Two more bodies were found just yesterday, wrapped in a grave of wreckage in the lower Ninth Ward.
posted by jeremy on March 20, 2006
In the months before Mardi Gras, some of us had wished that the city could mobilize itself in some other fashion. But attempts to establish a national Mardi Gras, a moment of silence, a display of upside-down flags of distress, all failed. Instead, New Orleanians did what they always do. They turned themselves inside out. Mardi Gras was a parade of misery, and everywhere you looked, people were laughing.
From an article by Michael Tisserand
Around 140,000 have returned to a city that, pre-katrina, idled around 480,000. From the vantage of the French Quarter things could seem almost normal. The streets hum with the usual drunken revelry, maybe 75% of the businesses are back in operation, people are making money and spending it freely. Still, nearly every business has a help wanted sign in the window and whereas many places were 24 hours before the storm, now most close around nine o'clock. This is excepting the bars of course. This is New Orleans. Fish without water, politicians without lobbyist, would have an easier time of it than Big Easiers without bourbon, vodka or beer.
Now once you exit the French Quarter and head towards the Marigny things get a little stranger. The occasional house lays in ruins. Minor to major storm damage still prevalent. Now you hit the Bywater and various houses seem to have exploded... & Yeah, you think, they probably did. Hang a left somewhere, get yourself into the Ninth Ward proper. I guarantee, unless you've been to some third-world warzone, then you've never seen anything like this.
Utter & absolute destruction. Houses laying on other houses scuttled in the avenues. Drifts of personal possessions, many seemingly precious, like so much flotsam. Things have burned, exploded, tho most of it is simply drowned in dried toxic muck. The waterlines tell so many stories. Sometimes you wonder about the holes in the roofs. What happened there, then? What happened to all of these lives? These remains... These carapaces.
& This is what remains of maybe 70% of the city.
Mardi Gras has come & gone. There was some debate, I suppose, over whether or not it should have gone on amongst all of this tragedy. There was talk of disrespect of the Gone, the waste of precious resources... But in the circles I run in, there was no debate. The party, as they say, must go on. But I think that most of us understood it this way, that this was no mere celebration... This was a wake.
A wake for the Fallen, the Gone, those that Left, those that have yet to Return.
For what we all lost, all who lived, who live on... here.
A storm moves in as I sit here on a monday afternoon in New Orleans, writing this. There are still so many questions. Who did wrong? Who did right? Where does this city, this inept drunken hell of a town, where does it go from here? What does it take to kill the soul of something so vast and what does it take to nurse it back to what it was before? What do we want from our future here? & mostly, what do we ask of ourselves?
I suspect the answers will present themselves, in time. They have to, right? There is no other way. Strains of live jazz float up from the street below. Somewhere somebody laughs, loudly & long, true mirth. Somebody shouts hello to a friend. Even in hell, hello!
Baby, I tell you, the party has just gotta go on...
