancy remote-controlled, tractor-treaded tree stump grinder the size of a small SUV. Fancypants. It’s a lovely service, actually. But that tree stump in the vest-pocket park next to her house could have stayed there another 50 years without being a problem at all. In a city with far more dire needs, this is the last one I’d be funding with scant resources.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Plaquemines
Leg 4
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans to Venice, LA, and back through Plaquemines & St. Bernard Parishes
183 miles through (to name a few, because they’re so great): Belle Chasse, Concession, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Ironton, Point Celeste, Happy Jack, Potash, Port Sulphur, Tropical Bend, Empire, Buras, Fort Jackson, Boothville, Venice, Pointe a la Hache, Cop Land East (yes, really… more later), Nero, Promised Land, Stella, Port Nickel, Braithwaite, Violet, Meraux, and Chalmette
via US 90, LA 23, Tidewater Road, Pointe a la Hache Ferry across the Mississippi, LA 39 and LA 46
There is nothing particularly tall in New Orleans. Someone I read half-joked that overpasses are New Orleans’ primary topography. (Prescient, as it was written before hundreds of New Orleanians took refuge on sun baked highway overpasses for several days after Katrina before being plucked to relative—if questionable—safety.) But the flatness is even more apparent as one approaches the southern delta. Down on LA 23, just past Belle Chasse, there isn’t much to see but sky. Sky and levees.
Route 23 runs along the west bank of the Mississippi from New Orleans south to Venice on the threshold of the Gulf of Mexico. On one side—between the road and the river—is the river levee constructed to protect the road and the small towns down here from being inundated by a swollen Mississippi during the spring and early summer when a third of the US is melting and draining past this point. On the other side of the road—between the road and the Gulf—is the hurricane protection levee constructed to prevent the road and the small towns down here (clusters of homes, really) from being sloshed from the other side by storm surges during the summer and early autumn. The result is that on narrow reaches of land that this road passes along, it’s easy to feel like you’re driving in a ditch hemmed in by levees left and right. On this day, there was the two-lane highway I was on, a grassy berm on either side of me, and brilliant sky. Grey-green-blue. For dozens of miles, I had no idea what it looked like on the river side of the levee and only glimpses of what it looked like on the Gulf side.
So I clambered up at different points to get a glimpse of what I was missing down below. From the river levee, there was no great surprise: the river and, in a few places, some associated industry shoehorned onto the margin of land between the river’s edge and the levee behind it—a precarious and sometimes soggy situation. On the gulf side was a much more varied picture. Some cropland. Some grazing pasture with scrawny cows and a few goats. Some industry. A few towns with rows of trailers.
All of this is Plaquemines Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. There is no question but that what happened in New Orleans was devastating by every standard—and perhaps especially so because of its density and the rapidity with which water came when levees failed in the city. But despite the levees in Plaquemines, I suspect no one on this spit of land here had deluded themselves into thinking they would have been safe. Indeed, when Katrina sent a 20-foot wall of water over the levees, hardly a soul was in any of the towns of Plaquemines Parish. They had all heeded the warning to evacuate.
By the time I headed down this way I had spent a week reviewing applications from small business owners for recovery assistance grants from the State of Louisiana. Many were in New Orleans, but a large number were commercial fishermen—shrimpers—who had been on the water in Plaquemines. Katrina tossed their boats into docks, into other boats, or inland where they wound up beached and broken after the water receded.
As I have come to understand it, these are small one- and two-person operations. They’ll head out for a week or so, pull up shrimp pots out in the Gulf, April and August mostly, and return to sell their catches to distributors on shore. They are simple operations, many of which seem better classified as subsisting, barely making $20,000 a year on the water.
Simple, but not unsophisticated. The shrimpers have a clear division of labor in their families. Among the white fishermen—many Acadian with names that still retain their French lineage, or which were the same as the town names down here—the husbands do the fishing and the wives manage the businesses. For each of the applicants I called to follow up and obtain some additional supporting information, the husband was listed as the business owner. But each asked me to speak to his wife who handled all the taxes, the paperwork, and everything other than the fishing, fixing and selling. I’m told the Vietnamese—of which there is an significant concentration in southern Louisiana have almost reverse roles.
Among the dozens of folks I spoke with in the previous week, especially the fishermen, there was an incredible sense of anticipation, of hope and of pride. But no real expectation. Everyone I spoke to was so pleased that they might finally receive some help to revive their businesses, their boats. Some men—clearly well into their 60s—were breathless with hope and appreciation. A lot of the conversations would end with them saying something like this to me: “I sure do wanna thank you for trying to help us out. I know it may not get approved, but this sure would help us out if it did. I appreciate what you’re doing.”
But almost everyone that I spoke to was already back in the water. It is incredible, really, the ability for folks to suffer, recuperate, and recover to continue to scrape by. In identifying what he might use the grant funding for if approved, this entry was not atypical: “TWO TRUCKS LOSTED PLUS SPAIR PARTS & TOOLS. 1 TRUCK HAS BEEN REPLACED BY USING RETIREMENT FUNDS.” This was a part of the world I was glad to be seeing for myself.
Venice is the southernmost community on this side of the Mississippi that you can reach without a boat. Just south of town, Tidewater Road goes on a bit further out into the marshes to provide access to a large oil refinery and a series of boatyards. It rides barely a foot above the sheen of the brackish marsh here. People talk about how driving across Lake Pontchartrain on the Interstate causeway feels like you’re driving on the water. It doesn’t hold a candle to Tidewater Road. Sneeze too hard and your car is in the water. Truly.
I don’t have a good sense of what it was like down here before Katrina, so it’s hard to compare now. There were fewer visible signs of destruction than I was expecting. Then again, it’s been nearly 18 months. Some of the damage I did see looked as though it was there before the storms and, unbelievably, weathered them… petrified truck chasses, rusting gas pumps that were probably dry of gasoline for a generation. What debris existed was piled into odd collections. One included one of those freezer chests, ubiquitous in front of every gas station or 7-Eleven with “ICE” written in that familiar font was deposited onto a tangle of tree trunks at an improbable angle. It reminded me of something one would see at Dia:Beacon. In each community along the route toward Venice I saw dozens, and sometimes upwards of a hundred, FEMA trailers. So that says something about destruction. On the way back north toward Pointe a la Hache I caught a spray-painted request on a two-story commercial structure just beside the road: “Do Not Demolish.” How many times did that happen accidentally?
On the east side of the Mississippi heading north on LA 39 I flew past a billboard identifying “Cop Land East, PPSO”. I spun back around to check it out and realized it identified the trailer park it was posted out in front of. These few dozen FEMA trailers are where the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office are putting up their deputies and families who lost their homes in the storms. Suddenly the impact of what happened down here became a lot clearer to me.
A word about nutria. Ed Butts, native of Waterproof, Louisiana and Assistant Commissioner in charge of Veterinary Public Health at the NYC DOH, told me to keep an eye out for nutria—that they would give me a whole new perspective on rats which many of you know are near and dear to my heart. “I’ve seen plenty of nutria in the brackish sounds of the eastern Carolinas,” I replied blithely, unfazed, and a little smug in the knowledge that I was one of the few New Yorkers to know what nutria are, let alone to have seen one. These semi-aquatic rodents are native to South America. They were introduced to many other parts of the world to harvest their furs but, in the meantime, have proliferated and become pests. The ones I had seen in North Carolina looked like small otters—cute, almost.
And then I saw what I can only classify as Nutria Mississippus. I was on a small road paralleling the river when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught something moving down the grassy backslope of the levee. I’m embarrassed to say I gasped. No goddamned nutria I’d ever seen looked anything like this, nor half of this. A grey armadillo-pig, I thought. But, realizing there was no such thing as an armadillo-pig, I settled on it being a nutria and could almost hear Ed chuckling. They are livestock-sized down here.
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans to Venice, LA, and back through Plaquemines & St. Bernard Parishes
183 miles through (to name a few, because they’re so great): Belle Chasse, Concession, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Ironton, Point Celeste, Happy Jack, Potash, Port Sulphur, Tropical Bend, Empire, Buras, Fort Jackson, Boothville, Venice, Pointe a la Hache, Cop Land East (yes, really… more later), Nero, Promised Land, Stella, Port Nickel, Braithwaite, Violet, Meraux, and Chalmette
via US 90, LA 23, Tidewater Road, Pointe a la Hache Ferry across the Mississippi, LA 39 and LA 46
There is nothing particularly tall in New Orleans. Someone I read half-joked that overpasses are New Orleans’ primary topography. (Prescient, as it was written before hundreds of New Orleanians took refuge on sun baked highway overpasses for several days after Katrina before being plucked to relative—if questionable—safety.) But the flatness is even more apparent as one approaches the southern delta. Down on LA 23, just past Belle Chasse, there isn’t much to see but sky. Sky and levees.
Route 23 runs along the west bank of the Mississippi from New Orleans south to Venice on the threshold of the Gulf of Mexico. On one side—between the road and the river—is the river levee constructed to protect the road and the small towns down here from being inundated by a swollen Mississippi during the spring and early summer when a third of the US is melting and draining past this point. On the other side of the road—between the road and the Gulf—is the hurricane protection levee constructed to prevent the road and the small towns down here (clusters of homes, really) from being sloshed from the other side by storm surges during the summer and early autumn. The result is that on narrow reaches of land that this road passes along, it’s easy to feel like you’re driving in a ditch hemmed in by levees left and right. On this day, there was the two-lane highway I was on, a grassy berm on either side of me, and brilliant sky. Grey-green-blue. For dozens of miles, I had no idea what it looked like on the river side of the levee and only glimpses of what it looked like on the Gulf side.
So I clambered up at different points to get a glimpse of what I was missing down below. From the river levee, there was no great surprise: the river and, in a few places, some associated industry shoehorned onto the margin of land between the river’s edge and the levee behind it—a precarious and sometimes soggy situation. On the gulf side was a much more varied picture. Some cropland. Some grazing pasture with scrawny cows and a few goats. Some industry. A few towns with rows of trailers.
All of this is Plaquemines Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. There is no question but that what happened in New Orleans was devastating by every standard—and perhaps especially so because of its density and the rapidity with which water came when levees failed in the city. But despite the levees in Plaquemines, I suspect no one on this spit of land here had deluded themselves into thinking they would have been safe. Indeed, when Katrina sent a 20-foot wall of water over the levees, hardly a soul was in any of the towns of Plaquemines Parish. They had all heeded the warning to evacuate.
By the time I headed down this way I had spent a week reviewing applications from small business owners for recovery assistance grants from the State of Louisiana. Many were in New Orleans, but a large number were commercial fishermen—shrimpers—who had been on the water in Plaquemines. Katrina tossed their boats into docks, into other boats, or inland where they wound up beached and broken after the water receded.
As I have come to understand it, these are small one- and two-person operations. They’ll head out for a week or so, pull up shrimp pots out in the Gulf, April and August mostly, and return to sell their catches to distributors on shore. They are simple operations, many of which seem better classified as subsisting, barely making $20,000 a year on the water.
Simple, but not unsophisticated. The shrimpers have a clear division of labor in their families. Among the white fishermen—many Acadian with names that still retain their French lineage, or which were the same as the town names down here—the husbands do the fishing and the wives manage the businesses. For each of the applicants I called to follow up and obtain some additional supporting information, the husband was listed as the business owner. But each asked me to speak to his wife who handled all the taxes, the paperwork, and everything other than the fishing, fixing and selling. I’m told the Vietnamese—of which there is an significant concentration in southern Louisiana have almost reverse roles.
Among the dozens of folks I spoke with in the previous week, especially the fishermen, there was an incredible sense of anticipation, of hope and of pride. But no real expectation. Everyone I spoke to was so pleased that they might finally receive some help to revive their businesses, their boats. Some men—clearly well into their 60s—were breathless with hope and appreciation. A lot of the conversations would end with them saying something like this to me: “I sure do wanna thank you for trying to help us out. I know it may not get approved, but this sure would help us out if it did. I appreciate what you’re doing.”
But almost everyone that I spoke to was already back in the water. It is incredible, really, the ability for folks to suffer, recuperate, and recover to continue to scrape by. In identifying what he might use the grant funding for if approved, this entry was not atypical: “TWO TRUCKS LOSTED PLUS SPAIR PARTS & TOOLS. 1 TRUCK HAS BEEN REPLACED BY USING RETIREMENT FUNDS.” This was a part of the world I was glad to be seeing for myself.
Venice is the southernmost community on this side of the Mississippi that you can reach without a boat. Just south of town, Tidewater Road goes on a bit further out into the marshes to provide access to a large oil refinery and a series of boatyards. It rides barely a foot above the sheen of the brackish marsh here. People talk about how driving across Lake Pontchartrain on the Interstate causeway feels like you’re driving on the water. It doesn’t hold a candle to Tidewater Road. Sneeze too hard and your car is in the water. Truly.
I don’t have a good sense of what it was like down here before Katrina, so it’s hard to compare now. There were fewer visible signs of destruction than I was expecting. Then again, it’s been nearly 18 months. Some of the damage I did see looked as though it was there before the storms and, unbelievably, weathered them… petrified truck chasses, rusting gas pumps that were probably dry of gasoline for a generation. What debris existed was piled into odd collections. One included one of those freezer chests, ubiquitous in front of every gas station or 7-Eleven with “ICE” written in that familiar font was deposited onto a tangle of tree trunks at an improbable angle. It reminded me of something one would see at Dia:Beacon. In each community along the route toward Venice I saw dozens, and sometimes upwards of a hundred, FEMA trailers. So that says something about destruction. On the way back north toward Pointe a la Hache I caught a spray-painted request on a two-story commercial structure just beside the road: “Do Not Demolish.” How many times did that happen accidentally?
On the east side of the Mississippi heading north on LA 39 I flew past a billboard identifying “Cop Land East, PPSO”. I spun back around to check it out and realized it identified the trailer park it was posted out in front of. These few dozen FEMA trailers are where the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office are putting up their deputies and families who lost their homes in the storms. Suddenly the impact of what happened down here became a lot clearer to me.
A word about nutria. Ed Butts, native of Waterproof, Louisiana and Assistant Commissioner in charge of Veterinary Public Health at the NYC DOH, told me to keep an eye out for nutria—that they would give me a whole new perspective on rats which many of you know are near and dear to my heart. “I’ve seen plenty of nutria in the brackish sounds of the eastern Carolinas,” I replied blithely, unfazed, and a little smug in the knowledge that I was one of the few New Yorkers to know what nutria are, let alone to have seen one. These semi-aquatic rodents are native to South America. They were introduced to many other parts of the world to harvest their furs but, in the meantime, have proliferated and become pests. The ones I had seen in North Carolina looked like small otters—cute, almost.
And then I saw what I can only classify as Nutria Mississippus. I was on a small road paralleling the river when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught something moving down the grassy backslope of the levee. I’m embarrassed to say I gasped. No goddamned nutria I’d ever seen looked anything like this, nor half of this. A grey armadillo-pig, I thought. But, realizing there was no such thing as an armadillo-pig, I settled on it being a nutria and could almost hear Ed chuckling. They are livestock-sized down here.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
New Orleans - Contrasts
New Orleans. I finally say it correctly, or almost. I shed “new or-LEENS” pretty quickly. I knew before I even got here that it wasn’t right. It gave me the same trepidation I feel preparing to go to a country where I don’t speak the language: anticipatory helplessness. I tried out “NAW-lins” for a bit. That was closer, but still a fabrication. Closer still to the way it’s said here is “nAW-lee-uhns.” Two-and-a-half syllables. And that’s what I’ve been working on.
Lots of you have asked: How is it? How bad is it? Still lots of debris? Is it dangerous? Do you feel safe? Are all the houses gone? How’s the French Quarter? Is the food good? I can answer all of these. The other question I get asked a lot—by friends afield, by friends here, by people I meet out in bars in town—is what do I think? I’ve had a much tougher time coming up with a meaningful answer to that one, at least so far.
New Orleans has been many things so far in this short week. It has allowed me to reconnect with good friends whom I’ve been far away from for too long. I’ve met new folks. All of them are working hard. Many of them have moved here to help rebuild New Orleans and the southern parishes of Louisiana in a variety of ways. Others are denizens, working hard to rebuild their homes. Some are reopening businesses with retirement money not waiting for (and more often that I would have expected, not wanting) grant money to dribble in from—emphasis theirs—The Government.
It sounds trite, but it’s a city of contrasts. I’m writing this from the porch of my friends’ Uptown home—what real estate rags would describe as “charming.” This is a densely packed area of single-family homes on small lots in the vernacular shotgun style. (New Yorkers should think of railroad flats.) I’m sitting at the back of one now. It’s tree-shrouded. The air is quiet; not silent, but quiet. Almost suburban sounding. That said, the quietness is suffused with the sound of everywhere mourning doves—a sound that singularly makes my heart flutter when my ears catch it, whether it be their calls or the quick “tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet” in time with their flapping as they take flight with such force that it seems to squeeze the song from their breasts. The soulful blow of a lazy locomotive’s horn a few blocks away drifts over the houses from the wharves along the levee. That particularly reminds me of the not-quite-eerie far-off cry of fire engine sirens in Chicago’s outlying neighborhoods, heard for miles.
But it is not suburban at all. Shotguns are long and narrow and they’re crammed onto small lots, cheek-by-jowl, with a density that, despite the predominance of single-story homes, feels urban. Yards are barely 10 feet wide and it’s hard to be more than that far away from neighbors at the greatest possible distance. Utensils clanging in a drawer as they’re being put away drift over from a couple of houses down. You sense that you’re in a neighborhood, despite sitting in a quiet oasis.
I’ve relished each morning and evening that I’ve wound up out on this wonderful deck, reading, writing, musing, gossiping, eating cereal, having cocktails. But it’s among the 20% of the city that was not inundated by Katrina’s surge after it broke through from Lake Pontchartrain. It is referred to as the “sliver along the river” or, derisively, as the “isle of denial.” It is the part of the City that was raised up just enough because it was built early in New Orleans’ history upon the Mississippi River’s natural levee—the highest part in a City that boasts of few spots greater than 10 feet above sea level and vast swaths 10 feet below. Homes and shops were built here before technology and hubris allowed humans to wall off lower-lying parts of the city, embroider it with drainage ditches and clever pumps, and remove water from areas that had been cypress swamp for millennia.
Houses are painted in the most spectacular sherbet shades. Porches are covered with pitched roofs bracketed by filigreed finials. Ceiling fans and gas lamps beneath are standard.
But just 3 hours ago, I was driving through the Lower Ninth Ward—by now familiar to everyone with a television, or a pulse. It looks more like a frontier town than the bombed-out, washed-away faubourg that was more familiar scene from camera shots I had as my mental image. A handful of dilapidated shotgun homes remained—sometimes one to a block, sometimes a half-dozen in a row—interspersed with emptiness of wild grass growing up in the unevenness of backhoe ruts. “Everywhere you see an open space was a house,” my host and guide Juliet reminded me as we drove through, macabrely trawling for images real and conjured. A minivan with Colorado plates turned a corner in front of us. I felt immediately voyeuristic and a little nauseous. “People should see this for themselves,” Juliet countered.
Eighteen months on, much of the debris and the most heavily damaged houses have been removed. Or at least plowed into piles. Random houses remain, scattered across the neighborhood like the few remaining teeth in a rotting mouth. Of dozens remaining in the corner of the community we were in, only one or two had a FEMA trailer up on cinder blocks in a front yard. Here was a pioneer, of sorts. What a scene to look out on from the window. Eerie remnants of neighbors’ lives could be spied in the weeds: stoop steps without a house to lead to; cinder blocks marking where the corners of a house had been but now stood alone, like a pagan rock circle from another millennium.
Parts of New Orleans got water in two different ways during Katrina. Some experienced gradually rising water over hours as rain fell by the half-foot and the pumps that keep this sub-sea-level saucer dry stopped working. Others—including the Lower Ninth—were largely scraped off the map by an immediate wall of water as the 20-foot wall of the adjacent Industrial Canal, among others, “failed”—engineerspeak for buckled and burst. This is where people died in the rush of water that crushed them beneath their splintering houses, or who drowned in their dark attics.
Lots of you have asked: How is it? How bad is it? Still lots of debris? Is it dangerous? Do you feel safe? Are all the houses gone? How’s the French Quarter? Is the food good? I can answer all of these. The other question I get asked a lot—by friends afield, by friends here, by people I meet out in bars in town—is what do I think? I’ve had a much tougher time coming up with a meaningful answer to that one, at least so far.
New Orleans has been many things so far in this short week. It has allowed me to reconnect with good friends whom I’ve been far away from for too long. I’ve met new folks. All of them are working hard. Many of them have moved here to help rebuild New Orleans and the southern parishes of Louisiana in a variety of ways. Others are denizens, working hard to rebuild their homes. Some are reopening businesses with retirement money not waiting for (and more often that I would have expected, not wanting) grant money to dribble in from—emphasis theirs—The Government.
It sounds trite, but it’s a city of contrasts. I’m writing this from the porch of my friends’ Uptown home—what real estate rags would describe as “charming.” This is a densely packed area of single-family homes on small lots in the vernacular shotgun style. (New Yorkers should think of railroad flats.) I’m sitting at the back of one now. It’s tree-shrouded. The air is quiet; not silent, but quiet. Almost suburban sounding. That said, the quietness is suffused with the sound of everywhere mourning doves—a sound that singularly makes my heart flutter when my ears catch it, whether it be their calls or the quick “tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet” in time with their flapping as they take flight with such force that it seems to squeeze the song from their breasts. The soulful blow of a lazy locomotive’s horn a few blocks away drifts over the houses from the wharves along the levee. That particularly reminds me of the not-quite-eerie far-off cry of fire engine sirens in Chicago’s outlying neighborhoods, heard for miles.
But it is not suburban at all. Shotguns are long and narrow and they’re crammed onto small lots, cheek-by-jowl, with a density that, despite the predominance of single-story homes, feels urban. Yards are barely 10 feet wide and it’s hard to be more than that far away from neighbors at the greatest possible distance. Utensils clanging in a drawer as they’re being put away drift over from a couple of houses down. You sense that you’re in a neighborhood, despite sitting in a quiet oasis.
I’ve relished each morning and evening that I’ve wound up out on this wonderful deck, reading, writing, musing, gossiping, eating cereal, having cocktails. But it’s among the 20% of the city that was not inundated by Katrina’s surge after it broke through from Lake Pontchartrain. It is referred to as the “sliver along the river” or, derisively, as the “isle of denial.” It is the part of the City that was raised up just enough because it was built early in New Orleans’ history upon the Mississippi River’s natural levee—the highest part in a City that boasts of few spots greater than 10 feet above sea level and vast swaths 10 feet below. Homes and shops were built here before technology and hubris allowed humans to wall off lower-lying parts of the city, embroider it with drainage ditches and clever pumps, and remove water from areas that had been cypress swamp for millennia.
Houses are painted in the most spectacular sherbet shades. Porches are covered with pitched roofs bracketed by filigreed finials. Ceiling fans and gas lamps beneath are standard.
But just 3 hours ago, I was driving through the Lower Ninth Ward—by now familiar to everyone with a television, or a pulse. It looks more like a frontier town than the bombed-out, washed-away faubourg that was more familiar scene from camera shots I had as my mental image. A handful of dilapidated shotgun homes remained—sometimes one to a block, sometimes a half-dozen in a row—interspersed with emptiness of wild grass growing up in the unevenness of backhoe ruts. “Everywhere you see an open space was a house,” my host and guide Juliet reminded me as we drove through, macabrely trawling for images real and conjured. A minivan with Colorado plates turned a corner in front of us. I felt immediately voyeuristic and a little nauseous. “People should see this for themselves,” Juliet countered.
Eighteen months on, much of the debris and the most heavily damaged houses have been removed. Or at least plowed into piles. Random houses remain, scattered across the neighborhood like the few remaining teeth in a rotting mouth. Of dozens remaining in the corner of the community we were in, only one or two had a FEMA trailer up on cinder blocks in a front yard. Here was a pioneer, of sorts. What a scene to look out on from the window. Eerie remnants of neighbors’ lives could be spied in the weeds: stoop steps without a house to lead to; cinder blocks marking where the corners of a house had been but now stood alone, like a pagan rock circle from another millennium.
Parts of New Orleans got water in two different ways during Katrina. Some experienced gradually rising water over hours as rain fell by the half-foot and the pumps that keep this sub-sea-level saucer dry stopped working. Others—including the Lower Ninth—were largely scraped off the map by an immediate wall of water as the 20-foot wall of the adjacent Industrial Canal, among others, “failed”—engineerspeak for buckled and burst. This is where people died in the rush of water that crushed them beneath their splintering houses, or who drowned in their dark attics.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Atchafalaya
Leg 3
Just the facts, ma'am:
Meridian, MS to New Orleans, LA
425 miles through Vicksburg (MS), Waterproof (LA), Black Hawk Plantation, Morganza, Baton Rouge & New Orleans
via I-20, US 65, LA 568, LA 15, LA 1, US 190 and I-10
I crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg this morning and the landscape changed suddenly—or at least it seemed to. The previous 450 miles had been rolling, pine-covered hills along interstates. The vista was unremarkable, obscured by the tree line. The only sense of rolling was the undulating pavement—a dip, a rise, a bank to the left, another rise. After hundreds of miles, I struggled to recall whether I was in Mississippi or Alabama—or Michigan.
But the northeastern parishes of Louisiana that hug the Great Muddy were quite different.
I read a bunch of stuff leading up to this trip and I’m trying to remember if the deltaic plain of the Mississippi River actually begins this far north of the Gulf. If it doesn’t, you’d have to convince me otherwise. Just beyond the levee, all goes flat. Farmland stretches to the horizon. There is a gentle ridgeline of the levee (sometimes natural, sometimes not) along the Mississippi. US 65 and Louisiana Route 15 both parallel the western bank of the Mississippi toward Baton Rouge, cutting southward toward the Gulf through a landscape whose winter-dormant fields are strewn with the remnants of soy, corn and thirsty, thirsty cotton. It was 70 degrees, but I’d sworn a snow squall had just blown through: along the margins of the pavement were windblown fibers from cotton bolls harvested and lost off the backs of baletrucks on the way to one of the cooperatively owned gins in small towns along the highway. Every few miles, billboards advertised Terral corn seed or “Delta King – Soy of the South!”
I have an affinity for this landscape in its own right. But my main reason for overshooting New Orleans by a half-day this far north and west was to see the hubris of engineers who think they can manage nature: infrastructural marvels of the public fisc euphemistically referred to as “flood control” that try to sculpt the earth—or to prevent Mother Nature from doing it, as is her wont.
I hadn’t checked the map for a bit and was wondering how much further it was to Old River—a formerly natural and now almost wholly engineered connection between the Mississippi and its offspring Atchafalaya River, roughly parallel and a little west. Like most adolescents, the Atchafalaya is dying to become the Mississippi. Old River is what connects the two and mediates this identity crisis. The Atchafalaya is only about 7 miles west of the Mississippi at this point. But the critical figure is that it’s also 30 feet lower in elevation. When the Mississippi floods—as it occasionally and invariably does—it will pour over its bank and down this seven-mile-long hill, through Old River and then some, to the Atchafalaya, gouging an ever deeper basin through the soft, deltaic soil from east to west. And that’s a good thing because were it not for this natural relief valve, Mississippi waters in flood stage would routinely inundate Baton Rouge, New Orleans and two dozen other principal towns further south along the river’s length. But the more flooding water that pours through Old River, and the deeper the gradient that is gouged along it each time, the more water of the Mississippi it will demand to draw. Left unchecked by billions of dollars of steel and cement and hundreds of thousands of man-hours at the Old River Flood Control structures, the Mississippi would, undeniably, become the Atchafalaya. And not in a few thousand years, but in a few decades and maybe sooner. And it may, yet, anyway. Writing in the New Yorker exactly 20 years ago, John McPhee described it elegantly:
“The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river's purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi's main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi… Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century A.D., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river's present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.
For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya's conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.”
With so much on the line, and being an infrastructure nerd, I had to see this complex for myself. And that’s what took me south today along LA 15. An hour or so past Vicksburg, up around a bend in the road and behind a stand of cypress, I saw a familiar-looking structure poking up—the only human-made structure in sight for dozens of miles in all directions: a crane used to lift and lower the heavy floodgates of a dam.
Another mile and I was upon it. Literally. LA 15 crosses the channel connecting the Mississippi & the Atchafalaya across the dam. It was more unprepossessing than I would have expected. I drove across it from north to south—a hundred yards, maybe—did a U-turn, and headed back to the north side where I had seen a small building on a rise with a bunch of parked cars in an otherwise empty landscape. And damned if when I got closer it didn’t say Visitors Center out front. I’d be lying if I said my full-on infrastructure geekiness wasn’t wracking my body at that moment. I was elated.
Alas, it was closed up tight. Cobwebs framed the doorjamb. Plexiglass models of the river’s basin, seen in shadow through the windows, were covered with a fine layer of dust—maybe Mississippi River mud. A yellowing notice taped up from the inside said tours available by appointment, to please call. It seemed like a plea, indeed. A lone man in a hard hat walked up the hill toward the parking lot, about 50 yards off. I waved a hello and got a nod of his head, unfazed if not uninterested. I guessed the cars in the lot belonged to workers at the dam who parked here, on high ground. I decided to explore a bit of the grounds anyhow to see for myself, without an appointment. After all, this was the masterful work of staggering scale that was actively and ceaselessly saving New Orleans from becoming a forgotten town on an oxbow lake when the Atchafalaya finally captured the Mississippi’s floodwaters.
It wasn’t all that impressive.
I walked over to the bank and looked down at the dam in profile, expecting to see water crashing through the floodgates on its way to the Atchafalaya. But there was not much more than a slight flow of water moving toward the dam, and a tangle of tree trunks and branches that had floated down the Mississippi and got pulled into this branch, cluttering up the place. This seemed like a rather ignoble engineering accomplishment. Hardly a feat.
I wandered back up toward the parking lot, dejected.
The fellow with the hardhat who had been walking up the hill was now sitting on the porch of the visitor center reading a book in the shade, hardhat beside him. There wasn’t a soul around except for him and me. I approached, excused myself, and asked, hopefully “Could you tell me if this structure behind us is what keeps the Mississippi from becoming the Atchafalaya?”
A pause. “I’m sorry. I can’t understand you,” he called back from the stairs. This is why I hate talking to strangers sometimes. Especially in strange parts, with a New York accent.
I went closer. “I was reading about how the Mississippi keeps trying to flow through Old River here to become the Atchafalaya.”
“It’s called the uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.” I had been saying ATCH-uh-fuh-LIE-uh. He continued in an easy, southern drawl “Well you see, this here is a hydro plant.” HY-dro. “It takes water that’s fallin’ and turns it into electricity.” EE-lectricity. “This here plant takes water from the Mississippi and sends through this dam and down to the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.
He exuded a kindness, almost a sweetness. Mellifluous voice, sky blue eyes that surprised me, his dark brown hair just beginning to salt around the edges. Still, he was younger than I would have imagined when I was trying to conceive what grizzled old Corpsmen might have seemed like. And he was trim. His walkie-talkie was clipped to his belt with one of those curlie-cue microphone cables running up behind his back and over his shoulder so that it hung down over his chest. Clearly, he was in charge of something, and proud of his plant.
“I thought part of what it was supposed to do is control the flow of the water going through so it doesn’t keep eroding and sending more and more from the Mississippi down the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh. I was beginning to get it.
“Well, we’re just a hydro plant. We make ee-lectricity. What your talkin’ ‘bout is flood control. Them structures are about a mile down the road.” He turned his head in the general direction. “The first one you’ll come to’ll be the old flood control structure. Then the next one is the big new one they built goin’ on 20 years now. The old one, it’ll just look like a bridge ‘crosst the water. But if you look off the side you’ll see where they can lift up them flood gates if they’re needin’ to. But they don’t hardly ever do that anymore, ‘cept every once in awhile they got to practice it. We’re just a hydro plant. Private corporation.”
“That reminds me of some drawbridges they have over canals where I’m from where boats don’t really need them to open anymore, but they practice opening and closing them anyway—just to keep the gears greased and working—just in case.” Now why’d I have to do down this conversational path, I immediately wondered.
“Oh, yeah? Where’d that be?”
“New Yor-uk City.” I was mimicking his cadence without really meaning to.
“Is that right? What brings you down this way? Got business or somethin’?”
“Nope, just visiting some friends in New Orleans.”
“On vacation?”
“Sort of. And seeing what I can do to help out a little bit after the storms.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” His walkie-talkie crackled with a tinny voice saying dispatcher-sounding things. “I’ve done some work a few times to help folks ‘long the Mississippi coast. I’m from Natchez. That’s up the River just a bit, in Mississippi. You a part of a church group, or somethin’?”
“Nope, independent.”
“Well, that’s just great, spreadin’ good will like that.”
“Just seems like the right thing to do,” I offered. That sat out there for a moment.
“Say, speakin’ of spreadin’ some good will, how’d you like to spread some good will with me right now?” He looked down at the book that he’d been reading and had placed on the top step, beside where he was sitting, when I interrupted. My eyes followed and I saw a little leatherbound volume, gold leaf around the edges, a red ribbon to hold his place coming from the binding. It looked small to be a bible. Probably just a book of daily devotionals. I admired his sense of mission. Nevertheless, I felt awfully alone at that moment.
“You know, I think I’m alright right now. What’s your name, sir?”
“Kelly Johnston. You sure? Won’t take but a couple minutes.”
I quickly extended my hand. “Mark Foggin. Thanks for taking the time to tell me about your hydro plant.”
“Oh, it wasn’t nothin’.”
“Well thanks just the same!” And with that I kept smiling and started to leave.
He rose to walk toward a big pickup that was approaching our lonely perch. Over the engine and just as I was reaching my car he called out “Hey, Mark, you do know all great things come from Jesus Christ, right?”
I turned back around and smiled, thinking for a moment about how to respond to this decidedly non-rhetorical question, across the parking lot.
“Never hurts to be reminded,” I hollered.
We got into our respective vehicles. I followed slowly behind them down the hill. They turned left before the main road, into the plant. I kept on until the main road, waving as I passed behind them in case they were looking at that strange guy in a Toyota from New York. Kelly waved back. And that was that.
Further on down LA 15 I found them finally. And while they still weren’t as grand as I’d imagined—perhaps I had the Hoover in mind?—they were notably more impressive than the hydro plant was. At least the new one was. But still, for a structure whose very existence is depended upon so utterly by two major cities, I found it to be almost abandoned. This was no beehive of activity that one might imagine: folks throwing levers to lift gates and channel water away from large populations. There were even fewer cars here than at the electric plant. But then again, it might be a little different in a month or so when the snow on the eastern rampart of the Rockies begins to melt, along with everything in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest, and sends all of that thaw down past this point at the astounding rate of 65,000 kilotons of water per second.
Just the facts, ma'am:
Meridian, MS to New Orleans, LA
425 miles through Vicksburg (MS), Waterproof (LA), Black Hawk Plantation, Morganza, Baton Rouge & New Orleans
via I-20, US 65, LA 568, LA 15, LA 1, US 190 and I-10
I crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg this morning and the landscape changed suddenly—or at least it seemed to. The previous 450 miles had been rolling, pine-covered hills along interstates. The vista was unremarkable, obscured by the tree line. The only sense of rolling was the undulating pavement—a dip, a rise, a bank to the left, another rise. After hundreds of miles, I struggled to recall whether I was in Mississippi or Alabama—or Michigan.
But the northeastern parishes of Louisiana that hug the Great Muddy were quite different.
I read a bunch of stuff leading up to this trip and I’m trying to remember if the deltaic plain of the Mississippi River actually begins this far north of the Gulf. If it doesn’t, you’d have to convince me otherwise. Just beyond the levee, all goes flat. Farmland stretches to the horizon. There is a gentle ridgeline of the levee (sometimes natural, sometimes not) along the Mississippi. US 65 and Louisiana Route 15 both parallel the western bank of the Mississippi toward Baton Rouge, cutting southward toward the Gulf through a landscape whose winter-dormant fields are strewn with the remnants of soy, corn and thirsty, thirsty cotton. It was 70 degrees, but I’d sworn a snow squall had just blown through: along the margins of the pavement were windblown fibers from cotton bolls harvested and lost off the backs of baletrucks on the way to one of the cooperatively owned gins in small towns along the highway. Every few miles, billboards advertised Terral corn seed or “Delta King – Soy of the South!”
I have an affinity for this landscape in its own right. But my main reason for overshooting New Orleans by a half-day this far north and west was to see the hubris of engineers who think they can manage nature: infrastructural marvels of the public fisc euphemistically referred to as “flood control” that try to sculpt the earth—or to prevent Mother Nature from doing it, as is her wont.
I hadn’t checked the map for a bit and was wondering how much further it was to Old River—a formerly natural and now almost wholly engineered connection between the Mississippi and its offspring Atchafalaya River, roughly parallel and a little west. Like most adolescents, the Atchafalaya is dying to become the Mississippi. Old River is what connects the two and mediates this identity crisis. The Atchafalaya is only about 7 miles west of the Mississippi at this point. But the critical figure is that it’s also 30 feet lower in elevation. When the Mississippi floods—as it occasionally and invariably does—it will pour over its bank and down this seven-mile-long hill, through Old River and then some, to the Atchafalaya, gouging an ever deeper basin through the soft, deltaic soil from east to west. And that’s a good thing because were it not for this natural relief valve, Mississippi waters in flood stage would routinely inundate Baton Rouge, New Orleans and two dozen other principal towns further south along the river’s length. But the more flooding water that pours through Old River, and the deeper the gradient that is gouged along it each time, the more water of the Mississippi it will demand to draw. Left unchecked by billions of dollars of steel and cement and hundreds of thousands of man-hours at the Old River Flood Control structures, the Mississippi would, undeniably, become the Atchafalaya. And not in a few thousand years, but in a few decades and maybe sooner. And it may, yet, anyway. Writing in the New Yorker exactly 20 years ago, John McPhee described it elegantly:
“The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river's purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi's main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi… Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century A.D., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river's present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.
For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya's conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.”
With so much on the line, and being an infrastructure nerd, I had to see this complex for myself. And that’s what took me south today along LA 15. An hour or so past Vicksburg, up around a bend in the road and behind a stand of cypress, I saw a familiar-looking structure poking up—the only human-made structure in sight for dozens of miles in all directions: a crane used to lift and lower the heavy floodgates of a dam.
Another mile and I was upon it. Literally. LA 15 crosses the channel connecting the Mississippi & the Atchafalaya across the dam. It was more unprepossessing than I would have expected. I drove across it from north to south—a hundred yards, maybe—did a U-turn, and headed back to the north side where I had seen a small building on a rise with a bunch of parked cars in an otherwise empty landscape. And damned if when I got closer it didn’t say Visitors Center out front. I’d be lying if I said my full-on infrastructure geekiness wasn’t wracking my body at that moment. I was elated.
Alas, it was closed up tight. Cobwebs framed the doorjamb. Plexiglass models of the river’s basin, seen in shadow through the windows, were covered with a fine layer of dust—maybe Mississippi River mud. A yellowing notice taped up from the inside said tours available by appointment, to please call. It seemed like a plea, indeed. A lone man in a hard hat walked up the hill toward the parking lot, about 50 yards off. I waved a hello and got a nod of his head, unfazed if not uninterested. I guessed the cars in the lot belonged to workers at the dam who parked here, on high ground. I decided to explore a bit of the grounds anyhow to see for myself, without an appointment. After all, this was the masterful work of staggering scale that was actively and ceaselessly saving New Orleans from becoming a forgotten town on an oxbow lake when the Atchafalaya finally captured the Mississippi’s floodwaters.
It wasn’t all that impressive.
I walked over to the bank and looked down at the dam in profile, expecting to see water crashing through the floodgates on its way to the Atchafalaya. But there was not much more than a slight flow of water moving toward the dam, and a tangle of tree trunks and branches that had floated down the Mississippi and got pulled into this branch, cluttering up the place. This seemed like a rather ignoble engineering accomplishment. Hardly a feat.
I wandered back up toward the parking lot, dejected.
The fellow with the hardhat who had been walking up the hill was now sitting on the porch of the visitor center reading a book in the shade, hardhat beside him. There wasn’t a soul around except for him and me. I approached, excused myself, and asked, hopefully “Could you tell me if this structure behind us is what keeps the Mississippi from becoming the Atchafalaya?”
A pause. “I’m sorry. I can’t understand you,” he called back from the stairs. This is why I hate talking to strangers sometimes. Especially in strange parts, with a New York accent.
I went closer. “I was reading about how the Mississippi keeps trying to flow through Old River here to become the Atchafalaya.”
“It’s called the uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.” I had been saying ATCH-uh-fuh-LIE-uh. He continued in an easy, southern drawl “Well you see, this here is a hydro plant.” HY-dro. “It takes water that’s fallin’ and turns it into electricity.” EE-lectricity. “This here plant takes water from the Mississippi and sends through this dam and down to the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.
He exuded a kindness, almost a sweetness. Mellifluous voice, sky blue eyes that surprised me, his dark brown hair just beginning to salt around the edges. Still, he was younger than I would have imagined when I was trying to conceive what grizzled old Corpsmen might have seemed like. And he was trim. His walkie-talkie was clipped to his belt with one of those curlie-cue microphone cables running up behind his back and over his shoulder so that it hung down over his chest. Clearly, he was in charge of something, and proud of his plant.
“I thought part of what it was supposed to do is control the flow of the water going through so it doesn’t keep eroding and sending more and more from the Mississippi down the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh. I was beginning to get it.
“Well, we’re just a hydro plant. We make ee-lectricity. What your talkin’ ‘bout is flood control. Them structures are about a mile down the road.” He turned his head in the general direction. “The first one you’ll come to’ll be the old flood control structure. Then the next one is the big new one they built goin’ on 20 years now. The old one, it’ll just look like a bridge ‘crosst the water. But if you look off the side you’ll see where they can lift up them flood gates if they’re needin’ to. But they don’t hardly ever do that anymore, ‘cept every once in awhile they got to practice it. We’re just a hydro plant. Private corporation.”
“That reminds me of some drawbridges they have over canals where I’m from where boats don’t really need them to open anymore, but they practice opening and closing them anyway—just to keep the gears greased and working—just in case.” Now why’d I have to do down this conversational path, I immediately wondered.
“Oh, yeah? Where’d that be?”
“New Yor-uk City.” I was mimicking his cadence without really meaning to.
“Is that right? What brings you down this way? Got business or somethin’?”
“Nope, just visiting some friends in New Orleans.”
“On vacation?”
“Sort of. And seeing what I can do to help out a little bit after the storms.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” His walkie-talkie crackled with a tinny voice saying dispatcher-sounding things. “I’ve done some work a few times to help folks ‘long the Mississippi coast. I’m from Natchez. That’s up the River just a bit, in Mississippi. You a part of a church group, or somethin’?”
“Nope, independent.”
“Well, that’s just great, spreadin’ good will like that.”
“Just seems like the right thing to do,” I offered. That sat out there for a moment.
“Say, speakin’ of spreadin’ some good will, how’d you like to spread some good will with me right now?” He looked down at the book that he’d been reading and had placed on the top step, beside where he was sitting, when I interrupted. My eyes followed and I saw a little leatherbound volume, gold leaf around the edges, a red ribbon to hold his place coming from the binding. It looked small to be a bible. Probably just a book of daily devotionals. I admired his sense of mission. Nevertheless, I felt awfully alone at that moment.
“You know, I think I’m alright right now. What’s your name, sir?”
“Kelly Johnston. You sure? Won’t take but a couple minutes.”
I quickly extended my hand. “Mark Foggin. Thanks for taking the time to tell me about your hydro plant.”
“Oh, it wasn’t nothin’.”
“Well thanks just the same!” And with that I kept smiling and started to leave.
He rose to walk toward a big pickup that was approaching our lonely perch. Over the engine and just as I was reaching my car he called out “Hey, Mark, you do know all great things come from Jesus Christ, right?”
I turned back around and smiled, thinking for a moment about how to respond to this decidedly non-rhetorical question, across the parking lot.
“Never hurts to be reminded,” I hollered.
We got into our respective vehicles. I followed slowly behind them down the hill. They turned left before the main road, into the plant. I kept on until the main road, waving as I passed behind them in case they were looking at that strange guy in a Toyota from New York. Kelly waved back. And that was that.
Further on down LA 15 I found them finally. And while they still weren’t as grand as I’d imagined—perhaps I had the Hoover in mind?—they were notably more impressive than the hydro plant was. At least the new one was. But still, for a structure whose very existence is depended upon so utterly by two major cities, I found it to be almost abandoned. This was no beehive of activity that one might imagine: folks throwing levers to lift gates and channel water away from large populations. There were even fewer cars here than at the electric plant. But then again, it might be a little different in a month or so when the snow on the eastern rampart of the Rockies begins to melt, along with everything in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest, and sends all of that thaw down past this point at the astounding rate of 65,000 kilotons of water per second.
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