Easy for some...
This will be a follow-up entry to Life is Good in the Big Easy ... and well, I discovered that life isn't that good for everyone. Actually it isn't that good for most people, I'd venture to say. Because in New Orleans -- and I don't want to pick on New Orleans for poverty because all of our cities have it -- there is a lot of land that still looks like the hurricane just hit. There are a lot of abandoned houses where neighbors don't even know where the people have gone.
I am sorry to say that I go caught up with my work in the Big Easy and then with more work at home, and I let the initial shock of what I saw saw sort of drain away. I regret that - I wish I'd caught my first impressions. Because the day I spent in the Ninth Ward was a time that changed me, like as if a connection was made in my mind, linking lots of things that were already there.
I think it was the stoops without the houses that got me. Have you ever seen a stoop without a house? It looks a lot like a gravestone. It looks lonely there, like a statue, a monument, a lost dog. It doesn't look right at all. I think there are a lot of ghosts in New Orleans.
I saw the house where Fats Domino got caught in his attic with no food or clean water for three days until they cut the roof and got him out. I didn't even know that, and it was sort of a wakeup. I mean, if Fats Domino only got out after three days, what about the other people?
The answer is that a lot of them are dead. A lot of them are dead, and their pets are dead, and their family members had to move to places like Western Mississippi and Southern Alabama and Houston and Baton Rouge. I learned that after the hurricane a lot of the hotels didn't have enough people to keep things going, and other people came in, so there was this big shift in the population. Some people I met had left and come back, but lots of people weren't able to come back. Maybe they had no house anymore, or they had no job to come back to, or they just didn't want to risk another storm coming.
A lot of people received insurance money for their houses but the mortgage companies got it, so they just ended up with the deed of a wrecked, probably contaminated shell of a home. And the poorer the community, the lower the home values, and the lower the payout. So even though it should be proportional to the need, they say that's why there is more rebuilding in the richer communities that were flooded. Another thing that happened with the insurance is that if your house was flooded six inches above the floorboards, they gave you money to rebuild up to six inches above the floorboards. But that doesn't make sense since the flooding lasted three weeks and the rest of the homes were also contaminated and ruined by the standing water.
The houses that are still there, whatever the neighborhood as long as it was flooded, have big exes on them. A lot of people left them there on purpose, like a badge of honor. On the top is the date that the house was checked, on the left is the agency that checked it, on the right is the number of types of structural damages there were, like a gas leak, for example, and on the bottom is the number of dead people they found. I only saw zeros but obviously some were not zeros otherwise there would be no point to the numbers.
So it is all very sad. The week I went, McCain had just been there and was reported as saying the community should not rebuild. It's under sea level, after all. I feel the people's anger at his saying that, but I couldn't help getting the creeps when I looked up from where I was standing at the edge of the levee to see a giant ship practically floating over me. That levee was a big pile of dirt, as are most of them, but the ones that broke were just big concrete walls. When you see both you can see why you'd want a mound of dirt rather than a wall. I mean, that is a lot of water when it rises up.
People told me that the Ninth Ward of New Orleans was fine right after the storm. People were just picking up things that had blown over in the storm, cleaning up a bit. When the water started coming in, they realized that the levee had broken, but as it rose more and more they couldn't leave. A lot of them climbed up into their attics and had no way out. Now they are building attics with escape hatches. But who would have planned it like that in the first place?
The things is, New Orleans is on a delta of silt from the river, and it is supposed to be getting replenished by natural deposits as the downriver side flushes away, year after year. The early parts of the city, like the French Quarter, were built on higher land, but as the city grew they built in lower areas, and at the same time the levees prevented new sediment deposits. So they have to just keep getting higher and higher. It is kind of doomed place.
But then at the same time, all this crazy cultural stuff has originated there, as if in defiance of the forces of nature, blossoming up out of the swamps. Next time I'll write about the music...