1 Dead in Attic (21 page)

Sitting at a table at the busy Flour Power Confectionery on Paris Road, one of the few commercial lunch joints open in the parish, Nunez Community College history professor Ron Chapman lays out the hard truth in one chilling statistic.

“Our soil is soft,” he says. “A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-two pounds. Do the math. The entire infrastructure of St. Bernard was compromised by the weight of the water. The flood literally compressed the parish.”

He pauses, sips, then says, “Think about that.”

I think about that guy I saw laying sod in a battered subdivision. And I think again about the only thing I could say.

Good luck.

After witnessing the chaos, confusion, and clutter of last summer's massive evacuation and displacement from New Orleans—people wandering from town to town with everything they owned in a shopping bag while carting pets and octogenarians halfway across the country—my wife and I decided that our life wasn't complicated enough.

But we don't have any octogenarians in New Orleans to haul around with us. So we got a dog.

She's a freaky-looking yellow mutt who was abandoned near Lafayette during Hurricane Rita and was on the kill line in a temporary euthanasia clinic in Acadiana when a friend of ours stepped in and rescued her.

She has one blue eye and one brown and her name was Luna but my kids wanted to call her Biscuit so her full name is Luna Biscuit, which I like, because that's French for “Moon Pie.”

Sort of.

But this story is not about my dog, not really, but about the landscape and horizon she has allowed me to revisit here in this city I love and that she has introduced to my children.

We're river rats now. We hang out down by the water with our dog. On the banks of the Big River, the Mighty Mississipp, that brown serpentine of lore, legend, mystery, romance, mythology, literature, song, and history.

And, yes—of cliché, hackneyed antebellum commercialism and volumes of bad poetry.

But still. What a grip it has on the American imagination, character, and identity.

And it's strange how, even though the city's economic livelihood depends on it, both for industry and tourism, it is so often unseen, unnoticed, in our day-to-day living.

It seems very few of us around here actually interact with the river on a regular basis—on any cognizant sensual or emotional level—other than to drive over it, drop kids off to play soccer near it in Audubon Park, or absorb its majesty from inside the hermetic glassed-in cocoon of a tall office building.

But it is us. It is everything, really.

Over twenty-two years and at seven different New Orleans addresses, I have never lived more than eight blocks from the river. But still, there have been periods of time—years at a time—when I have lived in nearly total disconnect from it.

I've had my occasional dalliances. I remember, in my younger and more vulnerable years, heading to the levee with friends after the Uptown bars closed at daybreak, and we would open our trunks, fetch our golf clubs, wait until tankers came by, and then try to drive balls and hit them.

This was stupid, and not just because the tankers are a half mile away (their immensity on that watery chimera makes them seem so close) but also because it is a perfect waste of $2.50 with every swing of the club.

Once, while I was drinking with a prospective girlfriend on the river many years ago, she took off all her clothes and went swimming and that freaked me out beyond words and reason and she wound up contracting some kind of wicked skin rash.

Let's just say we eventually drifted apart.

When I was single and had two dogs—and a hell of a lot more free time—I used to frequent the popular Uptown dog levee, the long patch of open space where Leake Avenue meets Magazine Street, right by the Corps of Engineers headquarters.

It's a busy social scene where legions of dog owners gather daily to let their charges run free and wild off leashes—a practice that is not quite legal but that the authorities have mostly allowed to exist over the years.

Dogs run crazy with play on the levee and tire themselves to their core and the pet owners hang out and talk issues of the day or gossip about regulars who aren't there at the moment.

But most of the dog walkers don't venture down to the back side, to the rugged and brambled shoreline, and it is here that the adventurous go and this is where I take my kids and my dog now, every chance I get.

It's not a pretty place, not by a long shot, at least not in any conventional sense. Some folks who frequent the area—I'm not sure whether it's kids or homeless folks—seem to revel in breaking their empty bottles here.

And the water, of course, is almost always a thick, muddy brown and all manner of random maritime debris floats ashore: empty gallon jugs, plastic rope, hard hats, chunks of Styrofoam, tires, work gloves, etc.

Watching the massive tankers churn up and down the river allows me to teach the kids about the three staples of Louisiana industry: petroleum, agriculture, and pollution.

Nevertheless, we love it here. It is an area largely primitive and ungoverned and probably no proper place for a dog or children, but it is there and we are drawn to it.

My dog runs through the thicket and splashes in the water with other dogs and my kids seek out their secret places and conduct treasure hunts and climb the small trees and I am teaching them, without success, so far, how to skim stones.

There is a rope swing, and when we are feeling particularly daring—when I have my protective daddy guard down—we explore several old rusted barges nearby, run aground and rotting for what looks like decades.

The kids' imaginations run wild in this environment, and they play out a thousand pretend scenarios of danger, rescue, and travel. “You're the wolf,” my daughter tells the youngest boy, and the three of them are off and running, ducking and climbing to magical places—castles, pirate ships, and jungles—that I can no longer see at the tired age of forty-five.

Watching my little Huck Finns and Becky What's-her-name at vigorous play on the banks of the river makes me feel so . . . I don't know. Southern?

I have taught my kids which way is upriver and which way is down and what there is in each direction. As spring has progressed, the beach area has shrunk dramatically and I have told them about melting snow in the upper Midwest and I'm pretty sure this is an abstract concept to them other than the fact that the rope swing has, in the past few weeks, become inaccessible due to the swollen tide.

I tell them they can swing on it again at some time in the future, depending on the precipitation on the Great Plains this summer, and, again, we're a little over their heads on this one.

A lot of it is over my head, too. I don't pretend to understand all geographical and hydrologic underpinnings at work on this river and their relationship to our city and my house, but, like everyone else around here, I have learned a hell of a lot about it in the past year.

I do understand that man's mercantile and arrogant determination to control this river over the years—to control nature itself—is a big part of the problem, as the river has been restrained from seeking its own course over the centuries and is confined within unnatural boundaries we have set.

And I know that to reverse this march of progress and engineering would surely spell our doom as a community—if the river left us, as she surely would if left to her own devices, we would be left with nothing.

At the same time, its containment prevents it from building the protective barriers and wetland masses we need to sustain our very physical presence. Here on Earth.

Talk about a conundrum.

I don't know what's on all those barges and container ships and tankers that go by, but I know that our nation's economy would be ruined without it—all that food and fuel and petrochemical whatnot and whatever, all going this way and that.

People from out of town ask me since The Thing: Do you think New Orleans will survive?

I tell them: America has no choice.

Sometimes when I say that, I feel like Luna Biscuit howling at the moon. I am haunted by mortality issues as never before.

Sometimes I look at the river while my kids are off on their nature walks, and I ask it: Will you kill us one day? Is that your plan?

I get no answer I can brook. The river, it just runs by silent and mischievous, in swirls and eddies that I swear sometimes look like the Devil's smile, and seems to whisper to me: That is for you to find out, my friend.

Only time will tell.

I was riding in the back of a cab recently through a wasted neighborhood full of damaged and abandoned houses, pick a neighborhood, any neighborhood.

The driver and I were talking about the future, the immediate future. Specifically, we were talking about June 1.

You don't need me to tell you what day that is.

Taking the pulse of the town and its citizenry, the driver told me, “I've never seen or felt anything like this. I'll tell you, brother: I'm scared. I'm real scared.”

Now, let me preface here by saying that I have spent much of my adult life in the backs of cabs disagreeing with their drivers on basically every premise we've ever discussed, whether it be sports, politics, or culture.

I have worked hard in life to become the antihack; I am doggedly optimistic, nonreactionary, and deodorized. But I admit, I fell right in line with this guy.

If I had to try to gauge the mood of the city right now, I'd venture that it's not good—no matter whom you wanted to be mayor. There is the unmistakable odor of malaise in the air.

The five classic stages of grief (anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and elections) have taken hold of this city in menacing waves—constant, undulating, nauseating, relentless waves—to the point that there have been sixty, maybe seventy stages of grief since The Thing.

The high points have been easy to define: Mardi Gras, French Quarter Festival, JazzFest. The unequivocal success of these events and the community pride they ignited were the surest signs we've seen that (A) we can indeed be saved and (B) we are indeed worth saving.

Then came the sweep of high school and college commencement exercises across the region these past few weeks, annually joyous rituals to behold, but this year each one a small miracle of survival, endurance, resilience, and determination to plant our flag in this soil, our weak, peaty soil. Our home.

But all that is over now. The high holy holidays are past us and the celebrations are muted and what lies ahead is . . . well, truthfully, not much.

It's going to be hotter than hell around here this summer, and the convention and tourism industries aren't exactly booming. Small businesses and frail marriages are going to take a beating, and many flat-out won't survive.

I know several families who are choosing to get out now—now that school is over and before the houses of cards come tumbling down. They're packing and bailing. And it's not because of Ray Nagin's reelection—as many suggested would be cause to pull the trigger—but simply because there are better jobs and happier people elsewhere.

You know how you can feel around here, walking the afternoon streets in the thick of the summer—you feel like the walking dead, only the dead don't have any worries and aren't waiting for a call back from Entergy, Allstate, and FEMA.

The dead don't need flood insurance to buy a new house, and for that you almost have to envy them.

The malignant vestiges of the Jefferson and Morial machines are stinking this place up worse than old refrigerators. Our levees aren't ready and the government is in gridlock and street crime is picking up a frightening head of steam and it's impossible—no, unreasonable—not to look in the mirror and ask yourself: Is this how I want to live?

What are you going to do the first time Bob Breck comes on the TV screen with that crazed Armageddon look in his eyes and the Super Doppler shows nothing but a big red swirl in the Gulf and—admit it—you still haven't gotten all your vital paperwork in one place as you've been promising yourself, and maybe you've got a generator now and maybe not, but what the hell difference does it make?

What are you going to do now? Other than telling yourself that you're not going to Houston this time no matter what happens—just what is your plan?

Whoever thought there would be a day of dread more wicked than April 15? But here it is, two pages ahead of us on the calendar. The feds could drop $80 billion in our laps right now, but what's that going to do for you in June, July, and August?

That's why the cabdriver is scared. That's why I'm scared.

And I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm not trying to lay out some doomsday scenario or send you running to the local Walgreens to re-up your meds.

I'm just saying: It's going to get tough around here this summer. Real tough and you can count on it, so you better dig in. The real fight is just beginning; prepare to defend yourself against the psychological plunder.

I recommend comfortable clothing, lots of water, and an ax in your attic.

Our ranks are in delicate balance, but there is something profoundly rewarding, uplifting even, in living in a community where the majority of folks are in civic lockstep. For whatever reason—because you're artistic, eccentric, or alcoholic or simply because your mama was born here—you have chosen to remain.

I've never been in the military, but I think I understand now what it's like to engage in battle and know—unhesitatingly and unwaveringly—that the guys beside me and behind me have got my back when the hammer comes down.

Semper Fi and all that. I get it now. And I've got your back, neighbor. You can count on that.

That cabdriver I was talking about? After driving in silence for a while, he said, “You notice all the sunflowers growing all over the place?”