extreme destruction of property, loss of life, and altered psyche of all who experienced the flooding as the result of Hurricane Katrina, I merely want to champion ‘the call for hope.’ New Orleans stands out in an outstanding way. The events of the week of August 29, 2005, are a wake-up call for us to treat one another with respect. Rushing floodwaters pounding people’s places and spaces, changing land, minds, and roots presented unpredicted trauma.
I’ve lived and worked in New Orleans for most of my life, although once I left for the Big Apple to study. Other cities I’ve called home cannot compare. The climate is excellent year-round. The landscape is a marvelous mixture of evergreens. The grass, oaks, pines, cypress, palms, ferns, and bright red dogwoods along with the bayous, ponds, and lakes are delightful. The airport is 20 minutes from the farthest point. The French Quarter probably enjoys some obscure distinction for having the most densely confined collection of establishments for having a good time. The buildings in all sections (wards) are wonderful examples of architecture from around the world, and the people living and working there are the type of folk you meet and instantly consider friends and family. That sounds corny and trite, but having been asked by so many people over the past three months, “What do you think about New Orleans? Will they rebuild it? Will it be the same? Will people that you know come back there to live? Will they fix the levees?” I have to say, “Yes!”
I realize now, sitting in an airplane seat at roughly 33,000 feet above the ground, that those and other sorts of questions are silly and foolish. Having just browsed the New York Times Sunday Edition, December 4, 2005, which covers world topics ranging from the war to a book review on Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, I felt compelled to add my opinion to the matter of rebuilding a city.
Diane Raines Ward’s book Water Wars is a fine example of an ‘I told you so’ type of work. In it, she superbly covers the history of flooding, dams, levees, water needs, rivers, lakes, and political musings. The work reads like a novel while discussing topics one usually encounters in textbooks on environmental studies or in earth science classes. Moreover, I have just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country, which is a brilliant collection of his thoughts about the universe. His humor is best summarized in, “What is life all about? We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The two thinkers have set a stage for me to delve into this essay.
New Orleans will be fine. We will have it back in a few years, after folks have moved past the trauma and horror, which were the result of nature and human error. Period. The suffering will continue and the anguish that came from the loss of lives and property will be in our minds forever.
There are groups of people who are using the best of their abilities to come together in the effort to rebuild this city. I see from the vantage point of having lived there, having visited there as a child growing up in North Carolina, and being sent there to vacation with mother’s relatives, that the warmth and eager force with which all inhabitants and journeymen/women who have enjoyed the space and the teams of thinkers coming together now to restore the city will make sure that things are up and running soon. All is not well in Smallsville. The mighty Casey has struck out, but there are other pitchers coming.
That brings me to the topic at hand from a technologic standpoint. The fact that I can write and edit these thoughts on a piece of metal and plastic machinery, viewing the words on a lit screen while traveling in another piece of machinery at 33,000 feet, traversing a distance which would have taken months to do so less than 100 years ago, speaks to my confidence in the matter. Rather than continue with such banal comments like, ‘If we can put a man on the moon …,’ ‘We live in an age of …,’ I say that the Crescent City will soon enjoy the flavorful vitality we all know and love.
There are people here like Matt Dillon, Elmo, Mike Dix, Lincoln Alexis, Mike Dunbar, Glenn and Morris Wilson, John Calcote, and Karl Washington, who are literally gutting establishments, replacing damaged materials in homes and businesses throughout the city, and rebuilding. Also, a man like musician Holden Jones sits at a table which hosts a strategic map of New Orleans. This table is the size of what one would image the Pentagon uses to outline war plans. Holden, however, is assisting in the city’s planning and rebuilding.
It is with sober research, analysis, insight, strategy, and energy that we will have Old New Orleans back to enjoy. The one thing which may just keep us from progressing is the way we treat each other. The storm has come and we are dealing with it. Let’s not continue along the lines we were on prior to the Kat.
Luke Jacobs
New Orleans
Chapter 0
Friday evening, setting sun ...
“Oh, what a magnificent day!”
“Hold still and let me look deep into those liquid pools!” His eyes lovingly marched along her face and followed the contours of each angle as a sculptor would in order to inspect his/her work. He smiled the deep kind of silent smile that speaks volumes.
Their quiet moments seemed like hours. The comfortable stillness of their session was as tender as a moonlit dusk — calm and motion free.
The two lovers rolled over in the dry, brown, crackly leaves now quite some distance from their picnic blanket. They had wrestled over the past few hours and hadn’t paid any real attention to decorum. His sticky fingers combed the long locks of her matted, blackish-blond silky hair. Her breath, blowing past those ivory-white teeth contrasting against the warm mocha-brown always seemed so minty, even in the deep recesses of the wooded park. Rosalind reached to grab a hunk of his lean waist and rotated his head onto the midsection of her chest. He reflexively reached around and buried his face into her bosom. Moments later, he turned, sitting with her back between his legs, he massaged her shoulders with the care that a baker takes when kneading bread.
“Like the poet I.B. Horton’s phrase: ‘… we have forsaken the mysticism of the full moon’s light and the romanticism of the surprise of reservations, say midweek, on a Wednesday night.’”
“That’s nice. I love it when you quote poetry,” responded the Tulane chemistry graduate student, sweet darling. The sunlight glanced against the green ferns nearby and shone through her dark hair. “Where is that from?”
“A student that I know. He’s a descendent of George Moses Horton, one of our nation’s great poets. The great-great-great relative lived in the 1800s. I’ve been doing some wood shedding — reading samples of the world’s great thinkers. Had to step up my game for you and your sister.” Luke smiled. “His pieces are particularly romantic.”
Rosalind Alonso was a descendant of Cuban immigrants. A Cuban-American, naturalized or illegal, she’s getting things done no matter the designation. Her parents had come to the States in the 70s. The paternal grandparents of famed ballet group, the Cuban National Company, stayed in the old country’s main city, Havana. The maternal grands are in the countryside, little heard from or talked about, but surely loved and respected. The texture of her homeland is said to have a similar feel like the Crescent City: populated with warm and sensitive people steeped with the kind of soul and depth of understanding that family and home matter more than anything. The old country is said by the folk now here to have a blanket of style which is unparalleled in the new land. The Alonsos were and are a force, a part of the desire to have the arts remain vital to people’s lives and thus, the decision of the grands to remain in Cuba. The politics are a bit too complicated for our current yarn.
Havana, Cuba. Havana: a city and a pulse, a beat and a rhythm. It’s a place
