Dear friends and family,
We’ve made it to the A list: we’re now getting mail deliveries at our house. That puts us among the privileged few and frees up a considerable amount of time.
Until now, we’ve been doing what most people in New Orleans have been doing, heading down to the post office to pick up mail. It sounds simple enough, but it’s not. The trouble is, we need to get mail addressed to our old house in Lakeview as well as our rental place here in Mid-City. We also have not one but three mail forwarding orders in effect: Lakeview to Baton Rouge; Baton Rouge to Houston; and Houston to New Orleans. Trying to cancel or change those is its own adventure.
The first time I went to pick up the mail post-Katrina, in mid-December, I headed off to the main New Orleans post office on Loyola Avenue, near the Superdome, directed there for our mid-City mail by the Post Office’s Web site. I first tried to enter the main building, but found it surrounded by ‘Postal Police’. The building, which is the largest mail sorting facility in the region and which used to serve Mississippi and Alabama as well as Louisiana, was flooded in Katrina. All the sorting machines in the basement were destroyed and there was water in the first floor. Who knows how much mail died a soggy death at that time.
The Postal Police directed me to the back of the Superdome, where they’ve set up a massive temporary post office. I waited in a long line to be directed to a parking place and then walked up to the entrance only to find a sign saying that mail for zip code 70119 was now being held at the post office on Jeff Davis, over near our place in Mid-City.
So I headed uptown to Louisiana Avenue to get the mail for our Lakeview home. The post office was jam packed, but they’d clearly been working on this routine for some time and it had its own ragged efficiency. I had to fill out a form stating my name and address and get in a long line to give this form to a clerk. As I made it to the head of the line, before I handed over my slip of paper I heard a voice wafting over the general hubbub calling out our address. It was our old postie, Jim, standing behind the counter together with a bunch of other posties. Jim’s been on our route for 28 years. It was such a delight to see him. He took my slip and went to check for mail in the bowels of the post office, while I waited out in the foyer, where they come and call your name and hand over your mail or tell you there’s none. When Jim emerged he had two items of mail for us; the rest must have been forwarded to Baton Rouge or lost. We hugged and exchanged flood tales (he lost his place), and then I headed off to the Jeff Davis post office.
Things there were less organised than at the Louisiana Avenue office, as they’d just newly started handling the mail. At that time, in mid-December, Mid-City was still very sparsely populated (it still is, but the population’s certainly on the rise). I got on another queue, handed over my ID and told them my new address, and was eventually handed a pile of mail, all of which proved to be for former tenants. The woman behind the counter asked if I’d like to be put on a list to have mail delivered, an offer I accepted although I’d heard that being on the list is no guarantee of delivery.
So, after about three and a half hours, I returned home with two letters, both offers from credit card companies mailed in September.
Since then I’ve gone through this rigmarole a couple of times and managed to cancel all but the Houston forwarding order, a process which required an hour-long wait in a separate queue. Unfortunately, as more people have returned to the city the wait at the post offices has become almost unbearable. Twice I went to pick up mail from Jeff Davis and gave up, facing a queue that snaked all the way through the building and out into the street. The thought of waiting in line two hours for a couple of pieces of two-month-old mail was too much.
But the last time I retreated from the post office, I returned home to find mail popping out of our mail box. Some of it was postmarked September, most of it October and November, but there was even a letter sent within the past three weeks.
Despite the welcome appearance of home deliveries, it’s still not a good idea to send mail to us in Mid-City. The system is so clogged and inefficient most local mail takes several weeks to deliver, if it gets through at all. If we send a letter to someone else in New Orleans, it gets sent first to Baton Rouge for a postmark, then to Houston to check for forwarding addresses, then back to Baton Rouge, then to the St. Rose sorting centre on Airline Drive in New Orleans, and finally to the local post office – if one is still functioning in the neighbourhood – a trip of about 720 miles. The system can only handle what’s called “first-class mail”, so things such as magazine subscriptions don’t even make it through the system. The upside to that is that junk mail is filtered out automatically.
I know this is a long tale about mail, but it’s what life is like here. We still spend a lot of time trying to accomplish everyday tasks, and in the end all we achieve is an approximation. Life certainly continues to revolve almost entirely around post-Katrina survival. About 80 percent of the articles in the newspaper are about Katrina issues, with a little bit of world news, sport, classifieds and death notices filling the rest of the pages. Even the latter two tend to have a Katrina spin, with many businesses announcing their reopening while the death notices still reflect the ripple effects of the hurricane, particularly on old people. The Times Picayune has been running a very touching series of profiles for several months on those who died in Katrina.
We’ve just had another blow. Our dear friend Denny’s sister, Marie, has terminal cancer. During Katrina, Denny and Marie’s partner Bill had to get her out of the city and then find care for her in Georgia where they ended up (I managed to track Denny down via text messages when we were still in Baton Rouge). We found it hard enough dealing with Katrina ourselves; it’s hard to imagine how difficult it was for Denny and Marie and Bill, trying to ensure Marie’s well-being.
In December, they returned to New Orleans and Marie recommenced chemo at a hospital in Baton Rouge. On Monday, Bill, who was driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, lost control of his car, crashed and was killed. The word “unfair” keeps springing to my mind, although I know fairness has nothing to do with it. But it seems like a particularly onerous burden for Denny and Marie.
Driving is still something which feels perilous. So many of us still have “Katrina brain”, a condition in which once perfectly adequate brain matter turns to mush. It makes driving pretty dodgy. Add to that roads full of potholes and gutted housing materials, traffic lights out of operation, heavy construction vehicles dominating the roadways, utility crews blocking the streets, and tens of thousands of tired, stressed people journeying back and forth from Orleans Parish to the surrounding areas each day, and it’s no wonder traffic accidents have quadrupled in some parishes here since Katrina.
We’re still waiting for word from our insurance company on the inadequate settlement they made us. We’re having an independent adjustor look at our claim and, if that doesn’t help. we’ll be calling in the law dogs. Clearly, we can’t make any rebuilding decisions until we have a final decision from the insurance company (what they’ve offered isn’t enough for us to pay off the mortgage let alone fix up the place), but that all may be moot given the latest urban redevelopment proposal. That plan divides New Orleans into areas where rebuilding is allowed, areas where there is a moratorium on building, former housing areas which will become parks, and areas marked for redevelopment, probably with tract housing of some sort. Our house is in one of the yellow moratorium areas, as is about 80 percent of the city. Having just driven one of my visiting Australian editors around a portion of this yellow zone, I’m staggered at how much of the city is completely uninhabited/uninhabitable. The redevelopment map makes that clear.
On a more upbeat front, I spent time last night working on a Web site for a friend, Monique, who’s trying to raise money for replanting trees in New Orleans by walking the Appalachian Trail. She’s going to get sponsorship for each mile walked (the trail stretches around 2100 miles from Georgia to Maine), and I’m designing a Web site to help her raise money and publicise the “Hike for KaTREEna”, as it’s called. The Web site isn’t finished yet, but you can check it out.
I also came up with a slogan the other night – Dikes for New Orleans – and designed a badge, fridge magnet and t-shirt and had them made up online. I wore my badge to a demonstration today in Jackson Square, in honour (ahem) of George Bush’s latest visit to the city he’s screwing. The demonstration was dominated by a very large and very vocal contingent of Catholic school girls. I’m so glad to see they’re getting a decent education.
Lots of love,
Rose
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