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For New Orleans
Aug. 31st, 2005 02:26 pmNew Orleans is under the sea. I’m haunted not by the big picture but by the details, the anguish we can’t know from our (currently) safe vantage points, but which exists nonetheless. Someone’s house is completely submerged, windows smashed as the water forced itself in. Someone can’t find their parents, their child, their spouse. Someone was too ill to leave their one-story home, and has drowned in their bed.
It was a place I’d always wanted to visit, one of only two US cities left that I had absolute plans to see before I die. I always imagined it smelled like mysterious mixtures of spices, and of bakeries, of unfamiliar tea, of incense from little shops with dark velvet curtains. A place where Catholic churches and voodoo suppliers co-existed on the same street, and where Cajun people spoke in an argot as dense and rich as gumbo. That's how I imagined it.
I check the news websites every few hours. People are being evacuated to neighboring states, leaving every detail of their life behind. Job – gone. Pets – missing or not allowed in the shelters. Car – submerged. Life – changed, down the very last atom. 20,000 people or more will be transported from the flooded Superdome to Houston’s Astrodome, where they will have to live for as long as until December, maybe longer. Cities do heal themselves. New York did. But this will take much more.
And our President had to be forced from his hammock-swinging vacation by an insistent Mississippi senator.
It was a place I’d always wanted to visit, one of only two US cities left that I had absolute plans to see before I die. I always imagined it smelled like mysterious mixtures of spices, and of bakeries, of unfamiliar tea, of incense from little shops with dark velvet curtains. A place where Catholic churches and voodoo suppliers co-existed on the same street, and where Cajun people spoke in an argot as dense and rich as gumbo. That's how I imagined it.
I check the news websites every few hours. People are being evacuated to neighboring states, leaving every detail of their life behind. Job – gone. Pets – missing or not allowed in the shelters. Car – submerged. Life – changed, down the very last atom. 20,000 people or more will be transported from the flooded Superdome to Houston’s Astrodome, where they will have to live for as long as until December, maybe longer. Cities do heal themselves. New York did. But this will take much more.
And our President had to be forced from his hammock-swinging vacation by an insistent Mississippi senator.