[StBernard] The many faces of America

[Westley Annis]

The many faces of America
It would be tragic to lose the life of New Orleans
By MARK DANCE
Thu. Jul 17 - 5:28 AM

EARLIER this year, 53 Dalhousie students boarded a bus in Halifax and headed
for New Orleans, La. I suppose it was the "alternative spring break," and
there was strong feeling on the bus that building houses with Habitat for
Humanity would be more productive than lying on a beach.

It was about three in the morning when we arrived to stay the night in
Washington, D.C. I had never been to Washington before, and many of us
thought the eight-hour stop would be much better spent seeing the city than
sleeping. Walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in the dead of night, with the
streets almost deserted, was pretty neat. Buildings of white stone cover
entire city blocks. As an Ottawa boy, my concept of what a capital city
looks like slipped away - there was a lot more power in D.C. than I'd ever
felt. 

The monuments glowed in the distance and the whole scene felt like the last
few frames of an especially tragic West Wing episode. I walked up to the
Washington Monument and tentatively touched the stone - a massive obelisk,
like those of ancient Egypt. Our tour continued, and the pure history and
legacy of the place was entirely overwhelming. 

I stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr.
told Americans about his dream. I looked up at the statue of Jefferson and
saw his vision of simultaneous trust in God and belief in reason. I read
Roosevelt's chiselled, immortalized words: "We must be the great arsenal of
democracy." I was, for a moment, seduced by what it seems to mean to be an
American.

We left Washington in the morning and a day and a half later, our bus
arrived in New Orleans. What a mess. Two and a half years after hurricane
Katrina and whole neighbourhoods looked like they had been hit by a bomb the
day before. Only 60 per cent of the population is back. 

Large, spray-painted Xs mark those houses that have been gutted. At the
bottom of each X, a single digit tells passersby the number of bodies found
in that particular house during clean-up. I forgot about Washington the
moment that I walked into the first abandoned house: clothes, dolls, the
scraps of lives lay strewn across the floor. Nobody was coming back for
these things.

We were lucky to be able to help. We were building at the Musician's
Village, a community especially designed to attract artists back to town.
The birthplace of jazz and a city that relies heavily on tourism, New
Orleans needs these people to return.

The work was challenging and rewarding. I got to build roofs, use chop-saws
and sheath gables, haul drywall and paint siding, and generally act as tough
as I could manage. I got a better understanding of what a place to live
means to people and what it must feel like for that place to disappear, to
be simply swept away by the current. We were proud of what we had done and
what we had built.

Before we knew it, we were loading onto the bus and steering back north. We
smiled and laughed and talked about how we did a good thing. Slowly, though,
the different moments of my trip started to fall together. My mind began to
connect dots, and as I talked to other people, I realized they had a vague
sense of the dilemma as well. How can Washington and New Orleans both be in
America?

In September 2005, two days after the hurricane had moved on and whole
houses were submerged in garbage-stew, the federal government had barely
made a move. For a long time during our visit, no one explained why the
locals of St. Bernard Parish, where we were staying, were so happy to see us
and why they were so enthusiastic about us being Canadian. As it turns out,
the Mounties were the first wave of relief into St. Bernard, even before
FEMA. Not only that, but locals informed us British relief had got to some
parts of New Orleans before American relief did. Strange.

The levies have been cemented back together, but in no way improved or
elevated. The houses that we were building stood on concrete blocks a mere
four feet off the ground. Toxic residue from flood waters keeps whole
neighbourhoods of New Orleans poisonous and uninhabitable. It seems little
is being done by the government of America for the people of America. New
Orleans is a long way from D.C., and its story is not told by any of the
quotes chiselled onto Washington's monuments.

On our way back to Halifax, we stopped in New York City for the afternoon. I
went for a run in Central Park and then headed to the American Museum of
Natural History with a few others. There we found an exhibit about water and
humanity's relationship with it throughout the ages. An entire wall is
devoted to the Mississippi Delta, and I got a sinking feeling. New Orleans
lies on a shelf of sediment, it says. There's a quote: "It took the
Mississippi River 6,000 years to build the Louisiana coast. It took man 75
years to wash away a third of it."

Because of the placement of cities on the Delta, the natural distribution of
sediment by the river has been choked. Every 13 seconds, an area the size of
a tennis court is swallowed back up into the ocean by erosion. New Orleans
is sinking.

I don't pretend to offer any solutions to this problem, nor do I know if
I've correctly diagnosed it. I feel as though I have a lot more research to
do about what the government has actually been up to and what is going to
happen to the city in the future. Even through the dust and rubble, it was
clear that New Orleans is a place of so much life and so much culture. The
possibility of that disappearing forever is tragic.

Mark Dance has finished his second year in contemporary studies at the
University of King's College.