Dear friends and family,
After an exceedingly long flight, I’m finally home in New Orleans. Instead of my original Sydney to LA to New Orleans flight, I had to go the long way round as United no longer flies into New Orleans. So it was a trek via LA, Chicago, Houston and finally into New Orleans on Sunday. I had an overnight with Marcia and Kirk in Houston, which helped sustain me. I also had perhaps the best pair of flight attendants I’ve ever had on the LA to Chicago leg of the flight. The flight left an hour late because of snow developing in Chicago, and that meant I was almost certain to miss my Chicago-Houston connection. Luckily, we made up some time in the air and when I told the attendants I had a very tight connection, they put me in a seat beside the door to ensure I was first off the plane. As we were chatting, they discovered I was a Katrina victim and I’d lost my home, and they were instantly full of compassion and offers of assistance. One of them even gave me her card and said “If you need to get out of there for any reason, come and stay with me and my husband in Wisconsin.” And I could tell she meant it. It’s amazing how generous people can be. Anyway, not only did they see to me getting off the plane first, one of them accompanied me (running) through the airport to make sure I made the connection. There’s no doubt I would have missed it had they not done so.
After the night at Marcia and Kirk’s, I arrived in New Orleans around 6pm on Sunday, after dark. I couldn’t see much of the city from the air and driving in from the airport, Kenner and Metairie looked moderately intact. As soon as we crossed the parish line at the 17th Street Canal, the picture changed dramatically.
I’d thought I’d notice some improvement after all the work that’s been done in the past few months, and there definitely is improvement. But all that effort has accomplished has been to take the city from “almost completely devastated” to “not quite almost completely devastated”. Driving around is deeply shocking. Even in the less affected areas, there’s destruction wherever you turn. And many areas are simply wrecked. In the daylight, it looks as if Martha Stewart has come up with a new shade of paint called “Drab” and, slaves to fashion, New Orleanians have daubed it over everything. At night, driving down formerly bustling restaurant and shopping streets such as Carrollton, it’s bizarrely dark, with the supermarkets boarded up and water lines evident on many buildings. “War-torn” is the phrase that comes to mind.
Heading up to Jane’s place where we’re staying until the gas is turned on at our Mid-City apartment, there are street lights along Wisner Boulevard until the bridge over the Interstate. Once you hit the top of that bridge, there’s nothing but darkness ahead. Driving up into Lakeview is like being on a remote country road. At least some of the ducks and geese have survived, looking remarkably plump as they wander about the banks of Bayou St John, beside Wisner.
Jane’s house is in a tiny intact area within the general destruction of Lakeview. Its almost pristine state is, in some ways, harder to accept than the ruined city. In fact, anything that works or is undamaged or looks beautiful instead of ugly is unnerving. For instance, driving Lillie in to work in the CBD on Monday morning, we had to negotiate miles and miles of roads with no traffic lights. All major intersections have 4-way stop signs, and it’s important to approach with caution as people are still sussing out the appropriate behaviour at some of the larger intersections. Every now and then, there are traffic lights flashing red in all directions. Then, as we came down Canal Street across Claiborne into the heart of Downtown, a long line of functioning traffic lights stretched all the way to the river. But even here, I hesitated each time I approached an intersection, not quite trusting that the lights would work properly or that the traffic would respect them.
Even where things function, they’re not quite right. That string of 10 or so traffic signals in a line through the CBD, for example, turns green simultaneously and red simultaneously. Niceties such as synchronisation of the lights to help traffic flow are way beyond the city’s capacity or priorities. You want lights? You get lights.
Our apartment is half a double shotgun. Shotguns are a traditional form of New Orleans architecture. A single shotgun consists of a long narrow house, one room wide, with the doorways lined up so if you open them all from the front door to the back, you can shoot a gun through the openings. I haven’t tried it, mind you, but no doubt someone in this gun-toting city has. A double shotgun glues two of these houses side by side. Ours is beautiful. It has gingerbread moulding on the front porch, dark wood floors and high ceilings. The back rooms flooded during Katrina (the house being on a slant – par for the course for New Orleans), but only minimally. Our friends and landlords, Katy and Kerry, have done a huge amount of work to get the place ready for us, and Lillie did a whole lot more moving stuff in while I was in Australia.
We now have electricity, phone, Internet, cable TV and running water. We still don’t have gas, so no hot showers, cooking or heating, nor are there mail deliveries or garbage pickup. It is very cold here already, around 5 degrees Celsius as I write this, so the lack of heating is a problem. I’m working here during the days but we return to Jane’s at night for hot meals, showers and a warm bed. We’re lucky to have such pleasures, but I am really looking forward to being in our own space and finally settling down. The Entergy guys in the streets say “Gas this week”, but such promises and deadlines have already marched by consistently for several weeks at least.
Tonight, while I write this, there are four other houses showing lights on our block. With around 40 houses/apartments on the block, that 10 percent occupancy rate overnight is right on the button for the city average: 50,000 residents stay overnight, the other 50,000 who are here in the day depart to the West Bank (south of the city) or Metairie and Kenner (west of the city) at nightfall. There’s still a curfew in the city, 2am-6am in Mid-City, Downtown and several other areas, 8pm-6am in Lakeview and the other badly affected areas. Driving at night is intimidating due to the lack of lights, debris scattered all along – and sometimes across – the streets, gaping potholes, and the absence of other traffic and people. Lillie’s already succumbed to the flat-tyre epidemic that affects most drivers here, with nails and screws and other sharp debris almost impossible to avoid.
The best thing about being back is seeing friends after such a long time apart. We had dinner with our friend Andrew in a Metairie restaurant the first night I was home, and it wasn’t until I saw him coming across the carpark that I realised just how much I’d missed him. I feel the same about all the other people I’m catching up with. Reconnecting is definitely the upside.
More soon.
Love,
Rose
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