I have always hated driving to NOLA via that route because it seems so desolate, like the Virgina woods leading up to DC. I can imagine the Burton boys growing up in that environment and I know exactly why they became stock car drivers. Driving along those stretches of road where you can't see anything but the cars in front or behind, getting almost nothing on the radio but demented preachers and countrypolitan pop tunes, there's no better preparation for the one-man show of auto racing.
I saw steel signs along the interstate bent double as though made of tissue. I began to notice the dearth of billboards. And it slowly dawned on me that I had no conception of the scope of Katrina's devastation. No, really. I knew it intellectually but no matter the size of your tv's picture, you're still only going to perceive the destruction on the scale of a small box in your living room. When you're in the midst of it, it warps your sense of reality. It is everywhere and constant. There is nowhere to look where you can not see it. Your only recourse, if you don't want to be assaulted by the image of an entire region debased by a storm, is to close your eyes. It's that freaking big.
Interstate 10 was still closed that day. Great heaping sections of it that had snapped were being used to patch up all the holes in what would have been the eastbound side. We never had too many choices about how to get into or out of NOLA. You had the twin spans of 10, the two lanes of US 11, the Causeway, or you could pull a Cristo Colon and circumnavigate the whole damn thing by driving to Jackson, MS on 20, taking 55 down to La Place, and then taking Airline Drive/Hwy in from the west. It has always been easier to fly or sail into New Orleans than to go overland. Someone is trying to tell us something, non?
And so I chose to take US 11, which runs through Slidell. Or rather, runs through the space on the map where Slidell used to be. My god.
The closer one gets to the lake, the less there is of Slidell that could be called "civilisation." There is simply one pile of debris next to another next to another next to another next to another next to another...and so it goes. There is not one house. There is not one store. All aspects of human enterprise have been swept into piles of brokenness. You would not be able to differentiate between this and, let's say, post-Enola Gay Hiroshima. Unlike what I was going to find in NOLA, where entire city blocks came away relatively unscathed, Slidell simply looked as though it had really pissed off God, and God took the full measure of his revenge. It looked like William T. Sherman was trying to win a war against St. Tammany Parish. The only evidence that humans gave a shit about this place was that people had taken pieces of splintered homes, spray painted their addresses on them, and stuck them in front of the mounds of wreckage. "I used to live in this," it said to me. Really, does your "address" matter at that point? "Where do you live?" Nowhere, you idiot.
So I crossed the lake. Going the other way was an endless stream of cars, filled with people who had no reason to stay in Orleans Parish. Some of the cars and trucks were towing U-Haul trailers. They had taken whatever they could that still mattered (and wasn't coated in black moldy evil shit), and they were getting the fuck out of the city they had called home. I didn't blame them. I can't blame them. It is a motherfucking burden of immense proportion to have to live there.
All the familiarity I once felt when I would drive into NOLA after being away was gone. You come in from the east, you are no longer among the living. Entire apartment buildings along 10 were shredded. Not a roof intact. Katrina's anger had torn the homes of thousands of people into little pieces. "My god." I kept saying it. "My god. Oh my god." There had been people living there just 5 weeks before, working people, families, children, old people. And now they were gone. Even if they had wanted to come back...well, let's be honest, what in the hell would they want to do that for?
I surveyed New Orleans East from the high rise. Ghost town. A real ghost town, filled with the ghosts of the people who didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, leave. Dead people. Dead city.
It hasn't been that long since I decided that I NEEDED to live in NOLA. I will never forget the feeling of driving down Broad Street off the interstate in that ludicrously big U-Haul truck, seeing all those people on their front stoops, sitting on their steps, carrying bags of groceries from the corner store, many of them inert, but still, everywhere I looked there were people.
And as day gave over to dusk on October 9, there were no people. None. Mine was the only car on the road. No cops looking to bust heads. No crackheads. No mothers. No sons. No mechanics. No teachers. Just a filthy black line on the houses and nasty grey-brown dust on everything. I was alone in New Orleans.
I had conducted a "CSI" to the winds of Katrina up to that point, but now I was seeing the evil of men played out in the form of a broken levee. How did we manage to let this happen? What a question. I feel so stupid for even asking it. I should retract it.
I don't know what to say about the flood. All I know is that black line. You could go around the city and hang pictures as though it were a laser level. That horrible, filthy, disgusting black line, I hate it. I hate it. It turns my stomach. It makes me angry. It makes me cry. Fucking black line. Goddamned black line. Black line on cars. Black line on houses. Black line on the goddamned interstate. Black line. Have you seen the black line? Piles of rubble can be taken away but that black line remains. Everywhere I look I see that black line and I see another life ruined. A worker in a shelter. A family split up. A bar that was struggling to make it. We should all get a fucking tattoo of a black line across our chests.
In two weeks I have only seen the remains of true horror and suffering. New Orleans is Club Med now compared to what it was when that black line was being drawn across the city. I have electricity and MREs. I have a cooler and FEMA ice. I have survivor's guilt. I should not have left, why did I leave, I am weak. I can take a cold shower whenever I want. I can shit in my own toilet, in private. I've never had it so motherfucking good.
But when I see the abandoned boat at the gas station where I stopped at 5:30AM on Katrina Sunday, the gas station on Claiborne under 10, just off Esplanade, and the gas station has been looted because people were starving and dehydrated, I am jolted. Every day I drive past that boat and look at it, parked askew next to a gas pump as though it were filling up. Every day. Someone was trying to stay alive, I know it.
One of the sad things about my city is how so few people know about it beyond the Vieux Carre and St. Charles Avenue. For decades tourists have come to debauch themselves on Bourbon Street and marvel at the mansions of the Garden District. And now those places are intact and it looks like nothing happened. There's not a big tourist market for driving along West Esplanade from Kenner and seeing the complete desolation of Lakeview. There's no soul-stirring "Ground Zero" to elicit tears from people from Iowa. I have seen it and I don't want to see it again. I don't want to see lives blown up and washed away and piled into giant mountains of garbage and wood. I nearly vomited the first time. I don't want to feel that dust buring my throat. I don't want to see the remains of happiness stacked up like cordwood or tossed away like a child's mold-ridden teddy bear. It's not fun.
Please don't forget us, world. Please. Please help save New Orleans.
