This is part two of my contribution to the Katrana Blog Project.
Simple enough this time: snippets from the journal I was keeping at the time, plus photographs I took. I'll keep my comments to a minimum.
November, 2005
This mess of a front lawn, only a few blocks from my parents' house, was one of the first things I saw when I arrived. The next morning, my brother and I drove out to his apartment, then down to the 9th ward, to visit our old high school:
Before starting home, we drove a bit around the 9th ward, as far as we could go. The damage here was much more pronounced: at one point we hit what we thought was a cul-de-sac, but actually, homes had been lifted off the ground and deposited in the middle of the street. We tried to see the spot where the levee had burst, but the military had set up blockades to prevent anyone from going within blocks. One can only imagine how bad those houses are.
Most chilling are the spray-painted signs. On every home that's been searched, the search parties leave the same sign on the front of the house: a large X, with the date of search written above, the search group's initials written on the left, and the number of dead underneath. Fortunately, most of the houses we passed had a 0, but every now and then, you'd pass a 1, and keep driving. A lot of the homes also have information about pets found on the premises; in some cases, larger pets prevented the search teams from entering the homes.
On the middle of the neutral ground (median), someone had left a sign: "Please come back to the 9th ward. We WILL rebuild!"
It's quiet all around. The hardest thing to get used to is that silence; you start missing the normal hum of city life, and realize you haven't seen another person for blocks. Most haven't come back yet; those who have took what they needed and left again. There's nothing here for anyone to stay. Whatever animals had been left behind are either dead or have moved on to drier ground.
The drive home from my brother's gave me a better idea about the scope of the city's problems. From the interstate over City Park, we could see trucks and rows of tents set up for migrant workers who'd been bussed in to make up for the city's lack of manpower. My brother and I talked about how bad the channels of information were - rumors and stories flying from every direction, and no one knows quite what's going on. It's going to be a long, slow, painful rebuilding.
After we got home that first night, we celebrated my brother's 20th birthday. He's been living on the floor of a friend's house in Baton Rouge, along with three other people, and paying his rent by doing most of the cooking and cleaning. He has no source of income, and walks an hour to class every morning, since there's nowhere to park on campus. After the initial post-hurricane love-fest (students can come here for free! we are a haven for you!), he's finding that the universities are having second thoughts about offering free tuition, and now he's got a bill for two months of an education he was told he wouldn't have to pay for. Good times.
All this time, the destruction hadn't yet hit me on a visceral level. There's something about it that's too distant to register, even when you're staring right at it.
The first time it really hit me was leaving the quarter. It was near midnight, about 2 hours before the new curfew. The quarter, mind you, is the city's heart - the popular tourist stuff is there, the city's history is there, and it stayed dry throughout the hurricane.
So everything there is up-and-running, including the street lights. But once you step foot outside the quarter, it's pitch-black, empty, and quiet. Something about that finally caught me in the gut, the despair of the whole thing. The French Quarter at night is an island in the middle of void. Driving into the emptiness, you suddenly realize just how bad this thing is.
For a moment, I got a sense of what it must have been like living in the city over 200 years ago, when it was just the quarter, and everything north was prairie and marshland. There's a gut, heart-of-darkness malaise that starts taking over. I'm starting to understand why the suicide rate is so high.
My attitude plummeted for the drive home, and I went to bed as soon as I got back.
We hit another military checkpoint at the Barracks - and by checkpoint, I mean they had dragged out train cars into the road to prevent anything from passing. There was one narrow slit for vehicles, guarded by two soldiers with M-16's who initially were not going to let my brother and I through. They had orders to allow only St. Bernard residents into the parish, and the vehicle with my grandparents had gone through about 5 minutes before (damn me and my picture-taking). Finally they were convinced, but gave us a reprimand - I found out later that the reason for the extra care was that they'd heard gunshots in the area that morning.
The Jackson Barracks are the border between Orleans Parish and St. Bernard, so once we were through, we had finally made it to the area worst hit. In fact, it's so bad that you're limited in where you can go: nothing as far north as Judge Perez highway, all the way until Chalmette. I found out later that the reason for the extra concern, like the Claiborne restriction the day before, had to do with the difficult search team efforts, and the high chance that the bodies had not yet been cleared out. On top of that, areas of Arabi were so badly mutilated that one person told me you can't even find the roads, because houses were torn apart, lifted and moved all over.
Yours truly:
I hesitate to use the expression "like a war zone," because I've never been in a war zone, and I don't want to devalue the gravity of that. But here the destruction just sinks into your head in ways I can't explain - it's the pervasiveness of it that's worse than the magnitude. On the lawn next door, I looked inside an abandoned vehicle full of dirt, water, papers, and a teddy bear. The little things of everyday life are scattered everywhere, mutilated. Not a single house isn't covered with people's private lives, but the mix is so heavy and widespread you can't even associate the objects you see with the houses they're near.
I wanted to highlight that comment, because I know you've seen pictures much, much worse than the one's I'm posting. But it's not that one house got wrecked worse than another - it's that you can drive for hours and see nothing but wrecked homes. It's a lonely feeling.
Here's what we were digging through, at my grandparents' place. One of a million homes just like it:
The key place to visit at the moment is a neighborhood called Lexington, on the north side of Judge Perez. It's gotten the status of urban legend around here, as the worst place you'll see. There were a few people around here, a few military vehicles, a few volunteer groups. Initially it seems no worse than anywhere else, but the further you get from the highway, the worse it looks: apparently the storm surge had come off the water in the back of the subdivision, annhilating the first row of homes and causing chaos elsewhere. Vehicles on top of other vehicles on top of homes on top of lawns - a total mess. Again, we hit what we thought was a cul-de-sac: in fact, a home (concrete slab intact) had been deposited in the middle of the street. Even worse, we couldn't find where the home had come from: all the lots around had houses on them.
Leaving Lexington, we drove through the subdivision that I grew up in. We had left when I was a teenager, and my brother still too young to remember it well, but we still had friends in the area that we visited from time to time. The pharmacy at the subdivision's entrance has been converted into some kind of camp: there are swamp boats and helicopters and trucks packed into the parking lot.
We ran into the rest of our family down the road in Violet, at our aunt's house. Here, among the other sites, there was a fridge in a tree, and at this point, you had to laugh. My grandmother was visibly exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and for the first time, she started railing on the politicians. My gradmother is not the type to get angry. "The government abandoned us," she said, between clenched teeth. The people of St. Bernard are getting more and more worried with each day: no one knows what's going to happen, if everything has to be destroyed, if anyone can ever move back, what kind of timeline there will be... nothing.
While my mom, dad, and my cousin went into the aunt's house, we sat outside in the heat, which is getting unbearable: the sludge is drying into a hard, cracked clay that covers everything - grass, sidewalks, roads, houses - with a creepy grayish color. They asked if we'd driven through Lexington; they had just passed through, as well. In a lowered voice: "Did you see the house with the 7 on it?" We hadn't. That comment ended the conversation, and everyone stared at the ground.
The drive home took us north via Paris Road, but not before we stopped to check that the De La Ronde ruins were (mostly) intact. A crowd of vehicles and people were surrounding Our Lady of Prompt Succor - later we found out that the Archbishop was performing mass outside the church. No food, no running water, no electricity, but they had their mass. We drove past, eventually reaching the other checkpoint into town, where they were washing/decontamining cars leaving the area. My brother dozed off in the passenger seat while I drove us back, exhausted.
After dinner, I met friends at the Red Eye, on Veterans. The Red Eye has always been one of Metairie's most popular bars; now, in full recognition of their status, they've a tongue-in-cheek sign out front that reads "No Reservations Needed!" The bar is largely empty, although one or two tables are occupied, some playing poker, others just drinking.
S. is another high school friend of mine whose fortunes have been up and down since graduation. He started working at a funeral home a few years ago as a sales representative, mostly selling flowers and coffins. Now, thanks to an increased demand and slimmer workforce, he's been put on the line dressing corpses. Recently he got the corpse of someone he knew:
Hey, do you guys remember so-and-so? He committed suicide; I had to dress his body the other day. He was 30 years old. Apparently he stayed behind and survived the storm, and he got pulled into working with rescue teams. After a week, they found him face down in his trailer with a bottle of antifreeze.
So, like I said, the suicide rate is up with a vengeance. Stories especially of police officers who've taken their own lives are rampant.
As for S.: his home washed away into the lake, he has nowhere to stay, and he's dressing bodies all day. This is not where he expected to end up. Fortunately, he's applying to business school at SLU, and we're all keeping our fingers crossed. I managed to unload a few donated sweaters and shirts on him, as well.
So we sat, and we drank, and we talked politics, and we felt worse. There's a lot of that going on now, and I wish it were easier to change the conversation topic, but everything leads back to the hurricane. How can you talk about trivialities when you're surrounded by this?
The drive home was even worse: a bunch of local radio stations have pitched in to set up a continuous news/announcements station that allows callers to ask questions/vent 24 hours. Driving around in the empty streets, I listened to one women nearly cry over the phone as she told about how her kids were denied classes at the local charter private school, because after the hurricane knocked out her house, she couldn't afford to buy them uniforms. Before the storm hit, she'd barely managed to scrape together enough to send them to a private school, and now they wanted her to scrounge up enough money to buy a whole new set of uniforms. It's like this a lot: common sense trumped by skeletons of bureaucracies with no one to mediate. Things will get worse before they get better.
In between the callers, there's a slew of commercials announcing important survival information, instructions, and proclamations from the state and local governments. Separate your trash into ten different piles. Don't hook up your appliances without contacting a contractor. Know your rights when dealing with insurance representatives. Then another caller raging about the levee breaks, then another set of commercials: rinse, dry, repeat. Listening to all this while driving through the darkness surrounded by piles of debris is not the best recipe for a good mood.
Desperation is setting in from all sides, and although there are spots of humor to alleviate the tension, it all disappears at night. From the people I've talked to, no one has a positive prognosis for the city.
We passed again the house where I grew up, and where my dad had lived for nearly 20 years. "Do you want to go inside?" I asked.
"No. It's someone else's house."
On the ride back, we took another route, driving through Jumoville, a group of homes across the street from the ill-fated RV park. Jumoville was the last plantation built on the east side of the Mississippi River, and is (was) one of the wealthier subdivisions in St. Bernard Parish. Though the neighborhood is waaay across the highway (almost half a mile), the tornado had knocked RVs into their streets and canal - the most vicious had swung an RV just low enough to clothesline the top off a house. We saw quite a few people working there: shoveling clay, tossing insulation, and whatever else one could do. At least the flooding here was not quite as bad.
Dad: "It looks like these people are trying to rebuild."
Me: "What if they can't? Didn't the oil spill go this far? Aren't they going to have to bulldoze the neighborhood anyway?"
Dad: "Honestly, I don't know. But what else can you do? The longer you leave it, the harder it is to salvage anything."
Unlike the drive there, the drive back was silent.
++++++++++++
December, 2005
I returned to New Orleans, this time with my boyfriend, to spend the holidays with family and do some more work around town.
Me, again:
After dinner, we watched a video that my father had gotten from relatives in Slidell. Slidell, as you may remember, was beaten into a pulp, but the video was taken by someone who filmed the entire storm and miraculously survived it. The narrator, a middle aged man with a deft sense of humor, started filming the wind damage, thinking it would be a good idea to chronicle the storm. As the waters rise and the damage increases, his jokes become more and more pained. His friends' houses float down the street in front of him. The water floods his first floor. He's standing on the protected barrier of his second floor balcony, and in a matter of minutes, he watches all (seriously: ALL) the houses across the street ripped apart. "Well, I guess I finally have lakefront property." The chaos... I have never seen anything like it. The waters start beating against his balcony, the door to the stairwell is busted open by the rising waters. He ends the video on a frightening note: "Well, hopefully somebody will see this if I don't make it." He did make it, but barely.
(Has anyone else seen this video? Does anyone have a link to it?)
Christmas in the French Quarter:
This is the longest chunk of text in the diary, but I hope you'll read it, and encourage others to, as well. This was a first-hand account of the week following Katrina from a family member who went through it:
Christmas day was something else entirely, and unexpected.
For the first time, we had our cousins from Poydras over for Christmas dinner. Some background information: these are my aunt's daughter, her husband, and their two daughters. We're not exactly close, for a lot of family drama reasons, but there's also a bit of tension with some class underpinnings: my cousin fishes and hunts for a living. That's a great profession, but given my increasing intolerance for racial slurs (not to mention homophobic), I can't say I've ever connected with them too well. However, family is family, and since their immediate family are all still (still!) evacuated, we had them over for Christmas dinner.
My cousin started telling us about his experiences during the hurricane, some of which I knew, some of which I never heard until then. He stayed in his house during most of the hurricane, only coming outside during the eye. He and his neighbors who stayed were scanning the damage from the first half of the storm, when one of them noticed something odd.
"Those boats shouldn't be so close to the highway." By boats, he meant he could see masts just on the other side of the highway, miles away from water.
As soon as the words left his mouth, the wall of water came rushing around the highway bend. They scattered, some to their cars, some to their homes. My cousin ran inside to grab his dog and cellphone, but before he could grab anything else, the water had already forced its way in through his front door, and was rising fast. He took the best option and ran (waded/swam) outside to his boat.
He spent the rest of the storm huddled at the bottom of his boat while hurricane winds battered the hell out of everything around him. He told us he bawled like a baby.
After the storm, he tried to get his boat of the canal. It was clogged with so much debris - roofs of houses, trees, vehicles - "you could almost walk across it." He took his boat around, looking for survivors. Until the water started going down, he was deputized 5 times ("Until then, I didn't even know what the word 'deputized' meant.") and sent all over the Parish picking up whomever he could.
Many of the people were taken to shelters, of which there were few, overcrowded, and badly stocked (if at all). They broke into a doctor's office to get the last remaining tetanus shots. Many people were kept in the gymnasium of a local high school - but the water had risen too high for the entrance, so people had to lie down in small boats while they passed under the front door.
The stories kept coming. He found an abandoned truck, with a dead dog still in the dog cage hooked into the bed. The drivers? "Probably lying around there somewhere, in the woods. No one would leave their dog like that. Most likely, they got in their truck and thought they could outrun the water. They couldn't." They weren't the only ones who tried it, either. "Some people were smart. Instead of trying to outrun it, they turned left and drove straight onto the levee, 'cause it was much higher. The rest?..." He shook his head sadly.
He told us he did this for days, hardly eating, and the skin on his feet were broken and blistered from the constant alternation between rancid water and hot sun. Meanwhile, the boats were running out of gas. "I lost a lot of respect for people I knew, people I worked with. These people knew how to work on the water, they were fishermen, but they sat at the shelters and just waited with everyone else. The people who did the most to help out, it was the crazy guys, the ones who were in jail, who did drugs - they're a little crazy, so they were enjoying it."
more observations:
"Where were our people? The Canadian ships, they were there in two, three days. I didn't see any of our ships? Why couldn't our people get down there?"
"People talked about their being bodies floating around everywhere. I didn't see that. There may have been somewhere, but I didn't see it. But there are a lot of dead people, and there are still a lot of dead people. A lot of people just didn't want to leave, and they died in their attics."
A couple of times he got angry trying to persuade people to leave.
"I'll tell you who the true heroes of that storm were. They were the nurses who stayed behind. I went to St. Rita's - I was there, I saw what happened. But those nurses didn't leave. They could have, but they stayed behind because they knew those people needed help. When the water started rising, they moved whoever they could to the second floor, then to the attic, and they kept treating people even in the attic. A lot of patients died, even one nurse. But they kept working through it all."
The sad mix of fear, incompetency, and selfishness prevented a lot from getting done. At one point, a boatload of people wanted to take their chances upriver, but they couldn't get to the river, because the only entrance was blocked by a stationary flotilla of boats that were tied to the levees to prevent their drifting away. The people begged for someone to move their boats enough to make a path, but the boatowners ignored them. Finally, my cousin says, he and friend (with a gun) went and started untying boats, and threatened anyone to stop them.
He told us a long story about a suddenly erupting domestic drama at one of the shelters: "This woman had been cheating on her husband before the hurricane, and she ends up at the shelter with her husband and the guy she's cheating on him with. In no time they were fighting - they put the woman and her boyfriend in a separate room to keep them away from everyone else, but that wasn't good enough for the guy, he was still going nuts and yelling at everyone. Finally we had him handcuffed on the roof, and shot pepper spray into his face. He cried and yelled, but once it wore off, he spit in the face of the cop up there. Now if it were me, I would have shot him dead on the spot. I have no tolerance for that, when all this other stuff is going on. But they sprayed him again. And he still didn't stop, so they unloaded a full can on his face. He was screaming that it burned, and he had tears and snot running down his face. Then he turns to the girl, who's sitting nearby, and says 'Will you marry me?'"
You can't make this shit up.
"Everybody in the government is yelling at everybody else over who did what, and who didn't, and why they didn't follow the book. Let me tell you something. I don't know much about books and reading, but there's no book for something like this. There just isn't."
As the waters subsided, the St. Bernard police put up a roadblock to prevent entry into the parish. Sound crazy? Even though every person left in the area was desperately trying to leave, they were so afraid that they'd be invaded by "those people" (read: "blacks") that they blocked off the only ways in to prevent what they saw as mass anarchy in the city. I could see the boyfriend try to hide his cringing reaction.
The rest of the party, we avoided. Old family wounds got reopened, and while things didn't necessarily get nasty between my family and the cousins, the discussion about other relatives turned quickly sour.... The boyfriend, my brother, and I stayed outside the room.
Afterwards, we went out to get drunk with old friends (sense a pattern?)
The quarter, despite its relatively empty streets, was packed: every bar was shoulder-to-shoulder madness. Apparently a lot of people needed to get away from family drama.
Driving home via the Gulf Coast:
I just got back from another trip recently. Some areas of the city have really picked up, and some... The pictures above would be indistinguishable from what's there now. It's a bloody mess, y'all. That's all I've got.