 |
  |
|
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
New Orleans is gone. I left it behind me on Saturday, with my two kids in the backseat, the soundtrack to Shrek on the CD player. My wife, a pediatrician, was on call for the weekend and stayed behind. She joined us in a town just outside Lafayette, La., Sunday evening after a harrowing odyssey along the southern route of Highway 90, driving without her glasses or a cell phone, our three cats roaming in the back of a shaky Volvo. Together that night, we watched the same show that all who'd gotten out were watching. The straight line for our city. The familiar "Cat-4" and "Cat-5." And for those of us who thought we'd seen this before, the much-hoped-for right turn. It didn't matter. It hit. Even those who could read the tea leaves in John McPhee's The Control of Nature or John Barry's Rising Tide, or who had seen the diagrams of a bowl-shaped city, are in disbelief. New Orleans is gone, along with the newspaper where I work, the home where I live, my kids' beloved school, my neighborhood sno-ball stand, my neighborhood anything. On The Times-Picayune's website and on cable news, I see my former home's dark and distorted reflection: submerged rooftops; a battered Superdome filled with the desperate; looters grabbing guns and VCRs and racks of shirts; a house scrawled in red with "diabetic inside"; the breach in the levee.
The future is recited: a bowl of toxic stew. The gas, the sewage, the dead. On the local news shows in south Louisiana, the crawl beneath the picture lists statewide evacuation centers in Rayne and Opelousas, and announces that "Evacuees in need of dialysis should call ..." Above these details are shots of aerial superheroes in short red jumpsuits or head-to-toe military green, alighting on rooftops and loading old women and little boys in wire baskets for their ride out. Scan along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and it's tragedy and timber. A man holds his two boys. "I can't find my wife," he tells the reporter. "Our house split in two." This is all via TV. Direct information is harder to come by. Cell phones aren't working; contact with others is haphazard. I haven't been able to talk with my publisher yet. But this morning, my wife reached her boss. This is a man who embodies the New Orleans peculiarly dark joie de vivre to such an extent that he dressed as the tsunami for this year's Mardi Gras. On the phone, he was blunt. "I don't know if we're going to have a practice to come back to," he said. "What families will return to the city with their children?"
Other cities are mightier. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. But New Orleans is where I wanted to make my home. I first hitchhiked to the city as a college dropout who wanted to hear jazz and see Mardi Gras. The ride I got was with a preacher who warned me about sin and temptation. Just like every drunk tourist on Bourbon Street, that's exactly what I was looking for. Soon after, I heard zydeco and followed the blast of brass bands on the streets, and started writing about musicians who seemed like magicians, the way they could conjure a mood. I even covered Hurricane Andrew, drove straight toward it, fueled by recklessness and a USA Today day rate. For the past 20 years, I have moved in and out of New Orleans. This last time, the roots buried deep: job, house, family, school. Early notions of the city of good times were tempered by the closer looks at poverty, illiteracy and crime I obtained as editor of the city's alternative weekly. Being a parent in the public school system brought me even closer. Long before the rain started, New Orleans was a troubled city. But it's still the hallowed ground of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, of Mardi Gras and jazz funerals that send off the dead with "Didn't He Ramble?" Of lesser-known purveyors of high spirits in bleak houses. I love New Orleans more than I've ever loved a particular place. Most recently, I loved my neighborhood. Every morning, friends passed by our corner on their way to school. We'd hurry up tying our shoes to join them. Of the thousands who evacuated to the towns surrounding Lafayette, a handful are from my street. We fled on the buddy system and hooked up when we got here. We've met for pizza and seen ourselves in each other, and we've drawn some comfort from that. Now, as the TV news reports rising floodwaters and worse, it is becoming more difficult to speak to each other about our plans and how long we can hold on. I haven't told you about Katy Reckdahl. She's a staff writer I hired a couple years back, and she writes about the hardest-hit citizens of New Orleans, including those who put themselves on the trigger side of a gun. She cares about all kinds of people. She knows this city better than most, and I am better for having worked with her. On Saturday, when I was driving my kids out, she was having her first child, a boy, in Touro Infirmary. Last I heard, they were moving people from floor to floor in Touro, and will now be evacuating them, along with others stranded in hospitals with no air conditioning and sealed windows, generators running out of gas. Where is Katy? At The Times-Picayune's Web site, stories like mine pile on top of each other. Looking for grandfather. Want to hear from my friend. What do you know? It's harder to access pleas that aren't online. Meanwhile, the TV stations traffic in comparisons: a war zone, Hiroshima, the tsunami, a third-world refugee camp, 9/11. I try not to think like that, but Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads keep coming to mind. He wrote them about another time when the forces of man and nature sent refugees into America: "So long, it's been good to know you." As I write, what's left of New Orleans is being swallowed up. Gov. Kathleen Blanco — whose maternal concern has helped me through each day — is removing the last of us from the flooding city. The next journey belongs to the tens of thousands in the Superdome, now on to the Astrodome in a fleet of buses. A couple hundred miles away, we have new household decisions to make. "I'm getting pretty bored of not having school," my 7-year-old daughter announced today. A week ago, her life was filled with first-day-of-school excitement. Now, there's maybe a Catholic girl's academy. The public schools are also taking in the children of New Orleans. My wife returned from a registration session, speaking through tears about the warmth and efficiency. We're staying with friends who just keep saying "as long as it takes." Last night, one of their neighbors showed up with smothered steak, rice and gravy, cabbage and sausage, and bread pudding. Another showed up with margaritas. Decisions. Maybe we'll call my daughter's first-grade teacher, who evacuated to a nearby town, and we'll set up a home school. The Saturday we left, my daughter was in his classroom a block up the street, playing on the computers while he put together lesson plans. "I want to go to Mr. Reynaud's," she'd beg every week until we relented. That's one of those memories that seems untraceable now. It leads nowhere. I also have a 4-year-old son. Last night, we were unfolding our hide-a-bed and putting blankets on the floor. "Did you see this?" my wife said, holding a book he'd made last month, before this hurricane had begun to form. He had drawn the pictures and recited the story, and my wife had taken his dictation. It was titled "Miles and the Sun!" and it goes like this: One spring day, Miles came out of his house in New Orleans. The sun was happy to see Miles. The sun was wearing sunglasses. Miles moved to his new house and the sun got very, very hot. Now it was even hotter! A fearful wild storm came with lots of monsters. Luckily Miles wasn't in it. The water splashed all over it. The drawing for that last page was all deep, hard-pressed scribbles. Last night, he sat on my lap and looked at the TV and the people walking through the water. "Are those the people who didn't evacuate?" he asked, carefully enunciating his new word. New Orleans is gone and I can't say when it will come back. My neighborhood, my job, all of it might somehow return. Yet I don't know what a rebuilt New Orleans will look like and I don't know if I'll be there for it. For now, we're living on the generosity of others. That's what it's like to be a refugee. You never know what's next. Michael Tisserand is editor of Gambit Weekly. He is currently living in Carencro, La., at the home of Scott Jordan, the editor of Lafayette's Independent Weekly. Since this story was written, it has been reported that Katy Reckdahl and her newborn son got out of New Orleans safely. Newspaper owner Margo DuBos reports that she is safe with her family on dry land in a small town in Louisiana. She believes all of her employees are safe as well. She doesn't expect to be able to publish the paper again for at least the remainder of this year, but remains optimistic that the city and paper will eventually recover.
DeFazio Storms Against Bush Congressman Peter DeFazio of Springfield calls the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina "disastrously inadequate."
"There are probably people that died because of the inadequate federal response," DeFazio said. He said that it was "astounding" that TV trucks were able to drive into the city for days while the federal government claimed it could not reach storm victims. DeFazio blamed the failure on Bush's reorganization of FEMA (the Federal Emergence Management Agency) into the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy. DeFazio said the Homeland Security consolidation was a hurried and poorly constructed political plan "scribbled on the back of a napkin by Carl Rove," the president's pollster, to respond to criticism that the government had failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks. FEMA and other disaster programs like emergency communication have gone begging for money for years, DeFazio said. "The Bush administration can't be bothered; it's tax cuts, tax cuts, Iraq." DeFazio said the head of FEMA "should be fired" and said his hiring in the first place was "ridiculous" political patronage. Bush has praised FEMA director Michael Brown for doing a "heck of a job" after the hurricane. Brown, a Republican activist, was reportedly forced out of his previous job overseeing horse shows. Congress should investigate what went wrong and "heads should roll," DeFazio said. But, "I expect the Republican majority will drag its heels" in investigating the Bush administration. "There's a lot of obfuscation and outright lying here," said DeFazio of statements by FEMA denying that there was a refugee crisis at the New Orleans convention center. DeFazio said state and local officials also share some of the blame for their part in failing to provide buses to evacuate the poor and elderly before the hurricane hit. DeFazio faulted Bush's initial response of flying over the disaster in a 747 at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, "he failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster." While the president was talking about how "Poor Trent Lott [a Republican senator from Mississippi] had lost one of his houses," DeFazio said, "people were drowning in their attics." DeFazio said race and class were "certainly a factor" in the failure to help the largely poor and black storm victims. "You got to ask that question, why the seeming indifference for days?" DeFazio said. "It was pathetic." DeFazio questioned whether taxpayers should fund the rebuilding of casinos along the Gulf Coast, an area repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. He said rebuilding New Orleans completely was a "more complicated question" and that parts of the city could "just be too vulnerable" to future storms to rebuild. With the nation facing the "incredibly expensive" and long-term costs of helping the impoverished victims of Katrina and rebuilding, DeFazio said Republicans should reconsider their push for cutting taxes for wealthy inheritance heirs and investors. But he said tax breaks remain Republicans highest priority. "This is insanity, these people are looting the country to benefit just a few people." — Alan Pittman
America's Bad Example America's slow, uneven and inadequate response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe has demonstrated our national hypocrisy with the whole world watching, says Eugene black activist Charles Dalton. "We have once again seen the time-honored American tradition of democratically supported policies having racial overtones," said Dalton this week.
"The whole world watched our performance," he said. "They will never trust us to do the right thing when we tell them we know what to do to make the world better. They have watched us air our collective dirty laundry." Dalton, a program manager at EWEB, said watching the unfurling drama in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Gulf has been emotionally difficult for him, and has brought to the surface years of resentments against "our domestic system of white privilege." He figures if a similar disaster were to happen in predominantly white Des Moines, Iowa, both the preparations and the response would be have been much better. "The feds knew in advance that the levies (in New Orleans) could not withstand a level 4 or 5 hurricane. They knew there were at least 100,000 people with no transportation and no money for necessities if they left. The disaster planners also knew that about 90 percent of those stuck in the city would be black." "No matter how the aftermath of Katrina plays out, the damage is done," he said. "Bush has destroyed any chance of convincing black folks that they can trust Republicans for at least a generation. The rest of the world will not trust us when we tell them we know what we are doing unilaterally." Dalton said he's also disappointed with the lack of response from conservative Christian churches. "I have not heard of any of those mega-churches offering to take in the displaced from New Orleans," he said, "I did not hear them advising their flocks to carry less stuff in their SUVs so they could offer rides to those they passed seeking rides on their way out of the area. To the contrary, a few conservative Christians have chosen to blame the victims for being liberal sinners." — Ted Taylor
The Music Lives On Rumors have been rampant about Fats Domino, Alex Chilton and other musicians missing in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. But those two musicians are alive and well, according to a running list of surviving musicians and bands now posted at the non-profit radio station WWOZ in New Orleans. The website is www.wwoz.org The long list of survivors also includes names familiar to Eugene audiences, such as Tab Benoit, Gatemouth Brown, Galactic, the Neville Brothers, Juanita Brooks, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Doc Otis, Hot Club of New Orleans, Funky Meters, The Radiators, Mother Tongue, Scott Saltzman, Rebirth Brass Band and the Marsalis family.
At
Home in the Dome Monday Travis Robinson lay on one of the more than 17,000 cots that fill the floor and concourses of the Houston Astrodome. Beside him was a chocolate cake with pink and white frosting, still in its clear plastic container. Although the Red Cross gave him the cake Saturday, he hadn't cut into it and said he won't until he finds his two sons, Travis, 7, and Tyrese, 7 months. He hadn't seen them or their mother since rescue workers evacuated him from the flooded city of New Orleans nearly a week before.
Robinson, 26, is one of 25,000 New Orleans residents living in four giant shelters in Houston, refugees from Hurricane Katrina. The cavernous Astrodome, former home of the Houston Astros baseball team, is now home to about 17,500 evacuees. It forms the cornerstone of the shelters, which include the adjacent Reliant Center and Reliant Arena, as well as the George R. Brown Convention across town. Everywhere you looked, evacuees listlessly wandered the huge arenas and their parking lots, sat in the dingy orange seats of the arena or rested on the cots arranged in neat rows on the arena floor. All around Robinson, donated goods including clothing, toys and even portable televisions were stacked on or beside the cots. Volunteers streamed by with food and water, or sat talking with evacuees on their cots. A pair of young men stood nearby and played chess, intermittently scanning the crowd for people they recognized from back home. Robinson, however, barely looked up as actor Chris Rock walked by, trailing a plume of media, police and curious evacuees. Rock was one of a half dozen celebrities including Oprah, Alicia Keyes and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. Bush, who stopped by the shelters to lend their support in the days after the shelters filled up. But it's hard to be star-struck when you've lost everything. "Most of the time I lay down," Robinson said in his soft, languid voice, tinged with the French-sounding New Orleans accent. Gripped by worry over his family's safety, he was unable to eat or sleep much. Though he had posted messages on the gigantic, crowded boards in all three of the nearby shelters and checked the growing database that the Red Cross is organizing to help evacuees locate one another, the former sous-chef was unsuccessful in finding his family. Monday he hadn't located a single person he'd known before the hurricane. "I pray a lot, I cry a lot," he said. His tale was sadly typical of the shelter residents. Lacking a car to evacuate before the storm hit, and lulled into complacency by the dozens of inconsequential evacuation orders over the years, he and his family stayed put and rode out the ferocious winds. But a few days later, as floodwaters rose in the city, he'd had an argument with his girlfriend and, in a rage, had left his apartment. Out in the streets he couldn't return because of the rising flood and was eventually rescued by helicopter from the roof of a building. The helicopter deposited him at a gathering point and he was loaded onto a bus with other evacuees and shipped to Houston with only the clothes he was wearing, in despair for having abandoned his family. Arriving in Houston that night he was fed, given space on a cot, blankets, clothing and access to the showers in the locker room. Then he began his search, but like the searches of so many others, it was fruitless. Robinson knew his family could be anywhere. With an estimated 119,000 New Orleans evacuees housed in shelters from Louisiana to Idaho, it has been a major challenge for family members trying to locate each other. The entire phone infrastructure in New Orleans is destroyed and people can't even leave each other voice messages. Furthermore, the Red Cross' database is incomplete, with evacuees still moving around the country. The lack of reunions is one reason that one of the evacuation's splashiest stories, a recently inked deal with three cruise ships to house nearly 6,000 people for the next six months, hasn't been put into motion. In Houston, many shelter residents refused to move. "The dome is home for them," Lt. Joe Leonard of the U.S. Coast Guard and area commander for the Houston shelters explained. "For residents, another immediate relocation is simply too much, too soon." So two Carnival line cruise ships, ironically named Ecstasy and Sensation, sat vacant in nearby Galveston while shelter residents posted messages on the crowded walls, stood in line to confer with volunteers with laptop computers or simply searched the crowds in the three massive buildings. "I have to have faith," said Robinson Monday. "As soon as I find them, we'll cut the cake. Then I can celebrate." But sometime during the night, he lost that faith. He threw the cake away, and cried as it tumbled out of its plastic cover into the plastic bottles and paper plates. "I didn't think I'd find them," he said. Then Tuesday morning, his family found him. His girlfriend's brother, who had also been transported to Houston, wandered by his cot, searching for him. His kids and girlfriend were in San Antonio, Texas, he said, and they'd found relatives in Beaumont, Texas. He and his sister were planning to stay there for the time being, and she'd asked her brother to look for Robinson, to bring him along. Robinson smiled, relieved — relieved that his family was safe, relieved he'd been forgiven for the argument that had separated them, possibly forever. "Now I can go there and be with them and get myself together," he said. "I don't think I'll be going back to New Orleans." Frederick Reimers is a freelance writer and student in the UO journalism program.
How To Help Victims The best way to help people in the most need is to donate money rather than goods, says local pediatrician Todd Huffman, MD. He recommends the following charities:
And if you'd like to open up your home to Katrina victims, contact: www.HurricaneHousing.org |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
