December 14, 2005

I’m sitting in a suburban house in west New Orleans. It’s where we’re staying tonight, in the midst of a five-day drive through the Gulf Coast.

The rain is pouring down, waves of falling water hitting the windows, lights flickering from time to time, thunder rumbling.

We’re in Phyllis Bodin’s home because Holiday Inn, Best Western, and Comfort Inn operators say the closest vacant hotel room is 95 miles away. Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Every hostage room is occupied, most by the former residents of New Orleans. Every hotel room along I-55 between Baton Rouge to New Orleans is lit up. All the rooms are full . . . squatter settlements, here, not over there . . . buildings, floors, corridors, vending machines, rooms, bathrooms, beds meant to house different persons some nights now house the same families every night for months.

I wonder what it’s like in the Lower Ninth Ward. I wonder what that place is like in this rain.

I wonder what it’s like and I spent the afternoon there with traveling colleagues Olon, Nihal, and Gaurab. In this rain it must be returning to some sort of original state--a kind of marshland or swamp, muddy then and now, quiet again. Original state and Augustal state.

After two days of hard driving to get here, we lazed through the French Quarter this morning. Four visitors, a few others. Businesses are still closed. Even though there was no flooding in the Quarter, employees are gone, tourists are gone.

In nearby neighborhoods, ten or so FEMA trailers hooked up in driveways and front yards, connected to the host’s waste lines with odd wireframe configurations of white PVC pipe, with 4x4 posts driven into front yards for new electrical junction boxes.

But the Lower Ninth Ward is why we came to New Orleans and after some asking for directions, after a number of wrong turns on the Crazy 8 interstates and city streets, we were here.

We knew we were here when the water lines stained on the houses started to move up the walls – four feet, six feet, eight feet, above the roofs, even. Houses sitting in this toxic gumbo for weeks. Hot summer weeks in New Orleans. Stains, strained, betrayed.

We knew we were here when we saw piles and piles of rubble along the road. “Piles” is wrong. Block after block, mile after mile, large banks of summer snow, the streets cleaned and clear, but the stuff of lives set outside. “Rubble” is also wrong. These were the things of people’s houses and lives: tables, chairs, computer monitors, rugs, sofas, rocking chairs, baby cribs and carriages and playpens, framed pictures, TV sets. One oversized bank of TV’s under a blown down billboard (how much TV do we watch?). Done. Gone. Wrong.

We knew we were here when we saw houses shifted off their foundations. Houses crushing into the house next to them. Houses, we eventually figured out, that floated down the street and crashed into other houses or utility poles. We saw many backyard “barns,” the sort people buy pre-built from Sears and Lowe’s, we saw a number of these upside down like small arks, floated who knows how far, crashed into houses, denting roofs, up against utility poles, snared by swing sets.

We knew we were here when we saw cars in the air, setting atop chain link fences, suspended, weightless.

We knew we were here when we saw a squad of four Allstate claim agents messing with an extension ladder. This is not considered wind or rain damage, but flood or storm surge damage. This is a categorization that allows the insurance companies to dodge most if not all responsibility, as residents never anticipated levees breached, flood gates opened. Insurance companies don’t want any part of complete system breakdown.

We knew we were here when we turned down one street, only to be blocked by a house that had floated into the street, and as we edged around it, we saw five more houses that had floated behind it, also blocking the road, at angles to each other. At angles to everything.

We knew we were here when I cautioned Nihal not to step on any downed electrical wires and then remembered: there is no electricity in the Ninth Ward, not 100 days since Katrina, not now when huge sections of New Orleans are without electricity, police protection, citizens, and hope. In the worst slums of south Asia and Latin America, there is electricity.

We knew we were here when we found the houses that were no more, just platforms where homes had been, where families had lived. The City of New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers inspected more than 120,000 houses in New Orleans. The great majority of the 5,534 described as “house is unsafe to enter or in imminent danger of

collapse; occupancy is prohibited” are in the Ninth Ward. Everywhere it’s “unsafe” and “imminent danger” and “collapse.”

We knew we were here when we climbed a new levee, saw Pontchatrain in the distance, looked back, and realized we stumbled upon the place, the Industrial Canal breach, the moment where people’s lives changed, where the levee broke, the water crushed and the tables turned--water was free and people were trapped--where the Lower Ninth Ward was, and is. We came to the spot where the big white bags dropped from helicopters and barges (Olon stood atop one of the bags), of the scramble to plug the break. We stood there, where the effort was abandoned and the neighborhood was given back to the marshes and the swamps and the mud and the toxic sludge gumbo that the water soon became. We stood there. There. We were there. It was here.

We knew we were here because we saw just one electrical crew all afternoon. One.

We knew we were here because we saw just one front end loader dumping debris into one open-topped semi-trailer. One.

We knew we were here because we saw one crew “guttin’” a house of all its belongings and all its carpeting and wallboard and ceiling materials. Everything. One.

We knew we were here when we saw one animal all afternoon – a sad, beat dog that paid us no attention. Even the animals are dazed, doomed. One.

We knew we were here when we realized: no one is here.

No one.