Got Water: Retelling November 25, 2005

In the North, ya'll say things like, "We'll meet you at 8:00 at the Common." In the South, these guys say things like, "We'll meet you for 8:00 at Cafe Du Monde." Actually, hardly anyone does anything at 8:00 AM or PM in New Orleans; things are slower and later here. People from places I've lived—Yankee places—would ask if someone's house was flooded, but as we drove around New Orleans today the Southerners in the car all used a different construction. They asked, "Did they get water?" It sounds so much gentler this way.

What has happened to New Orleans is anything, but gentle. Using one word (cataclysmic, surreal, disastrous, catastrophic, tragic, or devastating) to describe what has happened here is silly, impossible. What we saw was mind-boggling. It just doesn’t compute in my head.

We started our “Making It Real” tour of New Orleans by going to Lakeview, a white, middle class neighborhood that was under water for more than a week. There are some duplexes, single family homes, and apartment buildings in the neighborhood. Like the rest of New Orleans, it is flat. Philip’s parents’ bought their first home there, a duplex, on Avenue A and lived there when Philip and his sister were born, from 1972-1978. They still own the duplex. In fact, while they built their current house, they lived there from the summer of 1996 to December 1999, which was from when Philip and I were courting to Sumner’s birth. Lynn hosted a baby shower for me there.

In each neighborhood we visited in New Orleans, the first thing I looked for was a dead yard and bushes and the second thing I looked for was the water line. Once I saw dead bushes and uprooted trees, I knew the block had been flooded. Next I scanned for a white garage door or a white-painted fence, something where the water stain would show. In Lakeview, the water line was above all of the first floor windows by a few feet. Philip’s dad pointed out to us that the water line only indicates where the water sat for a long time, the water probably reached higher than the line it left.

When we reached Avenue A, there were two cars littering the front yard, both “total losses”, a phrase that is used often in post-Katrina New Orleans. The neighborhood has been cleaned up quite a bit. There are some piles of trash as big as 12 hay bales in individual lawns, but the roads have been bulldozed and residents have been returning week after week to salvage and get rid of their things. This is the fifth or eighth or tenth round of garbage wanting to be picked up. Apparently when the garbage trucks come to a neighborhood the residents and former residents nearly throw a block party. It is really exciting to get rid of your rotten stuff.

We went inside the Avenue A house. The water line reached within a foot of the ceiling of the first floor. Above that there was about a foot of mold spores, still thriving. The walls were covered with a residue that reminded me of the film in an empty mug that held hot chocolate, but sat too long and developed a milk skin. That skin now hung, dried to the wall. The floor was covered with dried and drying sludge. Earlier in the day I had been looking with my kids at photo albums from when Philip and his family lived in this house. In the photos a round-faced, small-nosed, curly-haired, three-year-old Philip sat on the kitchen floor smiling up at his mom. When my clog nudged some of the dried mud to see what was under it, it was jarring to find the same linoleum that Philip had been sitting on at age three. The furniture and appliances were strewn all over the place. The fridge was tipped over into the kitchen. The chairs and couches lay were the water had left them.

On the first floor everything, but a Boggle game, was a loss. The carpet, the artwork, the kitchen appliances, the coats in the closet, the overturned furniture, the other board games, the vacuum, the TV, the Feng Shue video, etc. were unsalvageable. Philip’s dad told us that the people who lived here were moving on and had already taken what they wanted. On the second floor they left some usable stuff behind. They had abandoned unwanted DVDs, outdated clothing, a bed, cosmetics, a computer monitor, some bad jewelry, and a lot more. The salvager in me saw some good stuff, but then it hit me. This isn’t a pile of stuff on its way to the curb or Goodwill. This was someone’s home. It appeared that they had come and took the best stuff; the things that they could not do without. The rest of this stuff was expendable to the family that lived here.

I realized that if I took something, I would be a few short steps away from becoming a looter.

We’ve all seen the video footage of black people cleaning the shelves at Walmart. I have read about purposeful looting for provisions like clean clothing and food and water. I’ve also heard stories of policemen (and other officials who were trying to keep the peace) threatening looters with guns and then helping themselves to the first pick of what is there for the taking. One man told me about what he calls “tourism looting”. He said “people with big rings or big trucks” come in from Houston and Baton Rouge and take dishes or TV’s or other things that have not been retrieved or even just set out to dry by people who’ve lost their homes. I can see the allure of looting—there’s a lot of stuff to be saved in this mess, but the fate of these home is still up in the air.

After seeing the old house we headed about six blocks away to the where the levy failed along the 17^th St. Canal. As we passed the playground Philip’s father noted, “The playground’s okay.” and indeed to was. The old swings, slide, and metal climbing structures were not rusted or overturned or washed away. Of course, there was no one there to play.

When we got to the break in the levy at the 17^th Street Canal, Philip’s dad said that we were at ground zero. At first I was amazed that where the levy broke no one happened to have built a house. Then I realized that there were houses there before the flood. Now, they were gone—washed away. Where houses had stood we saw several pools of water, 6 to 20 feet across, which seemed to be swelling from within. It was a bigger version of holes my children and I dig at the beach, several feet from the water. When we get a few scoops into digging our hole, we find water seeping into our hole. Water is still seeping from the levy into the dry land behind it. There is a construction crew there working on something with a crane, but the plain truth is that the problem is not fixed yet.

Yet, people are gutting and rebuilding their homes a few blocks away. This felt extremely risky. It is a case of a spirit of resistance; no one can just sit in a hotel room and wait. Adjacent to where the levy broke there was an old school bus parked with the words “DO NOT REMOVE” spray painted on the hood. The bus was nearly on its side and the back door was opened. A bright orange sticker from some sort of official agency that had condemned the bus had been ripped off the back window and thrown crumpled on the ground. When I peeked in I saw several trunks overturned and rifled through. There were plastic models, unbuilt, in boxes strew around the inside and one already finished model resting on a trunk. It all looked beyond salvage, but obviously the owner couldn’t let go, not yet. “Do not remove” was the best he could do.

People were in Lakeview. The best I could tell, a lot were lots of tourists, like ourselves, spending their post-turkey times seeing for themselves what is left. Workmen were in lots of homes. The buzz of equipment and the bang of tools could be heard in about one house in each block. Philip’s dad asked, “What is going to become of this neighborhood? If a few rebuild, but most abandon their homes, then this will become a ghetto of vacant, dying houses.

As we left Lakeview, Philip and Laura hopped out of the car to take pictures of the lawn signs thickly posted in the grass near each stop sign. The signs tell a story. When the first people started to trickle back into New Orleans reaching people was hard: the phones were unpredictable, the newspaper was not being delivered, and TV is just too expensive for small businesses. So, as small businesses re-opened they plastered the city with yard signs to drum up customers. Some of the signs bring up images of loss and death: “house gutting”, “we tear down houses”, “flood solutions”, “mold removal”, and “class action suit”. There is so much to be done. Other signs make your heart sing: a dentist’s practice is up and running, “St Paul X School is registering now”, “Children’s Hospital Reopens”, and po-boys and hot lunches are being served again.

When Philip and Laura climbed back in the car we decided to go to the Ninth Ward, an all-black and lower income enclave. Aside from Philip’s dad, none of us really knew the Ninth Ward. We got on the freeway. Even the big green freeway signs signaling exits made me pause: are these signs leading to actual places anymore?

The Upper Ninth Ward was open for car traffic. Philip said, “Every once in a while I think to myself, this just looks like post-Mardi-Gras litter, but its not.” We weaved in and out of block after block of vacant homes. Few tourists were driving in this neck of the woods. Every three or four blocks we’d see a car that had been driven in for the day and wave or smile at someone on the street or on their porch, pausing from the task of savaging assessing their next move. The water line was about five feet above the street level. I was getting so used to seeing ruin, seeing everything coated with dried flood water, that I stopped noticing the wrecked things. What caught my eye were the things that were pristine. There was a clean, white porch swing still hanging from a tree in a back yard. There were a few yards that were brown, but neat. Clearly someone had come and taken the time to make orderly their lifeless lawns. A playground sign hung proud and yellow announcing itself, but when we reached the playground we found a new FEMA trailer park had borrowed the space. There were some trailers with room for more.

We crossed over the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. Barricades kept us from driving in and so we parked the car and wondered in on foot. This area was still restricted, but people in New Orleans are used to walking past barricades (during parades) and we thought nothing of it. Very few other people were there. No one was patrolling the area.

The rest of the group was ahead and I stopped to look at the stuff at my feet on the neutral ground by the car. All within five feet of where I was standing there was a “Happy New Year” headband—still silvery and festive, a 45 record, a comic book, a TV, a camp lantern, a piece of a kid’s toy train track, a football, an artificial Christmas tree branch, a child’s tea set, and a waterlogged pair of huge underwear. All this stuff had seen the storm, but I got a sense that each thing came from a different household. Philip’s dad explained that when the water poured in, its force took a little bit from everyone and when the water poured out all that overturned stuff rushed back out. If the water goes in, it also must go out. I later learned that some residents had been allowed to take bus tours of the Lower Ninth Ward, but that they could not get out of their buses. Unlike Lakeview, very few people had a chance to clean up.

As we walked slowly toward the breach in this neighborhood, another ground zero, we saw whole houses and part of others that had been picked by the water and slammed against another. Bulldozers had pushed what was into the street onto people’s yards. There was a fridge on a roof. As we neared the breach, there were fewer houses and less of the ones that were there—houses without shingles, without doors, without walls, without porches, with whole rooms missing. Where walls had been torn, it sometimes looked like an enlarged piece of torn and frayed fabric. Debris was everywhere, muddy teddy bears, dishes, shoes, lots of stuff that people could save. Once the breach came into view, we saw steps to porches and houses that weren’t there. By the time we were in spitting distance of the breach even the concrete steps were out of place, laying on the slab they belonged to or sitting sideways, as if they were turning away in confusion from the house that left them.

Right at the breach there were two men in matching blue shirts looking official, talking to two state police officers in their car. This breach looked bigger than the other one. A red barge was lying uneven on the dry side. It had protected the house that stopped it, one of the bigger houses with two stories. I walked past the officials, closer to the breach, and then turned back. They didn’t make a move, so I climbed to the top of the breach. The water looked peaceful and powerful, as river water often does, but it caused the mess that was behind me. The 150-200 yard long and 15 ft high gravel patch I was standing on seemed like not quite enough.

Philip called to me and he and his dad motioned for me to come. I ran down the levy and up the street to them. We’d had enough and were hungry. We started out, all stopping to look at different things. I saw a case of CDs in someone’s driveway. Someone had already rifled through them. I picked a gospel one up, “Mighty Clouds of Joy”. The first four songs were: “Bright Side”, “I’m Glad About It”, “I’ve Got One Thing You Can’t Take Away”, and “There’s No Friend Like Jesus”. Man, I needed some Jesus right then.

On our way back to the car a New Orleans patrol man pestered us. We weren’t supposed to be there; he said he could arrest us, but he wouldn’t. We weren’t worried. As we walked I noticed that there weren't any new signs here proclaiming death or new life. It was frozen in a post-flood state. In shock, we made our way to lunch.

Between five of us we ate boiled shrimp, crab stuffed jalapeños, crawfish pies, an oyster po-boy, a soft-shelled po-boy, a roast beef po-boy, a beer, and some cokes. We talked about if the Big Easy could be easy again or if it would just be a sad and stressed place to live. Everything is so up in the air.

After lunch, Philip’s dad took over the grandkids and Philip’s mom took over the tour. Her tour was much the same—we saw degrees of destruction in other parts of the city. But there was one key difference: she talked about the people she knew. Each block was the home of a client or some gymnastics carpool friend of Laura’s or someone her mother knew.

This has been the longest and hardest blog I have ever written and if you made it this far, thanks. I have to stop. I needed to get it all out. I read in the paper today that the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward went home this week to claim their stuff. Thank God.