a trip through what's been forgotten
Jan. 6th, 2006 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashToday my mother took me for a drive through New Orleans.
Oh, I'd seen photos here and there of how high the water had gotten, and shots of ruins, but I didn't really have a geographic sense. I didn't know how my New Orleans had fared, how much the places I'd known had been smashed.
Not very well. Not very well at all.
Out here in Metairie where she's living right now, there are piles of house insides here and there. Blown-down trees collected in parks. But there are still people living and working. The first parts of the city we went to - Uptown and around the CBD - were also fine. Sure, there were blown-out windows, but there were also tons of little businesses with signs proclaiming they were open, there were people. There were occasional bits of debris, buildings fucked up by the storm, and blue tarps scattered on roofs everywhere - but the city was basically functional. We had some lunch and picked up a book that'd come in for my mother at the local bookstore.
Then we started to visit places I knew. And it got worse and worse.
We drove past my old high school and elementary school. The buildings looked okay. Lower-lying parts of the same area didn't do so well. You could see how high the water had been not just in the lines of filth left by the water on the sides of houses, but by the sharp demarcation between dead foliage and live foliage on bushes. The water just stayed there for a damn long time. The pretty blocks I'd walk along on my way from the high school to the bus stop were not so pretty any more.
We passed by Delgado, where I went to college for a while. It's right next to City Park. Some of the oak trees in the Park pre-date the city. I didn't see the truly ancient ones, just the ones on the edge, looking horrible with all their leaves blown off and half their branches gone. Delgado's mixed - some buildings are standing, some are collapsed, there's some of the ubiquitous piles of building-guts here and there. Supposedly they're starting classes in a week or so.
Nearby was the apartment my mother lived in after I left home.
The lawn in front of it was a ruin of dirt and tread-tracks. There were crews working their way through the homes in the area, ripping out the ruined lower stories. They'd already been to that building. The front door was open; I went in. The bottom story was gutted in preparation for, I suppose, rebuilding. The upper story was intact - my mother had left her door locked after moving her stuff out, but her neighbor's door was unlocked (She never locked it anyway). I went through. She'd had some roof damage. It was a mess. Insulation and half-ruined tchotchkes all over. I went down the back stairs and drifted out the front door again.
We went past the snow-ball stand I visited on my last day. An empty shell. The sign listing the flavors was washed-out blue and red, but still legible. It was all bright colors when I was there. Weeks under flood water must have stolen all the rest of the color. The art store nearby was empty, its glass front broken, everything in it gone. There was a huge pile of detritus in front. I wonder if they'll rebuild? I wonder how many local businesses like this will come back?
We visited the area my old friend Nick Lauland lived in when I was growing up. This was near one of the levee breaks. It had been a nice neighborhood, a quiet pretty residential one. Near by, we passed some people in hazmat suits with fluorescent vests. The only thing I recognized about it was the shitty condition of the streets. The high-water marks were typically somewhere in the middle of first floor windows. Every house had the cryptic markings spray-painted by the rescue crews, saying when it'd been checked, and how many survivors, corpses, and/or pets they'd found. I don't know how to decipher them, and I really didn't feel like trying to. My mother said there had probably been a lot of corpses: the area was full of old people, who pulled the same act my grandmother did, of refusing to leave. She got lucky; they didn't.
I barely recognized his old house, though I was there a lot. The park it was across from was a shambles. There was a house near the levee break that looked to have been lifted off its slab foundations and turned around by the rush of water.
We drove through another area I was familiar with. Not a high-income area, but a nice, comfortable, cozy residential one. One of my acquaintances had lived there; I'd visited once or twice. Everything in the area was trashed. Mounds of the insides of houses, the occasional crew of people working on one.
Lots of signs for demolition services.
And then we visited the house my friends Jason and Jennie owned. This was near UNO, near the lake. I went up the steps to the back porch and peered in. Locked, gutted. A sign on the front door saying it was going to have that done for safety; Jason's signature on it. Standing on the back porch, I looked at the water-marks: if I'd been standing there during the flood, I would have drowned. The water would have been five feet over my head, if I was standing on the ground.
And then we went past UNO and were going to turn up the street I grew up in, but the train underpass was full of standing water. Only a couple inches or two, I though, but we didn't want to dare it. We took the long way around, coming to the other end of Press, where it crosses Chef Menteur Highway. The drive up that way was past increasingly familiar sights. This place gone, that place gone. Houses with high-water marks somewhere in their first stories, even the ritzyish ones high up on terraced ground.
Press Drive was so devastated-looking I couldn't tell when we were about to come up to where my house was, on the left. We went past it because my mother wanted to look at some stuff near the underpass we'd turned around at. And then we went back up Press.
There it was, the little single-story yellowish house on the corner I grew up in. With the inevitable drift of leaves from the sycamore tree in the back yard in the corner of the fence.
And all the grass was dead, flat, dead white.
And it smelled like rotting.
And the waterline was halfway up the windows.
"That's my bedroom window," I thought, looking at it. Really just kind of blankly. "The water would've cascaded in over there, if it didn't already get in some other way."
The shed in the back yard was just a concrete slab and two sides of it, open. I'd climbed up there using the fence now and then, to read on its tin roof on a quiet summer evening. It didn't exist any more. The sycamore tree in the back yard I spent my whole youth in the shadow of looked like shit - all its leaves were gone, for the first time ever (it never got cold enough for it to shed them all; there would still be green leaves here and there by the end of winter, and a slow drift-off of dead ones), and it had a hell of a lot less branches than I remember.
One of the neighboring yards was just full of branches. Maybe from it, probably from the several trees I remember being there a decade ago.
Our neighbor had done some building around his carport, turning it into an extended garage.
The whole place stank of mold. There were bars on the back doors and back windows, but it looked otherwise unchanged from when I lived there. The 'Sears' logo on the fence gate between the carport and yard was still all red on the back because of me fooling around with spray-paint. The exterior faucets had the same kind of insulating tape I remember having to go out in the cold and wrap around them. The support beam on the carport that was knocked out of line when my mother thought I'd closed a car door that I hadn't yet was still unrepaired.
All the grass was dead. The wire fences were surfaced entirely in rust. Every flap of screening on the back porch was hanging loose.
Somehow, the worst was the tree. I'd figured it was so big, so strong, so old, surely it'd have survived the flood, surely its wide branches would still be there, hanging low, even if it lost most of its leaves. But it looks like a horrible stub of itself, just a scraggly naked thing rising up behind the house.
I would have taken a loose brick from the little lining in the patio in the front - they were loose all the time I lived there - but either the current owner threw them away, or the flood took them. We wonder if the current owner of the place has even been back. All the windows were closed, so I couldn't see in.
My whole past in New Orleans is gone. Everywhere I knew, everywhere I spent time, is ruined. The first twenty-five years of my life only exist in my memories, now. I'm really glad I feel like I have something solid right now, because I don't have anything else behind me.
I didn't enjoy any of this, but I needed to see it. I'd been aching to see it when we were fleeing the hurricane. i kind of put that need away when I was in Boston, but I knew that this was something I'd have to do when I came down here.
I cried a lot today. I'll probably cry some more tonight.
Oh, I'd seen photos here and there of how high the water had gotten, and shots of ruins, but I didn't really have a geographic sense. I didn't know how my New Orleans had fared, how much the places I'd known had been smashed.
Not very well. Not very well at all.
Out here in Metairie where she's living right now, there are piles of house insides here and there. Blown-down trees collected in parks. But there are still people living and working. The first parts of the city we went to - Uptown and around the CBD - were also fine. Sure, there were blown-out windows, but there were also tons of little businesses with signs proclaiming they were open, there were people. There were occasional bits of debris, buildings fucked up by the storm, and blue tarps scattered on roofs everywhere - but the city was basically functional. We had some lunch and picked up a book that'd come in for my mother at the local bookstore.
Then we started to visit places I knew. And it got worse and worse.
We drove past my old high school and elementary school. The buildings looked okay. Lower-lying parts of the same area didn't do so well. You could see how high the water had been not just in the lines of filth left by the water on the sides of houses, but by the sharp demarcation between dead foliage and live foliage on bushes. The water just stayed there for a damn long time. The pretty blocks I'd walk along on my way from the high school to the bus stop were not so pretty any more.
We passed by Delgado, where I went to college for a while. It's right next to City Park. Some of the oak trees in the Park pre-date the city. I didn't see the truly ancient ones, just the ones on the edge, looking horrible with all their leaves blown off and half their branches gone. Delgado's mixed - some buildings are standing, some are collapsed, there's some of the ubiquitous piles of building-guts here and there. Supposedly they're starting classes in a week or so.
Nearby was the apartment my mother lived in after I left home.
The lawn in front of it was a ruin of dirt and tread-tracks. There were crews working their way through the homes in the area, ripping out the ruined lower stories. They'd already been to that building. The front door was open; I went in. The bottom story was gutted in preparation for, I suppose, rebuilding. The upper story was intact - my mother had left her door locked after moving her stuff out, but her neighbor's door was unlocked (She never locked it anyway). I went through. She'd had some roof damage. It was a mess. Insulation and half-ruined tchotchkes all over. I went down the back stairs and drifted out the front door again.
We went past the snow-ball stand I visited on my last day. An empty shell. The sign listing the flavors was washed-out blue and red, but still legible. It was all bright colors when I was there. Weeks under flood water must have stolen all the rest of the color. The art store nearby was empty, its glass front broken, everything in it gone. There was a huge pile of detritus in front. I wonder if they'll rebuild? I wonder how many local businesses like this will come back?
We visited the area my old friend Nick Lauland lived in when I was growing up. This was near one of the levee breaks. It had been a nice neighborhood, a quiet pretty residential one. Near by, we passed some people in hazmat suits with fluorescent vests. The only thing I recognized about it was the shitty condition of the streets. The high-water marks were typically somewhere in the middle of first floor windows. Every house had the cryptic markings spray-painted by the rescue crews, saying when it'd been checked, and how many survivors, corpses, and/or pets they'd found. I don't know how to decipher them, and I really didn't feel like trying to. My mother said there had probably been a lot of corpses: the area was full of old people, who pulled the same act my grandmother did, of refusing to leave. She got lucky; they didn't.
I barely recognized his old house, though I was there a lot. The park it was across from was a shambles. There was a house near the levee break that looked to have been lifted off its slab foundations and turned around by the rush of water.
We drove through another area I was familiar with. Not a high-income area, but a nice, comfortable, cozy residential one. One of my acquaintances had lived there; I'd visited once or twice. Everything in the area was trashed. Mounds of the insides of houses, the occasional crew of people working on one.
Lots of signs for demolition services.
And then we visited the house my friends Jason and Jennie owned. This was near UNO, near the lake. I went up the steps to the back porch and peered in. Locked, gutted. A sign on the front door saying it was going to have that done for safety; Jason's signature on it. Standing on the back porch, I looked at the water-marks: if I'd been standing there during the flood, I would have drowned. The water would have been five feet over my head, if I was standing on the ground.
And then we went past UNO and were going to turn up the street I grew up in, but the train underpass was full of standing water. Only a couple inches or two, I though, but we didn't want to dare it. We took the long way around, coming to the other end of Press, where it crosses Chef Menteur Highway. The drive up that way was past increasingly familiar sights. This place gone, that place gone. Houses with high-water marks somewhere in their first stories, even the ritzyish ones high up on terraced ground.
Press Drive was so devastated-looking I couldn't tell when we were about to come up to where my house was, on the left. We went past it because my mother wanted to look at some stuff near the underpass we'd turned around at. And then we went back up Press.
There it was, the little single-story yellowish house on the corner I grew up in. With the inevitable drift of leaves from the sycamore tree in the back yard in the corner of the fence.
And all the grass was dead, flat, dead white.
And it smelled like rotting.
And the waterline was halfway up the windows.
"That's my bedroom window," I thought, looking at it. Really just kind of blankly. "The water would've cascaded in over there, if it didn't already get in some other way."
The shed in the back yard was just a concrete slab and two sides of it, open. I'd climbed up there using the fence now and then, to read on its tin roof on a quiet summer evening. It didn't exist any more. The sycamore tree in the back yard I spent my whole youth in the shadow of looked like shit - all its leaves were gone, for the first time ever (it never got cold enough for it to shed them all; there would still be green leaves here and there by the end of winter, and a slow drift-off of dead ones), and it had a hell of a lot less branches than I remember.
One of the neighboring yards was just full of branches. Maybe from it, probably from the several trees I remember being there a decade ago.
Our neighbor had done some building around his carport, turning it into an extended garage.
The whole place stank of mold. There were bars on the back doors and back windows, but it looked otherwise unchanged from when I lived there. The 'Sears' logo on the fence gate between the carport and yard was still all red on the back because of me fooling around with spray-paint. The exterior faucets had the same kind of insulating tape I remember having to go out in the cold and wrap around them. The support beam on the carport that was knocked out of line when my mother thought I'd closed a car door that I hadn't yet was still unrepaired.
All the grass was dead. The wire fences were surfaced entirely in rust. Every flap of screening on the back porch was hanging loose.
Somehow, the worst was the tree. I'd figured it was so big, so strong, so old, surely it'd have survived the flood, surely its wide branches would still be there, hanging low, even if it lost most of its leaves. But it looks like a horrible stub of itself, just a scraggly naked thing rising up behind the house.
I would have taken a loose brick from the little lining in the patio in the front - they were loose all the time I lived there - but either the current owner threw them away, or the flood took them. We wonder if the current owner of the place has even been back. All the windows were closed, so I couldn't see in.
My whole past in New Orleans is gone. Everywhere I knew, everywhere I spent time, is ruined. The first twenty-five years of my life only exist in my memories, now. I'm really glad I feel like I have something solid right now, because I don't have anything else behind me.
I didn't enjoy any of this, but I needed to see it. I'd been aching to see it when we were fleeing the hurricane. i kind of put that need away when I was in Boston, but I knew that this was something I'd have to do when I came down here.
I cried a lot today. I'll probably cry some more tonight.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 12:29 am (UTC)*hug*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 04:21 pm (UTC)But losing my city... yeah. I kinda dealt with it in theory before; now I've actually seen it, and it'll take a while to process...
no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 03:42 am (UTC)*bottom lip quivers; gushes tears cartoonily; hugs!*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 05:35 am (UTC)Gentilly looked just like how you described all the places you went: grey, dead, and stinking, with ruined cars and piles of debris in front of every house. I too needed to see it--even though I didn't have a personal stake in it like you did--because only then is it real.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 04:26 pm (UTC)The stink is not as ubiquitous, my mother said, as it was at first. And neither are the piles of debris. But it's still dead. Very dead.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 05:48 am (UTC)Dunno what to say about your visit home. After I was 4, we lived in the same house the entire rest of my childhood so you'd think I'd have some sense of permanence towards home. At one point a tornado blew through our neighborhood and leveled the neighbor's house but not ours so I've been in a scene of destruction but on a smaller scale and it didn't really touch me.
The thing that did stick in my head reading this was how much you writing felt like returning home after my auto accident. Everything was scrambled, different, not how I remembered it. Things that seemed important to me were gone or changed, things that had been unimportant before blazed in my head with significance. I couldn't remember a lot of it, it was all messed up, all wrong and broken, not where I'd lived before. Part of someone else's life or something I'd seen on TV. It was weird int he way that dreams are, where places are familiar and alien at the same time. It's a strange sensation.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 05:20 pm (UTC)Admittedly I saw other cars in the areas we went through that were probably doing the same disaster tour thing we were, but it's different when it's you doing it yourself to see your personal landmarks - seeing a formal list of the Worst Bits, regardless of your connection to them, is kinda nasty.
I've been home after a good while before, and there's a little of that scrambledness no matter what. New Orleans was increasingly alien each time I'd visit. But coming back after a major change to either yourself or your home changes it even more. I felt very different about coming back to the city when I was going to live there; I was looking forwards to doing stuff I'd always avoided due to being a morose little shard of miserable boy. I'd changed a lot, and the city had changed a little. Now after Katrina, I think it's the one that's changed even more; now the city's the miserable, broken one...
no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 03:50 pm (UTC)I've been thinking of you and missing you very much. I feel a little bit less like myself with you away. You will be welcomed with much love when you get back.
<3