[StBernard] The End of the World

[Westley Annis]

The End of The World

In St. Bernard Parish, Katrina wasn't content to simply damage or destroy
virtually every building standing. The storm seems to have made a concerted
effort to erase vast swaths of a place a lot of people call home. 
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Chris Rose

There used to be a sign at the end of the road in Delacroix, at the
termination of Highway 300, that said "End of the World." 

The official state Department of Transportation and Development map
identifies the endless expanse beyond this point as, simply "Hunting and
Trapping." 

Of course, that sign and that map predate Aug. 29. 

On that date, the sign disappeared, washed away like just about every
man-made structure in lower St. Bernard Parish. The End of the World went
from being a commentary on geography to a statement on what happened here on
Aug. 29. The sign itself washed out to sea. Obliterated. 

Some other time, some other place. 

And the land mass that reaches forever southeast to Black Bay and Breton
Sound -- next stop, Cuba -- is currently of indeterminate quality as the
famous pristine Louisiana sporting grounds it once was. 

Standing at what was once the End of the World, a commercial fisherman named
Cap'n Rocky Morales, a brick house of a man, gestures toward the horizon --
the Hunting and Trapping -- and says: "It was marshland before. Now it's
just water." 

Indeed, as far as the eye can see, mostly water, with lumps of land trying
to rise up, trying to break through, trying to dry out. Trying to exist.
Kind of like St. Bernard itself. 

The tidal surge that Katrina's brutal storm bands pushed into this land took
everything, including the sure footing, geographically speaking (and perhaps
psychologically as well). 

There are boats where they shouldn't be and no houses where there should.
And in the trees, everything, crazy stuff, it makes no sense: furniture,
appliances, tires, clothes, ice chests, a toilet -- all of it hanging like
some nightmare vision of Christmas in the Oaks. 

Katrina in the Oaks. 

And there are blue trawler nets everywhere -- everywhere -- fanned out in
branches like spider webs across the expanse for miles and it's impossible
not to think of Bob Dylan's song about Delacroix: "Tangled Up in Blue." 

The whole damn place is tangled up in blue nets and just trash. An unholy
mess. Coyote ugly and there's not enough beer in the world to make it look
pretty. 

"It's not so good," Cap'n Rocky says. "I was leery about coming back here at
first. But I was born here." 

And that explains a lot, particularly why he would try to carve a life here
out of the matchsticks that remain. The inexorable lure of a sense of place.
Home sweet home. A man's trailer is his castle. 

Cap'n Rocky was born half a mile up Bayou Terre aux Boeufs and he has moved
only this far -- third house from the End of the World -- in his 42 years. 

Funny, sort of, but he doesn't even know how to spell the name of the bayou
he has lived on all his life. Apparently no one has ever asked him to spell
it before. 

It has been a life uncomplicated and on his own terms and this is where he
will stay, despite the fact that his house vanished and everything in it is
a memory now. 

"When most people came back here, the only way they found their houses was
by the steps," says Cap'n Rocky. "That's the only way we knew." 

And it's true. All that seems unmolested by the fury are the steps to the
doors of the houses that aren't there, stairways to nowhere. 

Lined up and down the highway, they call to mind that macabre joke about the
little black boxes on airplanes that always seem to survive a crash: Why
didn't they make the houses out of the same material they used for the
steps? 

Delacroix, it's just wreckage and steps and ghosts. No ice, no fuel. Hardly
a way for a man who makes his living on water to carry on, but carry on he
will. His life is the water. Give Cap'n Rocky a boat and some bait and he
will make it. 

And not necessarily alone. "Let's see," he muses over the question of who
else has come back to live at the End of the World. "My uncle is up the
road; he's back. There's my other uncle. And there's that old man up there;
I guess there's four or five families." 

But more will come back, in that prideful and insolent Louisiana fashion
that The Thing has carved into our hearts. 

You can see already at the End of the World at least two dozen stacks of new
crab traps set out on empty lots where people used to live. Local fishers
have delivered them down here and will get busy with them when they can
clear the channel and if they can get new boats and if they can find a place
to live and if it doesn't all happen again this summer then, well . . . then
everything will be just peachy in Delacroix. 

"It doesn't pay to worry about it," Cap'n Rocky says. "Whatever's going to
happen will happen." 

I don't suppose Bob Dylan will get down here to Delacroix when he comes to
town to play the Jazzfest in a few weeks. It's just not a song anyone wants
to hear right now. 

. . . . . . . 


Moving up the road, up toward civilization on Highway 300, there is smoke on
the horizon to the east, off toward Chandeleur Sound. No one knows what it
is. Grass fire is everyone's guess. Natural causes. Probably methane. What
doesn't drown burns. 

This area is supposed to be the region's natural defense against hurricanes
and if it were a dog, someone would shoot it. It's flat, clear-cut by winds
and water and you look at it now and you'd almost think God took the sixth
day of Creation off and turned over the job of Louisiana's natural barriers
to the Corps of Engineers. 

It's scary is what it is, all tangled up in blue. 

Over in Yscloskey, at the foot of Lake Borgne, there are lots of trailers
and tents and fishers who look like they're still wiping the unbelievability
of it all out of their eyes. 

Dazed and confused. It's all rust and incongruity. And more steps to
nowhere. 

In Violet, there's a sacred place called Merrick Cemetery. The caretakers of
the place don't know how old it is; just that it's 19th century and that
there are slaves buried there. 

The flood came through like stampeding water buffalo, plowing, piling and
stacking the simple white above-ground tombs like toy blocks. When the water
receded, it left a jumble of concrete that looked like bad modern sculpture
all tilted this way and that. 

Scores of vaults broke open and the caskets inside them broke open and the
bodies -- those that were found -- are unidentified. Add to the indignity
that the cemetery records in a nearby house were destroyed. 

So much for eternal rest. 

There is a long line of new gray tombs that look like they were hurriedly
made of pavement and they're lined up along the length of the west side of
the cemetery. 

A man tidying up the grounds with a weed whacker explains: "A lot of 'em
came out and they don't have any names so they put them there." On them, are
markings: ME 12-00001, ME 12-00054, ME 12-00107, and so on. 

That's who they are now. 

Some families have come back and tried to locate where the tombs were before
Aug. 29. In one case, someone has stuck the end of a yellow kitchen broom --
bristles up -- to mark where a headstone should be. 

Just past here, past the house that's painted "Maw Maw, Call Chad" and the
trailer that says "We Shooters Looters," the road to Plaquemines Parish is
washed out. 

This area has the distinct air of a place you'd call the middle of nowhere
unless, of course, you lived there. In that case, it's home. 

. . . . . . . 


In the Story Park subdivision, in the lost suburbia halfway between the
middle of nowhere and Chalmette, three teenage boys skateboard through empty
streets piled shoulder-high with debris. 

The voyeur accustomed to the brown water mark of New Orleans and Metairie --
the line that measures our misery index -- would be confused here. 

The houses were clearly flooded but there are no water marks. The riddle is
easily solved by the appearance of a tree and other debris that settled on a
rooftop when the water went back to where it came from. 

It's just as bad as it gets; it's the Lower 9th but with low brick houses
that refused to budge. Painted on one: "Destroy this Memory." 

On another, a homeowner has painted a one-finger salute to Allstate. 

There are several "For Sale by Owner" signs up and, way up close to the 40
Arpent Canal, the rear door of St. Bernard Parish, there's a guy laying new
sod. 

On a sad and long cul-de-sac where cleaning crews have yet to clear, is a
man carrying hope -- or is it delusion? -- onto his yard, one strip at a
time. 

It's hard to know what to say to this guy. So I offer: "Good luck, man." 

"Thank you," he says, and toils on while the skateboarders down the block
rule their street without fear of oncoming traffic or a cranky neighbor
telling them to cut out all that infernal racket. 

. . . . . . . 


No question about it, nature and the corps opened a can of whoop-ass on St.
Bernard. It's impossible not to wonder about its future, not to worry about
its precarious location between the river on one side and the ruinous
man-made Gulf Outlet on the other, and then the lakes and the sounds whose
shores move closer day by day, week by week, the disappearing coastline now
more famous than the hunting and fishing grounds. 

There's little doubt: It can't possibly take another hit like this. 

But the hustle of the streets is constant, traffic off and running on the
main streets, Chalmette literally pulsing with commerce and cars as people
forge ahead -- that Louisiana insolence: This land is our land. No one is
going to take it away. 

No one trusts the corps and no one trusts the government. Nature, they'll
take their chances with. Live free or die trying. 

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 62 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. 

. . . . . . . 


Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose at timespicayune.com, or
(504) 826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.