False River, page 21
‘I try to tell people, you’re not going home Monday,’ he said. ‘We might be here for a month unless they build a big refugee facility closer to New Orleans.’
The thing they needed the most, he told us, were pull-ups for the elderly, and maxi-pads. The next day Paige and I drove to the Marksville Walmart — now decimated, with no water left and most supplies gone — and she spent three hundred dollars buying tampons, pull-ups, maxi-pads and toilet paper. The guys in line behind us, a father and son in camouflage, giggled and pointed as we stacked everything on the counter.
‘You must have a real problem,’ the father said, tittering, gesturing at the pull-ups.
‘They’re for the shelter,’ I said, and Paige and I glared at them until they stopped giggling.
When we dropped the stuff off around the back of Garan, Inc., the women prisoners who helped us unload told us the shelter urgently needed baby socks and women’s underwear. The next day Tom and I made the forty-minute drive to Alexandria to buy some at Target.
Though we lived in Louisiana, Marksville seemed a surreal and intense version of it. Days there were hotter than hell, and love bugs turned every wall in the house black. I found a frog in a cocktail shaker. There were ants in my bed. At night a rogue armadillo dug up the garden.
We lined up at the Family Services office to get food stamps. The capable woman in orange directing foot traffic told us there were 3500 evacuees in tiny Avoyelles Parish, a figure that didn’t include people staying with friends and families who hadn’t registered for any disaster relief. FEMA, she said, had been spotted in the Marksville area, but weren’t ‘on the ground’ yet. It was 9 September. The mandatory evacuation order was issued on 28 August.
Food stamps took the form of a Louisiana Purchase automated debit card, with DISASTER ASSISTANCE printed across the bottom. After filling in a form (name, age, race, income, plus a rough assessment of how much we’d spent evacuating and how much we’d lost), a staff member assigned a monetary value to the card. Ours was $274 for a month. The woman in orange announced to the waiting room that nobody could spend the money on paper goods (like nappies, to the obvious dismay of a number of people there), alcohol, tobacco or cleaning products. However, unlike regular food stamps, the card was good for hot food in the deli section of a supermarket.
Rodney was friends with Sheriff T-Bill, and told us we could go out with him to feed alligators any time we wanted. We spent a night in a Winnebago in Shreveport, and another night with the Tubre family, Rodney’s relatives, in Natchitoches, where Tommy Tubre took us out on his boat along the Cane River. We visited the house in tiny Cloutierville where the writer Kate Chopin lived in the 1880s. The other people on the tour that day were from Texas.
‘You’re from New Orleans?’ they asked. ‘Have you lost everything?’
They seemed disappointed to hear that wasn’t the case.
We drove to the annual Frog Festival in Rayne, a small town on the Cajun Prairie, and caught the end of the frog-jumping contest. In nearby Lafayette we went to the annual Festivals Acadiens, where Cajun bands play and stalls sell everything from accordions to chainsaw-carved wooden fish. Although it was almost too hot to stand up, a number of people were dancing in the dust in front of the stage, including one half-naked man using a stick as a substitute partner. From the stage, it was announced that the following year the Festivals Acadiens would be held in October, news that elicited a weary cheer from the baked audience. The Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, which we’d attended in 2004, had already been postponed until October, after hurricane season was over.
If it sounds as though we were having fun, we weren’t. We were just restless, stir-crazy. I couldn’t settle to any reading or writing. We helped around the house, washing dinners and sweeping away dead love bugs. We took things to the shelters. We obsessed over the news.
Sometime in September we drove north to Iowa City, where we had friends, and to St. Louis, where Tom’s family lived. At a Gap outlet in Mississippi we got an evacuees’ discount. On the way through Memphis, we learned from the radio news that the city was experiencing a mini-crime surge since the hurricane, and that no plea-bargains were permitted for crimes against evacuees.
People kept asking us if we’d lost everything. People wanted to hear stories, but we weren’t up to talking much. We returned to Louisiana in a car packed with donated items for the shelters: books, baby clothes, food, paper goods, baby formula. We delivered it all to the shelter in Marksville except for the beef jerky, which I gave to the Avoyelles Parish National Guard: they were having a snack drive for local guardsmen sent to New Orleans.
The volunteers in the shelter had more requests, so we drove back to Alexandria to use Target gift cards people had given us. We bought five giant bottles of laundry detergent for use in the sole communal washing machine, and one hundred towels. Nobody thinks to evacuate with towels: we certainly didn’t. Nobody thought they’d be away this long.
In late September Hurricane Rita hit. We’d never been on the eastern — and stronger — side of a hurricane before. On Saturday morning, when the power and water disappeared at Slowness, it seemed as though we’d all spend the day sitting around, watching the rain, reading and napping. Between sporadic bursts of wind and driving rain, I sloshed across the garden in Rodney’s rain boots to refill the birdhouse and collect various blown objects from the sodden grass, and took a surreptitious pee.
Sometimes the sky looked bright: birds flew between strands of trees, and pick-ups hissed along Blue Town Road. But when the rain returned it was loud and almost horizontal. The pond filled to its weedy brim. Rain drummed on the tin roof and the old house flinched and shivered in the wind. Just after two, the house really started shaking, the wind a piercing whistle, rain drenching the floor of the screened porch and blowing dirt and insect debris into the house. Wind bent the trees, and rain leaked into the house under windows and doors. The house seemed to be rocking on its foundations, drilled by the wind, and something on the front porch banged incessantly. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ I wrote in my notebook. We were all a little scared.
When the worst of it passed, the garden looked flattened and bedraggled. The birdhouse I had filled earlier was now six feet higher in the tree (and completely empty). The dog kennel was upside down. The swing seat on the front porch, unhooked earlier, had sailed away into the yard.
After a lull of about forty minutes, another band arrived (driving rain, mean wind), and then another more than an hour later. These weren’t as bad, although the second brought down the trellis, thick with vines, on the porch.
That night we had a shower at someone else’s house in town; he had water and intermittent electricity. On local TV we saw flooded gullies and roads choked with fallen trees. Sunday was hot and unbearable, and we drove back into town to sleep on the floor at the home of another friend of Rodney’s, John Ed Laborde.
The news after Rita seemed to focus on how major urban centres dodged the bullet (and other clichés), but this hurricane devastated southwestern Louisiana. Many small communities were destroyed. I read an AP report in The Advocate that the six Louisiana parishes and Texas counties most affected by Rita had higher poverty rates than the national average of 9.2 per cent, and none had median family incomes above the national median (of US$50,000).
A sadder statistic: even these people were better off than the 24 per cent of families living below the poverty line in New Orleans, where the median income in 2005 was only US$32,000.
Rita swept away and stillness returned, along with the infernal heat and another surge of never-say-die love bugs. Alexandria was thronged with even more evacuees. As well as the ones from Katrina who’d been stranded there for weeks, there were new arrivals from Lafayette and Lake Charles in southern Louisiana. Albertsons, the big supermarket there, was packed with people buying charcoal, water and snacks. (The ‘Beverage Boulevard’ aisle was particularly popular.) The gas station there had sold out of gas.
In Alec we visited our New Orleans landlords, Joy and Paul, who were fitting twelve people into a rented house, including six kids dressed in borrowed school uniforms. Joy’s uncle Lester Schmidt arrived; he was a colonel in the National Guard, usually based at Jackson Barracks in New Orleans East. The barracks were built in the 1830s and form one of the most impressive areas of antebellum construction in the country. Scenes from the movie Interview with the Vampire were filmed there. We’d had a party at Lester and Deanna’s white-columned house there the night before our wedding.
Lester was exhausted and desperate for a shower: there was no running water in the city. On the morning of Tuesday, 30 August, after the canal levee broke, a wall of water swept across the Ninth Ward and inundated Jackson Barracks. They could see it coming, Lester said. The building in which he was standing, watching the water approach, filled with six feet of water in minutes. Every building was flooded, and some were completely destroyed. The surge washed neighbourhood houses in, over the barracks’ perimeter fence.
Lester and his son Robbie took out a boat to rescue people in the neighbouring Ninth Ward, where the water was chest-high and slick with oil. He saw children falling off roofs, people desperate and dehydrated and in shock, calling for friends and family members who could not be found. They rescued ninety people in three days. Other guard members were out in boats as well, pulling people to safety, getting them to dry ground.
I’d heard a St Bernard sheriff on TV, saying that residents needed to understand they’d be coming home to nothing but their memories. The Ninth Ward and Chalmette, in neighbouring St Bernard Parish, would need to be entirely rebuilt, Lester said.
The highest part of the barracks, near the levee, had been drained, he told us, but there was a thick pungent sludge everywhere — oil and excrement and debris, dark and stinky. The whole place smelled of death.
‘It’s the worst thing to ever happen to New Orleans in my lifetime,’ Lester said.
The stories Lester told seemed a world away from Avoyelles Parish, where the leaves were starting to wither on the cotton bushes and the harvesting machines were moving into position. The summer was almost over; hurricane season was almost over. But still nobody could go home. And thousands of people had no home to go to.
After a long month of waiting, we heard we could get back into our neighbourhood to clean up. Then we heard that only business owners could get back in, but we drove home to New Orleans anyway. We crossed the Atchafalaya River to Simmesport and Morganza, past False River, through Baton Rouge, along the Bonnet Carré Spillway with its mud flats and stunted cypress trees, all the way into the city of New Orleans, where the once-white roof of the Superdome, visible from miles away, had been flayed by the storm.
We had to drive all the way downtown on the highway; our exit was closed. Then we illicitly doubled-back along Claiborne Avenue, hoping nobody from the National Guard would stop us. Before they evacuated, people had left cars along the neutral ground (the New Orleans way of saying median strip); a funeral home had parked its hearses there. All these vehicles had been underwater for weeks. Now their bleached carcasses sat at strange angles, along with children’s bikes that had floated out there, and tree branches, and toppled street signs. Windows were blown out of the businesses that lined the street; the wind had stripped away the sides of some buildings, leaving them open to the air, like dollhouses. I started to cry and Tom told me to stop. In our street we had to drive around a BMW with an open trunk and Mississippi plates. Maybe it had been stolen and abandoned before the water poured in.
Our house stank. The fridge, without power for a month, was a foul-mouthed incubator for insects, and had to be emptied, taped up and hauled out into the street with the help of Paul, our landlord.
Downstairs was a dark sea of sludge, everything up-ended by the tide. It smelled of brackish water, oil, sewage and rotting garbage. The whole city did, in fact. We wore masks and got through a box of disposable gloves. We spent two days carrying ruined things outside. A tall pyramid of sodden rubbish grew on the sidewalk. The only things we could salvage, like Tom’s metal Scout badges and some silver-plate used at our wedding, fitted into a small laundry basket. Everything else of economic and sentimental value — from bicycle to washing machine to spare bed to old letters to writing desk to shoes to ironing board to toolbox to Tom’s high-school yearbooks — was ruined.
We used the big bottles of water we’d brought with us to drink and wash. When night fell we drove out of the city to Metairie in Jefferson Parish, where there were functioning stop lights and no curfew, to stay with Paul and Joy: they were tired of life in Alexandria, and their house in Metairie had power and water. Near our place there was one place to eat, Slim Goodies on Magazine Street, where you could get a cheeseburger on a paper plate and a beer — cash only — and there was hand-sanitiser on the counter so you could clean your hands. We heard that Morning Call in Jefferson Parish was serving beignets and coffee, and that the big Target there was open, but not accepting food stamps. Down in the Quarter — now a military zone, but with electricity and a jovial atmosphere — we visited our friend Russell Desmond at Arcadian Books: he’d opened the shop because there was nothing else to do.
On Cucullu Street we had no electricity or phone line, and the water couldn’t be used for drinking or bathing. We saw rats and lots of stray dogs. National Guard vehicles rumbled by, because they were running the city now.
Back in Marksville the ad hoc shelter in the factory closed, and remaining evacuees were dispatched to the Riverfront Center in Alexandria, managed by the Red Cross. Hundreds of people slept in a communal room packed with cots and borrowed belongings. Most people there looked bored, or stunned, or simply exhausted. I’d felt anxious and irritable staying at Slowness. If I’d had to sleep every night in a huge room full of strangers, using communal bathrooms, told when I can eat, standing in line whenever I needed to get tampons or toilet paper, having to be checked in and out of the building by the National Guard, I’d be depressed as well.
The young Red Cross workers gave us a list of needs, and we did the trek to Target with our gift cards: a DVD player, a microwave oven, two basketballs, two footballs, two (Halloween-themed) play balls, two long jump-ropes, a pump, ten extension cords, four big packs of AA batteries, five towels and, with the left-over money, two big packs of Halloween candy. There were a lot of children in the shelter. The meal-time schedule, posted on a piece of cardboard, included a special early breakfast for kids going to school.
Katrina hit at the end of August. We couldn’t live in New Orleans until December. We moved back to live among the rubble and trailers, driving along streets still lined with junk and debris, passing military vehicles, or trucks laden with ladders and wood. Most traffic lights and street lights weren’t working. The streetcar track was a dumping ground, decorated with handmade signs announcing businesses that had opened or moved, or advertising mould removal, building services or electrical inspection.
We couldn’t move into our own place right away, because we had no electricity, gas or phone service. We camped out in the empty house of a colleague who was still out of the city. There were numerous ironies and irritations to keep us busy: receiving a disconnection notice from our phone company, MCI, because we hadn’t paid our home phone bill since the hurricane. We’d had no phone service since then, either, but I had to call MCI on my cellphone to tell them this, waiting more than half an hour on hold. MCI told us we’d have phone service again soon: specifically, February 28, 2006, at 8 pm.
Entergy had also sent a bill for estimated gas and electricity usage over the past three months. It was for sixty dollars, impressive when there was no gas or electricity in the entire neighbourhood. After more time spent on hold, I extorted a promise to reconnect our gas the same week, as long as I agreed to get to our house at 7 am and wait for someone to show up. He arrived at nine. I’ve never been so happy to see the burners on the stove light up.
‘Y’all haven’t had power since the storm?’ he asked. ‘All they need to do is flick that switch up there.’
With electricity back a day later, our house on Cucullu formed a little beacon of light in a trashed, still-empty neighbourhood. Paul arranged delivery of a new fridge, and we moved back in. During the day, workers gutted the innards of houses nearby, the neighbourhood noisy with the sounds of hammers, drills, and the crash of wood landing on piles in the street. At night, the only other lights shone from a couple of FEMA trailers parked outside. We held a defiant Christmas party for anyone back in town, and our porch light was the only thing visible in blocks. It felt as though we lived in the countryside, in the middle of a dark forest of empty houses.
Cartier, our mailman, came by every day.
‘I can’t believe you’re back at work,’ I said. He’d evacuated to Alabama and then Houston, but was back now staying with his sister across the river in Algiers.
‘What else am I gonna do?’ he said. His house was ruined, but he was rebuilding. He hoped to move back in next summer.
The guy from FEMA came by to confirm that we would not be receiving any compensation for our losses. Only landlords can buy flood insurance, and Paul didn’t have any.
The gas we’d been so happy to see was cut off again on Christmas Eve. Sarah was back now, living around the corner, and she had gas, so we walked there on Christmas Day, in our dressing gowns, to have a shower. Then we drove to our friends’ still-empty house to cook the chicken we’d bought with the last of our food stamps.
Despite the rash promises of MCI, we didn’t get a phone line again until the following April. The flooded BMW sat at its jaunty angle for almost six months, until someone had it towed. All the birds were gone, but rats were everywhere in our street, brazenly swarming our trash cans, until the contractor living next door laid poison. People drove the wrong way down one-way streets. People drove through red lights without stopping. No rules seemed to apply anymore. The city was a mess. Everyone was a mess.
