New Orleans One Year Later

The following is a three-part story of a two-day road trip I took with my father last month to New Orleans, LA. We traveled together from Atlanta to pick up my stepsister's stuff that she had left after evacuating from Tulane University. Unlike 95 percent of her classmates, she transferred to another school and never looked back.

If you haven't already seen it, try to find Spike Lee's documentary When the Levys Broke.
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/?ntrack_para1=leftnav_category6_show0

Part 1

I have been up since 6:30. I am sitting in my hotel room - it's more of a guest house room, actually. Sitting on my twin bed, listening to my father snore, thinking about everything we saw yesterday.

The hotel is in the Quarter - an old rooming house-type arrangement. You go in the front door into a narrow entryway with un-refinished antique chairs and a chest with fake flowers in a vase. Up a twisty, uneven staircase to a landing, and there you realize that the entryway and the landing used to be outside. You pass huge doors to other rooms that are numbered in no particular order. 3, 17, 12. Then out a door onto a balcony overlooking a cluttered courtyard. It was dark when we arrived, and there were no lights on the balcony. No doors either, only shutters. I examined the shutters and determined that one set covered the door to the room. Inside the room are two lumpy, old twin beds. No chairs. But it is quiet and dark, as the shutters are still closed. Really perfect.

The drive was easy. Down 85 to Montgomery. 65 to Mobile and 10 the rest of the way. I've made the drive a million times on the way to Houston. We stopped at rest stops and picked up maps of each state. Crossed the Louisiana state line at 4:30. Pop perused the New Orleans inset in the atlas and decided we needed a map. I thought about stopping in Slidel, but the exits seemed a little crowded, and I thought we'd have better luck finding an easy-in gas station on the outskirts of NO.

On the I-10 drive, the only sign of storm damage was downed trees and the occasional blown-over billboard. Nothing significant. There are still bridges out on the Coastal Highway, but we figured we'd go that way home to see the damage in the rest of the Gulf. As soon as we crossed the big bridge, New Orleans suburbs started appearing. The first houses, just to the right of the highway, were a maze of blue tarps surrounded by toppled-over brick walls. We came to the first exit and saw signs for gas and fast food, as well as what looked like two large strip malls on either side of the road.

I pulled off the road and gasped. The gas stations were boarded up, the signs still hollow with no glass. There were no working stoplights - only stopsigns at the intersections. A group of Mexicans were standing around a make-shift taco stand set up in the parking lot of an old McDonalds. I'm not sure who they were serving, since the place was deserted. We u-turned and cut through one of the strip mall parking lots. All the businesses were closed. There was still big x's of tape over the windows that were still there. Coastal birds played in the pond-sized puddles that covered the otherwise empty parking lot.

We got back on the expressway, but my father had his head in his hands and wasn't looking up. The sky had taken on that uniquely late-summer blackness. After driving the whole day in relentless sunshine, it looked like we were driving past a line into a darker place. It started to rain. That's where the devastation started. Driving through the eastern suburbs we passed mile after mile after mile of empty homes. Apartment highrises with windows blown out. Empty strip malls. Piles of debris. And this was the view from the expressway. At 5:00 p.m. local time there was no rush hour traffic. With no map, we figured we'd just head to the Garden District and see if we could find the cross streets we needed. We exited St. Bernard.

Again, blocks of shuttered businesses. A Church's Chicken with only the outline of the sign. A church with the roof collapsed and a blue tarp hanging uselessly. More piles of debris. A lone trailer hooked up in front of a beautiful Victorian home. The city looks like it's been bombed. You cannot imagine the extent of the damage. A lump rose in my throat and didn't go away. We passed many, many gas stations, all shuttered. But, as we headed downtown, the damage seemed less and less. There were more cars in front of houses. More people in the street.

As we got paralell to the French Quarter, we saw the first open gas station. It was packed with people. Mostly black folks, but one white guy in a suit. He went in ahead of me and went straight for the cooler and a Budweiser tall boy. The shelves were mostly bare, but they did have maps. And Zapps Crawdadliscious potato chips. I stood in line behind a man who had a $10 and had pulled three Colts out of the cooler. He told the woman at the cash register, "Whatever's leftover, put that on pump 2."

Ah, this is the New Orleans I remember.

As we headed through downtown toward the Distict and the colleges - Tulane and Loyola - my spirits lifted. The damage didn't seem too bad. There were still many shuttered businesses and debris by the road, but many people, and many of the beautiful houses unscathed. The giant oaks that lined Loyola were mostly still there. We stopped at a Walgreens to buy umbrellas. I went inside and Pop got out and joined the group of homeless folks who had taken shelter from the rain under the Walgreens canopy. When I got out, he was talking to a young, good looking but fat black man, who was dressed in a shirt and tie. Presumably the store manager. We chatted for a while about local politics, the rebuilding process and the mood. He was very optimistic. He said his family took the insurance money and paid off their house. The only thing they've done is replace the roof, but no one is going to take their house. As we got in the car, he hollered at us, "It's all good!"

I was starting to feel better myself.

Part II

After cramming the car full of Grace's crap, I tried not to resent the fact that we can no longer see out the back owing to a large pile of papers, too-small clothes and a set of butterfly wings.

I was hungry. Hungry enough that I had eaten a small bag of potato chips. I have never in my life bought a bag of potato chips.

Our hotel required some weaving around the French Quarter, giving us a chance to survey the area. The Quarter got mostly wind damage – no flooding. There were many new roofs and paint jobs, but it looked the same. The only signs of destruction were the trees – some of the oaks in the parks looked like a bad trimming job by the power company. But they were still there.

Getting ready for going out consisted of Pop brushing his hair and me changing from jean shorts into regular jeans. Pop lamented the fact that you could go to a new city now and all you need to pack for an overnight trip is a clean t-shirt. Au contraire, Pop, I brought a pair of clean blue jeans.

We wandered through the Quarter, and though there were plenty of tourists, there were not as many as I remembered. As we passed Bourbon St., though, it was teeming tourists of all ages, carrying silly looking frou-frou drinks in plastic cups shaped like bongs.

Pop gave me several choices for dinner, but when he told me Tujague's was his favorite restaurant in the whole world, how could I choose anything else? It is at the corner of St. Ann's and Decatur, right across from Café Du Monde, with a small neon sign. Peering through the window into the main dining room, you can't tell if that's the actual entrance. There is no hostess stand, and the room is cramped, poorly lit and old. The floor is subway tile, and the walls are covered with badly-executed black and white pictures of celebrities visiting the restaurant.

After we were seated I scanned the place, and there was one other set of tourists in the almost-full dining room. The menu is fixed price, with four choices of entrée. The choice was quite easy – it's not everywhere you can get a good crawfish etoufee. It was five courses, plus coffee. A shrimp remoulade, gumbo that you could smell the sassafras, beef brisket with tomato horseradish that they've been serving for 150 years, and bread pudding for dessert. Before the brisket came, I was already stuffed. We split a bottle of wine, and since my father doesn't drink, that meant I drank a bottle of wine minus one glass.

From there, it seemed appropriate to find a local's dive bar to have a nightcap. I've never been a fan of Bourbon St., or indeed, the "touristy" part of anyplace. We saw an uninviting looking corner bar and went in. Sure enough, it was smoky, quiet and filled with old men slouched over glasses. I ordered a Tanqueray martini, up, with a twist, stirred not shaken. He got it precisely. Everyone, even my favorite bartender, makes martinis with those ice crystals floating on the top. The last thing you want is to dilute good gin with ice.

On the way to the bathroom, there were pictures on the wall of many of the patrons who were in the bar with us. We were the only tourists. We were completely ignored. It was wonderful.

We wandered back toward our hotel, turning for a detour down Bourbon St. It really hasn't changed – it looks like Tijuana, or any foreign place that caters to touristas. Drunk people wandering the streets, club music blasting out of dark basements with people outside offering two-for-one drinks, or pretty girls, or whatever.

Friday morning I got up early and worked for a while, trying to decide whether to go for a run. After most of a bottle of wine and a martini, I wasn't quite feeling myself. At about 8:30 I decided, what the heck, I'd go for a run and just take it slow.

It was probably 90 degrees and 1,000,000-percent humidity when I started. First I headed down St. Ann to Decatur, then on Chartres across Esplanade, then Frenchmen St. I stayed on the side streets to get shade from the buildings. Business owners and workmen were hosing off sidewalks, and I had to dodge pungent garbage from last night's dinner that sat on the sidewalk in hot black bags. Mostly I ran on the street, asking everyone with a hose to spray me. Life looked normal, except for the large number of contractors filling up dumpsters with construction debris. Most of the folks I saw were Hispanic and black. I got a few appreciative smiles and had gestures from the mostly-Mexican work crews, and one Central American young man gave me a "You-go-girl," to the delight of his companions, who were all carrying six-inch copper pipes across a cobbled street.

As I turned up an unknown residential street, I dodged an older white man with a long beard, a top hat, a sleeveless t-shirt, and a conservative brief case coming out of his townhouse.

When I finally roused my father, we strolled to Café Du Monde for beignets and chicory coffee (decaf in my case), and listened to a street musician play and sing old protestant hymns – the good ones, and the old ones. The musician was someone my father had met several years ago when he brought Meg down to look at University of New Orleans. He made probably $200 while we were having our coffee.

Pop asked where he lived and how his house fared. "In the Garden District, with all the white folks." Which, of course, didn't get much damage. We wandered around for a couple of hours, stopping in shops and speaking to the locals. The story, of course, was nothing like what we've heard. Everyone is angry. People have lost everything and are fighting with FEMA and insurance companies for help. There were many uncreative anti-FEMA t-shirts, saying things like, "FEMA Sucks," and "Fuck FEMA." My favorite t-shirt read, "I stayed for Katrina, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a flat-screen TV."

We drove out of town on Esplanade, surveying all the old houses. Almost all had fared well.

We made our way to I-10 and Mississippi.

Part III
We left the way we had driven in, but this time I was the passenger. Some of the houses we could see from I-10 were vacant, but still had tape on what windows were still there. That sight, the emptiness, was even more sad to me than the destruction. So many people who left and haven’t looked back.

The damage to the trees on I-10 was more extensive than I thought on the drive in. There were miles upon miles of dead trees and twisted vegetation on either side of the expressway.

Since the Hwy 90 bridge over Bay St. Louis was still out, we headed into Mississippi for a few miles before exiting and heading to the coast on a small road that put us exactly perpendicular to the Gulf. About four miles from the coast road, we started seeing evidence of the damage. There were few houses left standing, but many empty pads and foundations. FEMA trailers set up on slabs. People living in tents surrounded by pilings that once belonged to their homes.

I had expected devastation when we reached the coast, but instead what greeted us was strangely serene. Unlike New Orleans, all the debris is gone. The emptiness that remains is more disturbing than destruction, because it is at once tragic and beautiful. The road was deserted, save for construction vehicles. We would pass miles and miles of nothing, then there would be five old houses facing the beach with varying degrees of damage and repair. That many of the old homes survived was both miraculous and encouraging. The beach was deserted – most of the beaches have been closed for the year, due to post-Katrina debris. The dunes were completely flattened, and there was little evidence of manmade structures in the water. A few broken posts sticking up where a pier or a boardwalk may have been.

Closer to Gulfport, there were miles of signs for gas stations and fast food joints, but no buildings left standing. It made me wonder why it seemed like a good idea to build a Waffle House right across from the beach, or a gas station between the coastal highway and the beach. I thought, “This is what it looked like 50 years ago.” While I was sad for those who lost their homes and businesses and livelihoods, I hoped that the region would use this as an opportunity to return at least some of the land to its natural state.

In Gulfport, all the casinos were closed. Some were gone. One eight- or 10-story high-rise towered over us at a slight angle. There were pilings where condos – probably rentals – used to be. There were some condos where half was gone, and half looked almost undamaged, except the break was right in the middle of a living room. We turned inland to look for some food, and surprisingly, just blocks off the ocean, the damage was much less. Unlike what we had seen on the trek from I-10, there were some shuttered businesses, and still many signs of damage, but most buildings were still there.

We saw a place called “Cajun Buffet,” which was in an old KFC. The restaurant was strangely set up, but when I saw the food (not Cajun at all, but rather plain old Southern - turnip greens, yams, cornbread, fried chicken livers), I knew it would be good. And it was packed. We piled our plates high (I got a plate of nothing but greens and cornbread) and found the an empty booth. The proprietor, a good-looking middle-aged Greek woman, was interviewing potential employees at the table next to us. It seemed that she was struggling to get enough staff.

As I was finishing my second plate of greens, an older man in a Habitat for Humanity polo shirt sat at a nearby table with a plate that had nothing but fried chicken. As he was bringing a chicken thigh to his mouth, my father asked him how the rebuilding is going. He was actually the one in charge of all Habitat houses in the region, and their goal is to build 1,000 within 18 months. They have 400 in process now.

He described the scene in the weeks and months after the storm. He said the piles of debris for some reason reminded him of huge brown snow drifts.

We got back on the coastal highway and took it through Biloxi. One large casino looks almost rebuilt, and has a sign on it proclaiming an 8/29/2006 Grand Opening – exactly one year after the hurricane.

The strange emptiness continued for miles after Biloxi.

Satisfied that we had seen enough, we cut back to I-10 East. And home.