Trendy But Casual

Katrina Revisited: Cotton Blather (9/23/05)

[Original post: September 23, 2005]

The rains of Rita are already pouring down in Cenla, but I wanted to post this picture of one of the local cotton fields, taken this morning before the bad weather moved in, and include this illuminating exchange between me and T. Middy.

TM: I didn't even know they grew cotton in Louisiana.

PJKM: How could you not know that?

TM: I don't know anything. I grew up in America.

Katrina Revisited: Who will run the frog hospital? (9/19/05)

[Original post: September 19, 2005]

We're back in central Louisiana (Cenla, as it's known around here) because, really, why spend time in leafy, breezy Iowa City when there are 100-degree days going begging here down in the Deep South? The heat is absolutely ferocious, and the ongoing lack of rain has made everything parched and dusty. Activity is confined to a pestilence of love bugs. Love bugs are not cute: they look like the obese cousins of mosquitoes, and swarm towards any light (especially light-colored houses, where they infiltrate through gaps in the boards and disperse over window panes, white-painted shelves, the fridge, T-shirts, etc). I have personally killed tens of thousands of these insects. Last night, I kept waking up because I imagined them landing on my head and crawling down my top. This morning, I discovered that this was only a slight exaggeration: my bed was crawling with ants. It's like Out of Africa down here, except without the safari suits and European accents.

The picture posted above was taken yesterday, Sunday, at the annual Frog Festival in Rayne, a small town on the Cajun Prairie. We attended not only the frog-jumping contest at that festival, but also the annual Festivals Acadiens in nearby Lafayette, where there were Cajun bands, great food and craft stalls selling everything from accordions to chainsaw-carved wooden fish. Although it was almost too hot to stand up, a number of people were dancing in the dust in front of the stage, including one half-naked man using a stick as a substitute partner. From the stage, it was announced that next year the Festivals Acadiens will be held in October, news that elicited a weary cheer from the baked audience. (The Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, which we attended last year, has been postponed until early next month.)

The main point of this post is to thank everyone in Iowa City and St. Louis, as well as other readers of this blog, for their extremely generous donations to the shelter in Marksville. We returned on Friday with a packed car - books from Aunt Pat, beautiful baby clothes from Holly and Bob (and Lily, who is perhaps unaware that her infant wardrobe has been ransacked), huge amounts of paper goods and baby formula and other necessities from Pat and Mike. These were all delivered to the shelter on Saturday morning - except for the beef jerky, which I gave to the Avoyelles Parish National Guard: they were having a snack drive for local Guardsmen sent to New Orleans.

Today we went to Wal-Mart with the money raised from Paige's art sale on Saturday night and bought toiletries, underwear and more paper goods for the shelter. The woman on the front desk asked us for towels, so tomorrow we'll head into Alexandria to use some of the Target cards people have sent.

On Wednesday, our zip code will be admitted back into the city for clean-up, unless the federal government decides to interfere. Our landlord, Paul, has already seen our place, and thinks that nothing can be salvaged from downstairs. Today we bought lots of heavy-duty cleaning stuff to take in with us. We'll need to take our own water in as well, of course. Our electricity isn't back on yet, unsurprisingly. We have no plans to move home until November at the earliest.

One additional item of interest from the drive north: listening to the radio as we passed through Memphis, I learned that there's been a mini-crime surge there since the hurricane, and, as a result, no plea bargains will be permitted for crimes against evacuees.

Katrina Revisited: Relief (9/9/05)

[Original post: September 9, 2005]

We’re about to head north for a week, up to St Louis and Iowa City, because it seems extremely unlikely we’ll be permitted back into Orleans Parish within the next seven days. Joy and Paul, our friends and landlords, returned to Jefferson Parish on Wednesday, but when they tried to drive towards our neighborhood, armed soldiers turned them away. We managed to find our place on a satellite picture yesterday: the roof looks fine, and the water doesn’t reach the second floor.

We’ll return to Marksville next Saturday, because Paige is having an art show to raise money for the Garan shelter, and we’re going to help.

Yesterday, we went to the Family Services office and lined up for food stamps. The women working there were extremely efficient and good-tempered, considering the unusual glut of people. The very capable woman in orange directing foot traffic, who might be a former Miss Marksville, told us there are 3500 evacuees in Avoyelles Parish, though I suspect that figure doesn’t include people staying with friends and families who haven’t registered for any disaster relief.

FEMA has been spotted in the Marksville area, she said, but they're not "on the ground" yet. They're looking for a place to set up - a big place, apparently.

Food stamps are a sleek card – a Louisiana Purchase automated debit card, with DISASTER ASSISTANCE printed across the bottom. After filling in a form (name, age, race, income, plus an assessment of how much we’ve spent evacuating and how much we’ve lost), a staff member assigns a monetary value to the card. Ours is $274 for a month. The woman in orange announces to the waiting room that we can’t spend the money on paper goods (like diapers – a number of people are disappointed),alcohol, tobacco, or cleaning products. However, unlike regular food stamps, this card is good for hot food in the deli section of a supermarket.

We drove to Alexandria to see Joy, Paul and family – twelve people in a rented house, including six kids in borrowed school uniforms. Lester arrived; he’s a colonel in the National Guard, and had some stories to tell – of a wall of water on Tuesday morning inundating Jackson Barracks and filling the building in which he was standing with six feet of water in minutes; of taking out his son Robbie’s boat to rescue people in the Ninth Ward – 90 people in three days, the water chest-high and slick with oil, children falling off rooves, people desperate and dehydrated and in shock, calling for friends and family members who could not be found.

The highest part of the Barracks, near the levee, is drained now, but there’s a thick pungent sludge everywhere – oil and excrement and debris, dark and stinky. The whole place smells of death, Lester says. The Ninth Ward and Chalmette will need to be entirely rebuilt. “It’s the worst thing to ever happen to New Orleans in my lifetime.”

It’s a world away from this parish, where the leaves are starting to wither on the cotton bushes and the cotton harvesting machines are moving into position. We’ll miss Marksville while we’re away. More reports to follow.

Katrina Revisited: Marksville (9/6/05)

[Original post: September 6, 2005]

It’s Tuesday evening, and I wanted to post about one of the shelters here in Marksville, the one in Garan, Inc. This was a garment factory until a few years ago, when the work moved south to Mexico.

On Friday, my friend Paige and I visited and talked to Roland Scallan, who’s running the place. It’s not a state-run shelter. As far as I can see, it’s a building owned by the Marksville sheriff, T-Bill, and Roland was supposed to be in charge of a new communications company T-Bill plans to set up there. (The T is short for petit: the sheriff is short, we hear.) There are 550 people sleeping on cots in there. Everyone here has come from another shelter. The staff is made up of volunteers from the community and inmates from the local prisons, both women’s and men’s.

It’s a clean and cool facility, but it’s still a factory in a small town – a stark industrial space with no showers and limited bathroom facilities. The air-conditioned half is where everyone sleeps on a multicolor quilt of cots and where food donated by Marksville residents is served. The other half is where donated items are stored – boxes of old clothes, piles of toilet paper and sanitary items, dozens of bottles of water and canned goods.

Roland is a retired banker. He has gray hair and a tan. The look in his eyes is kind of wild. He’s dressed in a polo shirt and khakis; his name tag gives his name but no job title, because he doesn’t have one. “I’m not Red Cross, I’m nothing. Not social services. I’m a civilian who’s become the person in charge here.”

When we meet him, he’s clutching a pharmacy bag containing an insulin prescription – not for himself, but for one of the evacuees, paid for out of Roland’s pocket. “People arrived here with just the clothes on their backs,” he says. “They have nothing. We have children, old ladies – one just had surgery and lost her toes. We just got her a wheelchair. We’re getting prescriptions illegally: we have to. Some won’t go to a nursing home because they want to stay with their families.”

He talks a mile a minute, his voice hoarse, leading us towards the food line. “All the food is donated,” he tells me. “We don’t know where it’s coming from. Someone donated a refrigerated truck and someone donated the diesel for it. We put milk in there. Someone is donating a washer and dryer.”

Local pastors have been visiting. One has thirty people at his church. “He wants to bring them here, but we’re at capacity.” Other visitors are less welcome. “Those people talking to me back there – they’re from the State Board of Health, asking all sorts of questions. I’m telling them all kinds of lies.”

Local AC contractors have been in getting the units to work; local plumbers have come in to unblock the toilets when they get jammed with diapers, or to fix the urinals when someone kicks them loose from the walls. At a table in the corner, two nurses talk to evacuees: local nurses are coming in on their days off. A doctor who’s an evacuee himself has just come in to write prescriptions. Even the security guards on the door, checking people in and out, making sure nobody has weapons, are volunteers. We say hi to a fireman that Paige knows. He’s the first black person called Bubba I’ve ever met.

“This can’t last – people donating. Everything’s free,’ Roland says, noting that evacuees “get angry and it’s understandable. There’s so much uncertainty – people don’t know where they’re going next. They get mad at me because we have no facilities for showers. We got some school buses to pick people up from the different centers and take them to the youth center fifteen miles up the road.”

Roland gets frustrated, too. He’s having to ration toilet paper and diapers, because people stockpile them, or use them to barter. “I try to tell people, you’re not going home Monday. We might be here for a month unless they build a big refugee facility closer to New Orleans.”

Bureaucracy is also driving him crazy. “Some people were asking for pay phones, so we tried to get some in here. We’re still waiting for the permit. It takes six days.”

We walk towards the plastic flaps to the humid storehouse section. People sit eating their food out of polystyrene boxes, or watching one of the two televisions. The women serving food tell Roland that they need ice for the coolers filled with soft drinks: he says we’re waiting on the Lutheran church to deliver some more. Roland pauses to thank all the women serving lunch, and the people from Bateman Senior Meals delivering food, then he starts to choke up. “You can’t thank them enough,” he says, explaining to me that this is a poor community, dependent on farming. “And the farmers are struggling. We have no industry in Avoyelles Parish.”

In a small back room littered with supplies, beyond stacks of folding table, a donated microwave, and scattered toys, Roland gets upset again. A male inmate walks in, looking for more paper towels. “We never thought we’d get the mass of stuff from the local community,” says Roland. “But we need more, especially pull-ups for the elderly, and maxi-pads. Some people think we’re holding out, that we’re keeping the good stuff. We’re not. I brought in stuff from my own baby to give to a two-week-old here.”

On Monday, Paige and I drive to Wal-Mart – now decimated, with no water left and most supplies gone – and she spends $300 buying tampons, pull-ups, maxi-pads and toilet paper. The guys in line behind us, a father and son in camouflage, giggle and point as we stack everything on the counter. “You must have a real problem,” they titter, gesturing at the pull-ups. I become Lady Bracknell-ish and tell them, in stern Victorian tones, that it’s for the shelter. They stop giggling.

When we drop the stuff off around the back of Garan, Inc, the women who help us unload tell us the shelter urgently needs baby socks and women’s underwear. (Today, Tom and I drove into Alexandria and bought some at Target. If anyone wants to contribute stuff like this, I can get you an address.)

Sorry this post is so long, and that I’m still unable to add pictures. Our friend and landlord, Paul, got into the city yesterday and got close to our house, but there was too much water to reach our street. Those of you who know Deanna Schmidt and her beautiful antebellum house in Jackson Barracks – the whole ground floor is flooded. Her son, Robbie, looked in the window and said it was like visiting the aquarium. (A very polluted aquarium, with a floating fridge.)

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Katrina Revisited: Shelter (9/3/05)

[Original post: September 3, 2005]

Yesterday I visited one of the shelters in Marksville, and interviewed the guy who's trying to run things there - his name is Roland Scallan. I'll post the interview tomorrow (and will try to post a picture as well from the shelter). Roland is completely exhausted; he broke down crying a couple of times while I was talking to him. There are 550 sleeping there in a disused garment factory (with no showers): all the aid so far, from the cots to the food to toiletries and clothes, is donated by the community. It's not the only shelter in Marksville - there are about 400 people sleeping at the casino. This is a town of just 5500 in
Avoyelles Parish, one of the poorest in Louisiana.

I went to the shelter after doing a phone interview with Curtis Sittenfeld (very nice person: read her book): the interview was supposed to take place last Sunday, but we were stuck somewhere in Mississippi at the time. Surreal juxtaposition - talking to an author about New England private schools then driving out to a shelter in sweltering central Louisiana.

Those of you asking about our good family friends, Rebecca and Randall Lewis: they're still in a hotel in Dallas, spending money they don't have, like everyone else, but hopefully will be moving back to Louisiana soon. Deanna Schmidt, Becky's sister, is in nearby Alexandria, along with Baby Joy and family. Becky may come to Marksville and try to rent a house for a few months so the children can go to school. Last time I spoke to Becky, she hadn't heard from Lester or Robbie, who are both in the Louisiana National Guard. Big Joy is in Houston, and so is Deanna's daughter, Stacy. I haven't heard about Doug and Jill yet.

As for us, we spent last night sleeping in a Winnebago in Shreveport, near the Texas border. (It's not quite a Barbie camper, but I was excited.) We left our friends, Sarah and Joe, in a PJ's coffee house waiting for Sarah's mother to drive in from Dallas. Tonight we're on the Cane river just outside Natchitoches, staying with more family of family of friends, if that makes sense. (Kevin: if you're reading this, it's your aunt's house.) Everyone has been incredibly hospitable and kind. Nearly everyone around here has taken in someone from the New Orleans area.

Today has been hard, and I'm not sure why - perhaps the terrible frustration with what we're reading in the newspaper and seeing on television, too many people still living in despair and squalor in the city. It's good to know our mayor, Ray Nagin,is making some noise. He's an immensely charismatic man. We saw him once in the Canal Place shopping center, the one that's currently on fire. I'm glad he hasn't left the city, choosing to stay while the rest of local government moves to Baton Rouge. The pictures of the elderly lying on the baggage carousel at Louis Armstrong airport, or the tanks rolling through downtown while people line up still waiting to be evacuated, make me feel utterly sick at heart. The hurricane passed us on Monday. Today is Saturday. There are still people rotting in the Superdome and the Convention Center.

Part of me is desperate to go home and see our house and our neighborhood. Part of me wants to steal the Winnebago and drive west, as though leaving all this behind will somehow make it unreal. More unreal than it already is. Like that line from Withnail and I: we've gone on holiday by mistake.

Please excuse my probably confused mix of American and English spelling. Tulane has officially canceled the semester now, and for those of you trying to reach me at my Tulane e-mail address, it isn't working at the moment.

Katrina Revisited: A Town Like Alec (9/1/05)

[Original post: September 1, 2005]

I'm just back from Alexandria (Alec), which is the city-of-sorts around here, running errands for the people we're staying with.

Went into the Books-A-Million to buy a coffee; the guy behind the counter told me: "I'm enjoying y'all being here." Except for one lady yesterday, he said, who complained that he was chatting with the
customers too long, and that there should be more than one cash register open. "And I told her, you are our guest here! If you don't like it, you can just go home and swim."

On sale on the counter: red wristbands for sale for $1 with the message "I Live for Him." (Proclaim your faith, the sign urged.)

The conversation turned to the violence, rising as the flood recedes. The clerk's brother-in-law is a paramedic, he said; yesterday, he and colleagues drove into New Orleans to help the relief effort. After their car was shot at, they turned around and came home.

"They need to kill some of these looters," he said. "Not just wound them, but actually kill them."

Another customer (grizzled, sitting alone a table without a drink) got up to join the conversation. "New Orleans is a terrible place anyway," he said. "Right now ..." He shook his head. Words could not express what it's like right now, apparently, and I left before the conversation turned to God's vengeance on gay people, heavy drinkers and Mardi Gras floats.

Driving back to Marksville, on the radio I heard a description of the four levels inside the Superdome: it sounded like the four layers of hell - dead bodies, a slick of excrement and urine, speakeasies in the
corporate boxes.

And here is House Speaker Dennis Hastert in Chicago's Daily Herald, asked about rebuilding the city: "It doesn't make sense to me ... It's a question that certainly we should ask."

Katrina Revisited: They're Trying to Wash Us Away (9/1/05)

[Original post: September 1, 2005]

We're still in central Louisiana, among the cottonfields and hummingbirds, waiting, waiting, waiting. The latest news, as most of you probably know, is that the city is being cleared, so they can find all the dead and stop looters from taking everything (not to mention killing other people, carjacking, and shooting at rescue helicopters: the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas was broken into, and all the guns were taken).

Our mayor, Ray Nagin, says it will be 12-16 weeks before we'll be allowed to return, though possibly we'll be allowed back in after a month to assess damage and salvage things. We hear there's about five feet of water in our neighborhood, but we can't be certain. I'll feel very lucky if that's the worst of it - if we don't have a tree through the roof letting rain pour in, or a kicked-in front door and ransacked house.

Some of our friends are still in the city, we think - can't be sure of this, either, because cell phones with 504 numbers are still a problem. For those of you who know our friend Rebecca Lewis and her family,
they're safe in a Dallas hotel, but her sisters stayed in Metairie and cannot be reached yet.

Katrina Revisited: Homeless (8/31/05)

[Original post: August 31, 2005]

Sorry to have taken so long to thank everyone for their good wishes and let you all know how things are.

We left New Orleans on Sunday morning. I just returned from Denver the previous evening, having to scramble to get back at all and catching the last flight to Baton Rouge. I-10 was already jammed with cars heading west, and we had to leave the highway halfway back into city because of the contraflow.

We live on the upper floor of our house: the ground floor is a basement (as we can't have below-ground basements in New Orleans, for reasons that are now perfectly obvious to everyone). Sunday morning we moved as much as we could from the ground floor upstairs. All the roads west were gridlocked, so we drove north into Mississippi, planning to veer west via Natchez, headed for central Louisiana, and following our friends, Sarah and Joe. Just across the state line, their car broke down, so we crammed them (and all their stuff) into our Ford Escort. Every car on I-55 had a Louisiana license plate. We dropped them off in Alexandria, and ended our journey in Marksville. Normally, this is a three or four
hour drive from New Orleans. It took us 14 hours.

Since then, we've been driving ourselves crazy listening to the radio, going to people's houses to watch TV and obsessively reading updates on www.nola.com. We're waiting to hear if we can get back into the city next week, albeit briefly, to survey damage, fix things and get some more of our belongings. At the moment, we're hoping that we don't have worse damage than flooding on the ground floor, but the water is still rising. We live in the Audubon section of the city, for those of you who know New Orleans, and our street is just below sea level. The most recent thing we heard is that there's less flooding Uptown than
elsewhere, but we don't want to get too hopeful. Many streets are impassable because of fallen trees. It seems that we won't be able to move home for more than a month, possibly two or three months, so we'd like to secure the house, presuming we still have one. Also, when we left, we thought we'd just be away for a few days, like the last time we evacuated, so we have very little with us.

Then we may head up to St Louis and Iowa City, and then come back down here when it's closer to the time we can return home. If we really have to be out for three months, as the mayor suggested today, then I may go back to NZ to stay with my family. There's only so long you can stay with friends without driving everyone crazy. Thanks to everyone who's offered us a temporary home: we really appreciate it. There are so many people from our adopted home town who have to depend on the kindness of
strangers right now.

The city is just a mess - rising water, fires burning, trees down, roads gone, looters breaking into Wal-Mart and stealing guns. There's no electricity, gas or drinking water. Cell phones aren't working. Nothing is working. Tulane's whole semester may be cancelled: this is looking increasingly certain. (I'm waiting to see if I get paid tomorrow.) It's very surreal to be so displaced, from home and work, and to be uncertain about what our city will look like and feel like when we eventually return. New Orleans is almost third-world at the best of times; now, at the worst of times, it's a chaotic, lawless shambles. Many people have lost everything. Today, as you probably know, they're evacuating the people in the Superdome to Houston, and the governor wants everyone to leave the city.

Maybe we'll see those of you who live in Iowa soon. We'll stay put here in Marksville until there's more news. Thanks again for all the e-mails and good wishes.

Katrina Revisited

Recently I discovered that the posts I wrote for the blog Babies Are Fireproof during the early days of Katrina evacuation in 2005 - i.e. the first month - are no longer available to the public. (BAF has gone private these days.) I'm going to re-post them here over the next day or two. Hopefully nobody will be confused, in a War-of-the-Worlds-like manner, and think that hurricanes are swirling into the Gulf Coast again. (Technically, it's still hurricane season until the end of November.)

Many thanks to Corbin Collins for finding these posts in the depths of the dusty BAF archives, and sending them all to me.

Lafayette, Louisiana

Kenny Donnelly is the grandson of our friends, Deanna and (Colonel) Lester Schmidt. He's the eldest son of their daughter, Stacey Besselman. Kenny is also the great-nephew of Rebecca Lewis - as some of you know, one of our dearest friends. Becky lives in New Orleans, as do most of her extended family. Ten years ago, Deanna and Lester hosted a party for us at their home in Jackson Barracks, the night before our wedding.

After the storm, when Jackson Barracks was underwater, the National Guard moved out of the city. Deanna and Lester, along with Stacey and her family, had to re-locate to Alexandria, Louisiana. Kenny finished high school there. He joined the Guard, and began college in Lafayette.

Last Thursday Kenny and one of his roommates were attacked at their home in Lafayette. Kenny's roommate is in hospital now. Kenny was killed.

His obituary is posted here.

Tom and I are so, so sorry to hear this awful news. We last saw Deanna, Lester and Stacey in August, when they drove down from Lafayette for our going-away party. We wish we could be in New Orleans this week for the funeral. We're thinking of Kenny, who was always smiling. We're thinking of them all.