New Haven Independent

* * * *

Driving down Bayou LaFourche, my eye catches on three sights: the enormous, stately live oaks, with their sheltering branches making them wider than they are tall; a potpourri of commercial and pleasure boats, with memorable names like “Cajun Viagra”; and under-construction low-end new housing with pretentious names like “Acadia Plantation.” Oh, and many signs like this one, which somehow reminded me of the struggle to unionize Yale-New Haven Hospital.

I’ve been focusing on two areas in my reporting from Katrina Country. I’m looking at the question of whether the state’s coastal wetlands can be saved, after a century of canal dredging, levee building, natural subsidence of the land, and the threats from global warming. And at the issue of Katrina and Rita survivors’ mental health, including post-traumatic stress, depression, divorce, and violence of all kinds (murder, suicide, family violence). To add urgency to that topic, a few days after I arrived, four people were killed in New Orleans in 24 hours, for a total of seven in a three-day period. And Mayor DeStefano and Cisco Ortiz think they have problems.

(Click here to read the previous diary entry from Katrina Country.)

Many of the people who live here will start crying when they talk to visitors, as a particularly horrible memory surfaces. Many of the volunteers who come to help also cry at the enormity of people’s suffering — and also, from the joy of solidarity they feel. I don’t cry that often when I’m down here, but I do sometimes feel overwhelmed and teary-eyed. I’m also still amazed at people’s resiliency in the face of a very slow recovery.

Coastal Louisiana is criss-crossed with north-south bayous running to the Gulf and 8,000 miles of canals, mostly dug by the oil and gas industry. It’s estimated that the industry is responsible for 30 to 40 percent of the destruction of the wetlands, but no one is holding it accountable. Same with the state’s elected officials. Kerry St. Pe (pictured), director of the Barataria Terrebone National Estuary Program, encompassing most of the coastal Louisiana wetlands, tells me that anybody pointing the finger at industry or the state’s elected officials for not moving on the problem “should curve that finger around to ourselves” because “we the people” have not demanded accountability — at least not yet.

The people — the Cajuns, the Houma natives and everyone else — who live here know their way of life is threatened on one level, but on another level they don’t seem willing to change their behavior. For example, wakes from boats eat away at the fragile wetlands surrounding the bayous, but on our way down to Port Fourchon on the Gulf, the road parallels a wide bayou posted with signs, “No Wake.” A local in a motorboat is keeping up with us on the highway, doing at least 40 miles per hour, creating a helluva wake.

I’m headed down with my friends Rochelle and Lanore to a ceremony to kick off the second phase of an elevated highway from Port Fourchon to Leeville, about 10 miles away. The governor’s there; the area’s congressman is there, plus other honchos. The point of the road is to protect, during major storms including hurricanes, the transport of the 18 percent of the nation’s oil and gas supplies that come in through Port Fourchon. My friends say that any additional protection the highway affords the residents during storm evacuations is purely incidental.

These folks sure know how to party. A huge tent has been set up overlooking a bayou. After more than an hour of speechifying, hundreds of invited guests sit down to a meal of — what else? — boiled crawfish (pictured). Plus shrimp, oysters, bread pudding, beer, and more. It was all paid for by … yes, the oil and gas companies.

After the shindig, we drive down to Grand Isle, which is now the first line of defense from storms coming in from the Gulf, since all the barrier islands are now under water. For more than a century it’s been a weekend destination for families, who built camps practically abutting each other all along the perimeter facing the water. It was hard hit by Katrina (or was it Rita?), but, nevertheless, many people are rebuilding or building new “camps,” like this palatial one. I can’t imagine these homeowners can get insurance, but Lanore says they can, though it’s very expensive.

One vivid example of the encroaching water is that many phone poles now sit in open water, like this one. People who’ve lived here even just 10 years all have stories of the drastic loss of land around their homes and the places they used to visit, all underwater.

I loved visiting the bayou, deepening my friendships there, and sleeping all alone in a room — unlike the dorm situation that preceded and followed my time there.

Once back in the city, I visited the one elementary school open in St. Bernard Parish. Women from the Louisiana Children’s Museum are conducting a program call “Play Helps,” in a geodesic dome set up in a courtyard. They’re concerned about the mental health of the children who survived the storm and its traumatic aftermath. This is a time for them to play, run around and make noise (none of which they can do very well in a small FEMA trailer). Pictured, some kids are acting out the story of a butterfly landing on a tree.

When they were prompted to make a mural about spring, a helicopter (like the ones that plucked people from their rooftops) made it front and center into the picture — indicating they are still working out their feelings about their ordeal.

I’m staying now at the volunteer headquarters of Common Ground, an amazing organization that sprang to life within a few days of Katrina hitting New Orleans. More than 12,000 volunteers have come down to help with house gutting, rebuilding, wetlands restoration, toxic soil cleanup, public housing tenant support, and more. One of my roommates, Katie, is ecstatic after spending a day sunk past her knees in the mud, planting marsh grass in the bayou.

I drop off a few boxes of medical supplies I’ve managed to collect in New Haven to the second free clinic Common Ground has opened, this one in the Lower Ninth Ward. The woman who runs it — a nurse who turned her home into a clean, bright, well-equipped facility, while she moved into her new husband’s house — is extraordinarily grateful, thanking me profusely and telling me she’s blessed. She gives me a tour, including of the ob-gyn exam room, and I think I have to bring my dear New Haven friend, Janet the midwife, to volunteer down here. She would love it.

I stop at another Common Ground house in the Lower Ninth, the famous “blue house” that New Havener Frank Panzarella helped rehab on a trip down here in January ‘06, to get a T-shirt from Albert (pictured with his sign to the tourists who pay money to a tour company to see the devastation).

I get lost (as usual) trying to get to my next destination. I ask directions of a man on the sidewalk who’s chasing a toddler. I thank him and ask him how he’s doing. He gives me a big grin, hugs his granddaughter, and says, “We have new life; we have to keep going.”

Amen.