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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Here and there, weird little traffic jams for no reason. Then 30 blocks in a row without another car.
The flooded neighborhoods look bad, but not as bad as they'll look in a couple of months, when all the condemned houses start coming down. Right now they seem to be frozen in place by their waterlines. Many of the houses look OK, but the waterline is high on the wall and they have pink stickers that mean they've been declared uninhabitable. A strange whitish dust coats everything, like a stage set in an apocalypse movie. The cars appear to have been bathed in a caustic solution that has sandblasted their glass. They sit at odd angles here and there on the ground and in the streets, where they came to rest when the floodwaters receded. The poor blown-open houses with their guts spewed out onto the sidewalk! Creole cottages, shotguns, camelbacks, doubles -- block after block, on and on for miles. Some houses are missing their fronts or their sides, some are completely caved in. There's one that looks fine, but then I see the number 5 five spray-painted in the lower-left-hand quadrant, meaning five dead people got pulled out of there.
There's a new New Orleans smell: vomity and moldy and dead, a reek of rotting garbage, occasional notes of putrefying flesh.
The smell makes me feel guilty. I am nothing but a Disaster Tourist with my oldest running shoes on and my camera ready, eagerly searching out the most impressive damage for my snapshots. A fire truck roars by, and another. I pull over to let them pass, and here comes another, and another, on and on until 18 fire trucks have roared past me. And now I can't help myself, now the Disaster Tourist also becomes an Ambulance Chaser, a Fire Gawker, roaring after the firemen in my rented Taurus.
The burning house is in the Gentilly district. It was already ruined before it caught fire, but still it's sad the way the firemen don't even try to put it out. They just play their streams of water on the broken houses on either side, to keep the fire from spreading.
Some folks have been sneaking back into New Orleans to set fire to the remains of their homes because the insurance won't pay for flood damage but will pay for fire. The radio has been warning people not to try it, because the insurance investigators are good and will find you.
On United Radio the talk is about what to do if you have to use unrefrigerated insulin, how to safely enter a demolished house, how to get children to talk about their hurricane dreams, how you have to get in line at 2 o'clock in the morning if you want to get through the Red Cross application line by the end of the next afternoon. A caller asks if it's true that some preachers are claiming God brought the hurricane down upon New Orleans because of its sinful ways, the gays and the Mardi Gras and the drunks and Bourbon Street and all that. If that was actually God's intention, the man says, then God's aim was pretty bad, because Bourbon Street is one of the only places in town that stayed high and dry.
I drive out to City Park, to the lakefront where I used to ride my bike, down Carrollton where many of the old homes were undergoing restoration before the disaster, then up onto the interstate and out for the suburbia of New Orleans East.
Everything is devastation, mile after mile of Wal-Marts and McDonald's and churches, new-car dealer lots, thousands of brand-new ruined cars awaiting the people who will buy them for pennies on the dollar, clean them up and try to pass them off as unflooded cars -- coming soon to a used-car lot near you!
I never thought I would see a wild boar in an advanced state of rot in the active right lane of an interstate highway. Within the space of a mile I see four of them. This strikes me as surreal, and vaguely ironic, because everything in the hurricane zone is so surreal that it seems ironic, and none of it is. What it is is so tragic that you just can't stand to think about it anymore.
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When I get back to the hotel, the lot is full, and I ask the attendant if I can park on the street. He smiles. "You can park anywhere you damn well please."
"I guess nobody's writing tickets, huh?"
He points to the middle of the street, formerly one of New Orleans' busiest thoroughfares. "You can park in the left-turn lane in the middle of Poydras," he says. "It's a new day."
There is something kind of fun about anarchy, if it's the kind of anarchy that includes lots of National Guardsmen riding around in Humvees, turning a blind eye to everything but looting. There's nothing fun about anarchy if there are no National Guardsmen in sight and you're one of the frightened people stranded at the Superdome or the Convention Center or on the I-10 bridges day after day with no food, water or medical attention. Nothing fun about being told that buses are waiting for you on the other side of the Mississippi, walking all the way across that long, high bridge, down the other side, only to discover that the bridge you have crossed has become the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the town on the other side has turned into Selma circa 1965, complete with gun-toting sheriffs shooting into the air and screaming people running for their lives.
But if it's just a matter of parking in the middle of Poydras -- if it's a matter of running every red light in town, even in the neighborhoods where the juice is back on and the red lights are working again -- anarchy can be vaguely exhilarating. The city feels depopulated, except for the Guardsmen and the dump truck drivers and the workers and debris-removal specialists driving around in their huge pickup trucks. All day these men repair infrastructure. At night they head down to Bourbon Street to get drunk and hoot at the strippers at Big Daddy's.
Late that night, sitting at a stoplight beside a Humvee with four Guardsmen from Kentucky, I rev the engine of my Taurus. The driver of the Humvee revs his.
"Don't you know there's a curfew?" the driver says pleasantly.
"Can I run the red light?" is my answer. "That way I'll get home faster."
He grins. "Go ahead. I'm not allowed to shoot you for that." We both put the pedal to the metal and screech through the light. The Humvee easily wins.
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The last angry black man was seen on national television on or about Sept. 5, when the National Guard finally arrived, along with food and water, and buses to evacuate the people trapped at the Superdome and the Convention Center. After that, the only African-Americans allowed on television were cute little homeless kids, sweet little old grandmothers, and Oprah.
