True Dirt

return to post-Katrina New Orleans

I've just come back from our annual trek to New Orleans to visit friends and go to Jazz Fest. It's a major miracle that Fest exists this year, and also that our friends are back in their undamaged house in Uptown and working. That said, New Orleans is a changed place, probably forever, and our friends were quite obviously in a sort of grief depression despite their good fortune.

Miles and miles of neighborhoods--not just the infamous Lower Ninth near the levee breaks--are ghost towns. This includes poor, rich, and middle class streets of bungalows, mansions, and restored vintage houses that stand but are empty of people and possessions. Some have been gutted and await the insurance check, the FEMA flood map, or a government loan to be repaired to livability. Others were left as is after Hurricane Katrina, standing amid piles of debris and demolished roof parts, broken yard furniture, drowned cars, downed tree limbs. All are marked on the front with spraypaint: an "X", a date, a record of what was left for dead or removed. Every door or house front in New Orleans bears this mark except the few that have been painted over by returning residents. One thinks of the plague where medieval houses of the sick were marked as a warning to others.

A faint brown line traced on clapboards and brick, windows and parked cars--straight as a laser beam level across the city--marks the flood line. The peculiar sight of shrubbery top green, bottom brown is another reminder of the brackish water that rose so high and stood for so long that twenty-foot magnolia trees turned brown, lost their big glossy green leaves, and died in the swampy goo. Most of New Orleans' gardens died too, unable to withstand the weeks of inundation, half-salty water, and swirling bits of junk. Palm trees stand decapitated on the remains of front lawns, now just sandy dirt. Hibiscus and jasmine, tea plants, begonias, berginia, camellia and gardenia are all missing or dead.

The survivors are the natives, of course. The southern oaks that line the boulevards and cast their gnarled, ferny and mossed limbs across the city in a layered canopy, simply dropped their leaves in the maelstrom and are now pushing out new ones. A few succumbed to the waters and fell, unearthed giants laid on their sides in broken heaps. But the deep green ceiling of old New Orleans will live on. Some thrived after the waters receded. The native cyprus trees are brilliant chartreuse with new growth, firmly rooted and wondrous apparitions amid the grey-brown wastes.

In the islands of slightly higher ground, among them the French Quarter and downtown, the Garden District, and Uptown, New Orleans gardens are in the full flush of an exuberant spring. Flowering roses, gardenias, ginger, and hibiscus create a delirious swirl of color and scent walking the lanes of Uptown where only the occasional blue tarp covers a roof and the ubiquitous white rectangle of FEMA trailers is a rare sight. The tree canopy has been severely diminished, however. By chainsaw-wielding clean-up crews with a mandate to clear any limb within four feet of a telephone wire. In a random patchwork, large trees fell--often on roofs--and have been removed. In my friends' garden the disappearance of several large sycamore trees in the neighbor's yard has flooded their small bricked courtyard with sunlight. The bromeliads and staghorn fern are thriving.

I kept thinking about another, closer disaster as I toured the devastated streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, now eight months after the flood. I thought about the Oakland Hills firestorm of twelve years ago and how completely the monster waves of flame consumed an old and architecturally-layered, densely vegetated neighborhood of over 2,000 homes. Today the fire zone is a largely treeless, strangely homogenous district of McMansions packed property-line to property-line, expensively landscaped with "fire-safe" shrubbery and inhabited by people too rich or too busy to spend their Saturdays tending the front flower border, or pulling weeds and talking to the next door neighbor. One is hard pressed to find a door, or a neighbor among the walled compounds.

The people of New Orleans are waiting. For decisions by the politicians in Baton Rouge and Washington D.C., for insurance companies to settle their claims, for the Army Corps of Engineers to finish their levee repairs, for the new flood zone boundaries to be redrawn, for hurricane season to begin again. They wait in tiny FEMA trailers, and friends' spare bedrooms, in Houston, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles to see if they can come home again. And the gardens of New Orleans wait too, the ones barely hanging on in deserted neighborhoods and the ones that exist only in the imaginations of the gardeners who created them and for whom they are never entirely gone.

Posted by briggs at May 12, 2006 8:33 AM