[Note: This missive was written on 12/9/05. My life became so busy in the days and weeks leading to the holidays that I literally could not get back to this report, or even edit it until today, 1/1/06. Since this report was written (and stored in draft form... I make no promises that its spelling and grammar are perfect...), my husband and I have gone back to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast, into the path of Katrina. In an upcoming report, I will detail that trip and the huge gains made in the past three week in New Orleans, and the continuing stagnation in the Lower Ninth Ward and in Mississippi. --tana]

Back from the Edge of the World…

12/0/05

So, I followed a dream/idea and drove to the Gulf coast of Mississippi yesterday, laden with art jewelry and other beautiful gifts from my artistic and generous friends. I left I-10 and dropped south to the coast, where U.S. 90 runs right along the beach. I was west of Biloxi and east of Pass Christian, at Long Beach. Had Katrina not come, had it not damaged this area almost beyond repair, I would have been in an art show in Pass Christian this past September, staying in a hotel in Long Beach. Now that strip of sand is only sand.

Biloxi and its uprooted floating casinos lie to the east of this area and an armed guard prevents tourists from turning toward that gambling town. The Beau Rivage Casino promises to lead the way back to an economy dependent on gaming. But these gentler communities to the west of Biloxi are still host to hundreds of people attached to the land, however damaged or disappeared their former homes may be.

God’s Katrina Kitchen stands as a beacon in the sand. Offering hot meals and a warm place to sit on a chilly December night, it also offers a friendly community. Church people cook and serve the food and run the programs that care for the homeless and disenfranchised. It’s a warm experience to be among them, workers and recipients alike.

I took with me great gifts and found the perfect organizer to distribute them at their upcoming “Santa” event this Saturday. The gifts fill a former void – things mostly for women, carers of bodies and souls.

I’d left home without a clear plan. Just knowing something of the Mississippi coastal villages, I felt that I would be led to the right place. The fact that it happened so quickly, so smoothly, gave it a meant-to-be quality. I feel blessed to have the friends that I do, and to have met up with Jennifer at God’s Katrina Kitchen. She took the gifts from me and placed them into her car’s trunk for safekeeping until Saturday. Mission accomplished. As natural as anything.

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Toothpicks, matchsticks...

Then I drove further west to see what I could see. I found a few antebellum homes still standing, with lights on, with people living in them. A night of miracles.

One can measure the effects of the hurricane winds and surge by the disappearing homes and foliage one finds near the water’s edge. Inland, there’s some wind damage, some downed trees here and there. But two blocks from the once-raging sea, there’s nothing. Foundations. Stubs. The storm peeled back human habitation as it roared ashore. How the antebellum homes stand intact, I know not. But those that do are the very ones burned into memory from earlier trips, and the ones I wept for on August 30th. To see them standing, lit from within, brought full-body relief to me. A small piece of our architectural heritage surviving.

I could not follow the roads out of there. Everything is covered in white sand, coating details as a heavy winter snow coats the details. Making the landscape unrecognizable.There are no street signs remaining and so I could not find Menge Road, another road leading north from the coast. After searching in vain, I turned around and returned to I-10 on the road I'd come down on. And jumped onto I-10 and headed to New Orleans.

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Nuclear winter in New Orleans...

I truly did not know what to expect, kinesthetically. The beloved 18th century city of my dreams and now my nightmares. I knew that images on TV could not convey the total landscape. It’s the nature of media to show the same limited images again and again, while missing the scope of the destruction. Anderson Cooper’s doing the best job he can for CNN and Katrina, but a lot is not being said. And there are the technical limitations of any camera. I knew I had to place myself in the landscape to really understand.

• A week ago, bankers from Boston were toured around the ruined Ninth Ward. They had come in hopes of learning how to bankroll the rebuild of the area. But I'd heard that the scope of damage was beyond their imagining.
  
  And here are some of the images and impressions I received last night and today…
  
  
• I have been driving into New Orleans day and night for the past 20 years. Last night, I drove over the I-10 bridge from Slidell to East New Orleans. They cannibalized materials from both spans to make one complete span (remember the pictures of every chunk of pavement missing from the support pilings?) and there’s one lane of traffic moving in each direction, without a concrete barricade separating one lane from oncoming traffic.
  
• As I drove westward into East New Orleans, it was already quite dark. And I could see no lights on in the city! The entire area was dark, from the Gulf Outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to the North Shore of the lake. Absence of manmade light made it possible to see the last remnants of a winter’s sunset in the far distance, a sight I’ve never seen in the urban landscape.
  
• The marshy wetlands near Irish Bayou, the wildlife refuge one encounters for the first many miles on the city’s side of the interstate bridge, are decapitated. Gone are the graceful black willows and roadside brushes, torn up by winds and surge. Litter lies strewn about. No street lamps light the way on this stretch of the interstate. Cars that failed their drivers sit akimbo, left behind in the rush to flee Katrina.
• 
  
• East New Orleans is a complete ghost town. Several large new car lots, acres of pavement and new cars covered in a white silt are parked in orderly lines that go on and on. A complete shopping mall sits abandoned, its Dillards store dark and gutted. A google-plex cinema and a Toys R Us are abandoned. Miles and miles of apartment complexes are dark and nothing moves. Not one person living there or guarding property. Not one light. Until Katrina, East New Orleans housed a population bigger than that of Tallahassee.
  
• As my car climbed the tall “high rise” bridge over the now-infamous Industrial Canal (the canal whose breached levy flooded the Lower Ninth Ward), I see very few lights throughout the city. Off the front left corner of my car stands the Central Business District (CBD), devoid of so much lighting as to be unrecognizable as the New Orleans I have seen hundreds of times from this vantage point. I cannot pick out the Super Dome. Even the bridge over the Mississippi River (called the GNO – Greater New Orleans bridge in my time there, and now called the Crescent City Connection) seems to have only about half of its lights on. But, its frail lights arc the Mississippi River and gives me my first definition of the once-familiar landscape.
  
• Miles and miles of darkened neighborhoods lie below me in all directions. I barely smell the coffee roasters of yore – and even the hints of coffee roasting may be either a permanent odor stained on the concrete below my wheels, or only in my memory. I cannot tell if I’m making it up. Wishful thinking.
  
• No ships or boats seem to be moving in any body of water. No planes seem to be flying overhead. The city is asleep, in a flood-induced coma.
  
• Traffic is less intense than I have ever seen it. I easily make my way onto I-610 and exit down the ramp to Paris Avenue. At the bottom of the ramp, no cars challenge my progress in any direction. But two large motor boats are strewn beside the street like giant children’s toys abandoned on the shoulder of the road. I can’t figure out where two such boats may have come from, since we are not right by any body of water. Were they used in the rescue effort? Did they float off of driveway trailers? Did they float all the way from the lake? That they have just been lying there for weeks makes me feel uneasy, and I know they portend many things to come.
  
• As I turn left onto Paris Avenue and go under the interstate, formerly busy shops sit dark and shuttered. One roof has slid off the building onto the concrete below. I realize that I have now officially entered the hurricane/flood zone at ground level.
  
• I travel to a dark intersection unencumbered by traffic signals or street lamps. Weird. This street is usually so busy. I turn right onto Gentilly, toward the Fairgrounds which has seen decades of the New Orleans’ JazzFest. The several crazy, diagonal intersections also have no traffic signals, but stops signs on tripods are placed to remind drivers of which of these crazy streets have the right-of-way. I stop each time, and when I am past the last of these, I turn right onto Trafalgar Street, where David and Vera live.
  
• I have never been to this house. They bought it only a year ago. They had one year in their new house – after waiting until their fifties to buy their first home – and then Katrina struck. On the eve of Katrina, they departed, taking one car and their giant English sheepdog. They were gone for a month, and they have now been home two months. They have seen massive improvement and cleanup in the city, despite my disbelieving eyes.

................................................................

• Their small house, which sits on a slight rise in the land, and atop two rows of concrete blocks as a foundation, did not go underwater. The flood waters rose under their house but did not hit their floorboards.
  
• Their house sits like a shining jewel in a dark landscape. No one else has come back to their neighborhood. Some houses are being gutted. Two FEMA trailers have been installed. But their house has a decorated Norfolk pine at the front steps, leaning crazily like Charlie Brown's tree, and a wreath on the door. The house shines, with its polished floors, its lace curtains, its funky N’Awlins charm. They know they are lucky, to a point. Materially, they have lost far less than most other New Orleanians. But they have lost their economy and their community and their identity, and those things that are least as important as material things. And they suffer survivors’ guilt.
  
• I sleep well on the guest futon in their front room. The city is preternaturally quiet. Only an occasional car cuts through the neighborhood.
  
• In the morning, we tour the city. I have always made a particular circuit around the city. They have always lived in Mid-City and I have nearly always stayed with them. We follow something of this path on this day. But first David drives us to where the two lakefront levies broke. The London Avenue canal was breached in two sections and its floodwaters flowed east and west, wiping out neighborhoods for miles around. We slowly make our way up and down, back and forth, in a grid that reveals the extent of ruin in this area. Floodwater stains mark the depth of where the waters settled. The water level was likely higher, with the stains defining where the water dropped back and settled. Spray paint markings are everywhere, announcing dead bodies inside, or not; dead cats inside, or not. It is one of these houses where the two corpses were found just this week, despite markings claiming the contrary. Maybe some of these markings have no meanings, because maybe no one has entered some of these houses since August 29th.
  We see piles of debris and workers in haz/mat suits and respirators. I quickly roll my window up, realizing that mold resides in the debris piles by the curbs. Up and down the streets we go. We encounter no one but workers here and there.
  
• There are signs everywhere advertising services to gut house, to abate mold, to haul trash in a day… Signs hang everywhere. There is no one to read them and no one to request the services. Debris piles seem to have materialized independently. David and Vera assure me that many, many tons of such debris has already been hauled away. But there’s always more.
  
• We drive over toward the 17th Street canal. Water is still running from the levy through a yard and into the street. Not a significant amount. Not enough for another flood. But certainly enough to signal that all is not yet well with the levy. Today’s Times-Picayune contains the most updated graphics diagramming the flood. Remaining residents study each new generation of graphics, each new explanation, trying to absorb exactly what happened to their city, and why.
  
• It was all human error. The levies were not built correctly. Concrete walls stand on top of earthen berms. Beneath the concrete walls, there should be 20-foot metal walls down inside the berm. Instead, there are only 10-foot walls down in the berm. Before water breached the concrete walls at the top of the levies, it had already undermined the berms themselves, pushing tons of soil as water tunneled beneath the metal walls. As the tunnels emptied themselves of soil, the concrete walls swayed like crooked teeth, allowing water to rush through. This caused a new breach over the top of the levy. And tons of water flowed through these neighborhoods, until the water pressure within the lake was equalized with new water pressure on the city side of the levies. Only then did the flooding stop.
  
• All around the city, the levy system was built to protect New Orleans. And all around, the city is ringed with higher ground. Those living near the breached canal levies felt safe because they had built on the higher ground near the levies.
  
• We all thought the city had dodged the Katrina bullet. We knew things were bad in Slidell and Mississippi, and below New Orleans. We awakened to a feeling that the city had again missed a direct hit. And this was true. The eyewall, and therefore the strongest surge, hit further east. And we know what that did to the areas struck. But for two days, Katrina has been pushing water ahead of itself and raising the water level in the lake. Because of its counter-clockwise spin, water was pushed downward into the city’s canals. The lake levies held, but the canal levies did not. A question is: Who was responsible for engineering the canal levies? And this does not begin to discuss the breaches in the Industrial Canal, which connects Pontchartrain with the river…
  
• City Park is decapitated, in large measure. It has become a campground for squatters with nowhere else to live. The city imagines charging campers $200 per month for this service. The former glory of City Park, the last remaining plantation left mostly natural, is damaged, if not destroyed. We only skirted the park, but I could see downed trees and flooded soil. The 17th Street canal’s flood crossed the park.
  
• Carrollton Avenue was a war zone. Closed and boarded shops, obvious signs of looting. Nothing open. All the way to Claiborne Avenue, the end of the line for the street cars, everything is askew. Boarded shops, broken glass, no life. At Claiborne, the street cars are missing, but some of the businesses are open. Some restaurants, some galleries. But not the sushi bar, where I introduced Glen to sushi a decade ago. Not the drug store where we bought a blow-up mattress, slept on it during JazzFest and then returned it when the show was over. Not the Camellia Grill, the famous 24/7 breakfast place which typically saw lines out the door and down the block; where you were lucky to get seats at the counter. Not La Madeleine.
  
• Hanging left onto St. Charles Avenue, things began to seem “normal” for the first time. There’s tree damage and some signs of house damage, but some of the mansions now display their gorgeous Christmas decorations. A few cafes are open, but not Copeland’s on the parade route. After eating at a breakfast café, we angle toward Magazine Street. It’s pretty normal there, too. The same all the way to Canal Street. The site of the most publicized looting, many businesses are boarded up but many are now opening.
  
• We travel across Canal Street and into the Quarter, down Bourbon Street. All of the bars and strip joints appear to be open, although it’s still only 11:30 a.m.
  We drive around the Quarter. Parking is crowded, but traffic is minimal. The old La Marquise is gone. The Cathedral and the museums beside it are fine. There was no flooding in the Quarter. But business is sparse.
  
• Central Grocery is open and I’m eager to buy Italian condiments and a muffalatta to take home to Tallahassee.
  
• We cross Decatur Street to see a gallery where Vera sells some of her ceramic pieces. Then we walk toward the French Market and it begins to rain. When we arrive at the farmer’s market, where for decades (maybe generations) food vendors have hawked their foods, there is no food and no vendors. Was the food taken after Katrina? Far down through the building, we can see that the non-food vendors appear to be open. But it’s too rainy to walk down there and so we head to our car.
  
• David makes one swipe up Frenchman Street in the Marigny. Like the Quarter, it appears to be mostly fine.
  
• Then we travel up Esplanade, where mansions stand abandoned but intact. There have been some fires in this area, but mostly these grand old houses do several things right: they anticipate the possibility of flooding and so are built of cedar wood, and they’re elevated. But the people are gone and spray paint marks their exteriors. The neutral ground is scarred with many efforts at debris removal.
  
• We drive to Crete Street, where David lived for 25 years. This is where I lived with him in the late ‘80s. Vera lived there a long time, too. Until Katrina, they kept one last apartment to store David’s collections. Their landlord has not been kind to them, wanting David to remove many tons of things that went underwater, refusing to return the security deposit. After weeks of removing the collections that didn’t show mold, David has come to the end of his work there, leaving the rest of the job to the landlord’s new team of workers. Justice. The loss of the deposit in exchange for leaving the rest of the work to paid workers. I think David came out ahead.
  
• This is the blow-by-blow journal of this trip. On the way home today, I stopped in at Ocean Springs, MS. My online research, in the desperate weeks after Katrina, had convinced me that Walter Anderson’s museum and original works were largely undamaged by the storm. But David had other information, saying that he’d heard that 90% of the works had been damaged.
  
  The story is that there are two collections. The museum’s collection is fine and the museum is open. The family’s private collection was moved to a vault, and the vault was breached. This collection has been taken to the university in Jackson, MS, for drying out and restoration. It’s in a climate-controlled vault and, when the money is raised, the restoration will be completed. Walter Anderson’s work is that of an important, but little-known 20th century American artist. Part impressionist and part surrealist, his colors are gorgeous and his shapes fascinating.

This whirlwind loop through Katrina's deadly swath helped me gain perspective on the situation. I need to go back again, and again, and watch the region come back to life. Right now, the city of New Orleans is like 10 minutes after the Rapture, where it seems bodies flew up into Heaven, leaving behind material things. Leaving those things in a ruined, changed state. Leaving tourists and residents left behind, or coming back, with many things to see and think about.

Old New Orleans has largely survived. Historic development, before the age of earth moving and fill dirt, was, of necessity built upon natural higher ground. Knowing that the old city flooded all the time, structures were often built off the ground. Support structures were built of cypress wood, resistant to rot and mold. And so these old technologies worked again, and New Orleans did not lose all of its architectural history. It is the "modern" development of the city that had no defense against rising floodwaters and was the most dependent upon the levies. Ranch houses built upon slabs, built on the low ground, near the lake, are the worst hit. For miles, these working class and lower middle class neighborhoods sit molding in the aftermath.

This is not a popular position to take, but I feel it would be best to either tear down those neighborhoods and sections of the city that proved they could not survive, or to implode them right where they stand and create newer, higher fill and rebuild atop that. Simply rebuilding the levy system and returning to the old ways of doing things seems like denial to me. With rising Gulf waters predicted in the next 90 years, New Orleans will become a fortress island, probably unable to support and sustain its former population.

I feel those who lost their homes, who lost everything, should be compensated and "re-housed." But not in East New Orleans, not in the Lower Ninth Ward, and not along the Lakefront or any other former cypress swamp or brackish marsh. Nature intended that zone to be a wetlands buffer and it is man who has pushed back its wilderness nature. Perhaps a higher ground in a rural area of Louisiana could become Nouveau New Orleans. Familiar architectural styles could be built and old neighborhood communities could be encouraged to come back together. Such a new community could be designed to replicate important remembered accoutrements of the past: coffee shopes, corner markets, corner bars. New Orleans culture could be encouraged, with foods and music. New Orleaneans proved to be resilient in past centuries. They put together a functional culture despite the great crime and poverty they were forced to coexist with. Perhaps, given a new chance, a new settlement could be built so that inhabitants could comfortably and safely relax into just living and plying their trades. Certainly in a country that can give us faux New Orleans tourist towns in Florida's Panhandle, we can provide a living neighborhood for people who have been displaced and not allow them to move back into harm's way.

New Orleans itself is predicted to survive, but to become a much smaller city. This will likely be good for the area in some ways. It was man's folly to build communities on fill dirt in the path of great storms, ringed by faulty levies. Perhaps now we can redevelop it more appropriately. I say this with a grieving heart, only guessing at what the displaced inhabitants have lost. I don't think they can go home again. But perhaps we can give them a new city, and that new city can have a sister-city relationship with old New Orleans, one that will rise from the fires and flood-waters.