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.
No comments:
Post a Comment