Here's the whole story of how I snuck into our poisoned neighborhood, got into our destroyed home and how I salvaged what little that I could:
I met up with Chris Reams (a friend of Shanna's from High School who was kind enough to bring me inside) at the PJ's in Mandeville around 7am and we were soon joined by Toby and Pam, two friends of his that wanted to get to their home in Midcity as well. We drove across the causeway which is in great shape and then through Metairie which is in decent shape. There are tons of RVs and work crews at Lakeside and both the Doubletree and the Galleria have hundreds of windows blown out.
We then wound our way through the Jefferson Hwy. checkpoint using Chris' business as a reason for entry and entered into Orleans Parish. The upper portions of Claiborne looked pretty good but after about 10 blocks, somewhere around the now upside down Frostop mug you start to see the waterline rising. By Central City the line is halfway up houses. We drove right through the Magnolia Projects and the silence in that neighborhood is chilling. There are abandoned boats and cars everywhere along with looted stores and burned out homes. I also started noticing the search and rescue codes on all of the homes here, a testament to the loss of life and also to the efforts of so many brave volunteers.
We finally ended up at our first stop, Chris' store Ichabod's on Magazine. The store had been looted and horribly ransacked. It was awful. We got his heat press and as many shirts as we could pack up and headed for stop number two, Toby and Pam's house. They lived on Toulouse near Solomon Pl. which is about a quarter mile to the North from our house. They only got about a foot of water in their house which was enough to destroy most of their possessions but not everything. They were able to pull out lots of different types of their belongings including clothes, bikes, a kayak, camping equipment, books and kitchen stuff. At that point I was really optimistic. I was thinking of all the cherished goodies I would be able to salvage at our house.
So we headed down out to Carrollton and made our way past the sad sight of Brocato's and Pho Tau Bay. We turned the corner at Cleveland and I started noticing the big height difference in the waterline and also a decline in the general condition of the area. Everything in our side of the neighborhood looks scattered, burned, desolate. The water went over the roofs of the cars and they were bleached grey from the toxic mess.
Turning left onto Solomon I could see my yard, scattered with limbs and debris, bizarre toys and other people's things whose destination I can only imagine. I walked up the porch, which had and upside down plastic chair that had floated in, popped open the gate door and then unlocked the swollen and bloated front door. I had to kick it in to open it and when it finally did I could only get it in about a quarter of the way. It smashed into a pile of books and magazines that had melted into a pile of pulp. When I got my head in the door the sight of our ruined home was almost too much for me to handle. I had been building myself up for this sight for 4 weeks but none of the images that I had conjured in my mind could compare to the disgusting devastation in that room.
The television had been sitting on a beautiful mid-century sewing table that belonged to my Maw-Maw. It was now reduced to a melted pile on the floor, the TV lying face down like a murder victim in a gangster film. The couch had floated halfway across the room and was covered in an innumerable spectrum of mold and fungi. One of my bookcases was half-opened, it's contents spewed out onto the ground in a wet mess. In one of the most ironic sights of the day my copy of Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus had sprouted bizarre, rhizome-like tentacles that looked like 3 inch long mung bean sprouts.
The two bookshelves in our office completely melted from the water. My collection of over 15 years reduced to a barely recognizable pile of stagnant water, mold and pulp. EVERYTHING was crawling with mold. Every variety of mold in North America is probably growing in that house. My Bianchi was coated in it. The only dry books left were covered in it. It was on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling and on any surface in between.
Things floated everywhere. I had shoes in the hallway that were left under my bed. It was so disconcerting to see the material output of our life strewn about our house, reeking, poisoned, destroyed. The bedroom was a total loss. The mess was too much. Luckily Chris and Pam were behind me and they grabbed a ton of Shanna's jewelry and other things from the mantle.
In Shanna's dressing room I found two minor miracles, all of our photographs and all of my sketchbooks/journals, which had been kept in separate plastic containers, floated on top of the water unharmed for three weeks and then managed to go unscathed from mold. We have both containers in our possession now.
In the kitchen the refridgerator had floated up and fallen on it's back. In another bizarre twist there were absolutely no insects present in the kitchen wheras at Toby and Pam's they were swarming. I was able to grab all of our dishes and glasses, several pots, lots of other barware and glassware and my Henckels knives. I made a final sweep of the house and was also able to recover many ceramic, glass and metal objects and several pictures of the walls.
The whole experience was sort of traumatic and distressing but overall I feel a strong sense of closure about the whole thing. I can stop staying up at night fretting about our possessions and the condition of our place. I know what we have and what we've lost and now I'm ready to start the next chapter of my life.
I'm also really pissed. I'm really fucking pissed off that the levees didn't hold at three major points. I want to know who is responsible and why they dropped the ball. On this trip to Chicago I hope to be able to speak with officials from the Corps to find out what they are going to do differently this time. Everything about that operation needs to change and we as citizens must force them to change if they won't do it willingly.
