Christmas in New Orleans

    When I arrived in New Orleans to spend Christmas with my family last week, it had been about eight months since I had last been in the city. In the spring, I had spent five weeks living out of my tent in the wasteland of the Upper Ninth Ward, volunteering with an anarchic relief organization called the Common Ground Collective. Operating out of the most devastated areas of the city, where seven months after the storm the landscape still looked like a nuclear bomb had just been dropped, we worked with the few returning residents to cultivate some semblance of community, offering basic supplies, health and legal services, house gutting, children's programs as well as less conventional services like a bike repair shop, political outreach and "bioremediation" to remove poisons from the toxin-drenched soil. When I got back to Maine after that first trip, everyone I ran into would ask, "how are things down there?" And now that I've returned for a second time, people ask, "has it changed?"
    Because of the enormous scale of the situation, those are incredibly complex questions to answer, but to the former question maybe the simplest answer is  "very tragic" and to the latter, "not much." 
    Even back in March, it would have been fairly easy to spend a few weeks in New Orleans and not see any substantial signs of damage from hurricane Katrina. The French Quarter, along with many of the other areas most frequented by tourists, was running smoothly and bustling with the usual (thought much scaled down) mix of celebratory fervor and historic charm. The majority of visitors to New Orleans hardly get past that most famous district, so for them there wouldn't have been much more than the missing tiles on the roof of the Superdome in the distance as a reminder of the city's recent trauma.
    But such orderly quarters are only islands amidst vast destruction. Imagine that the entire state of Maine had flooded and only the Old Port and Munjoy Hill survived and you've got a good sense of the state of New Orleans. What would Maine be without the distant presence of Aroostook County or the hundreds of coastal villages and small towns – without all the communities and landscapes that give Maine its distinct character and sense of place? Many people would similarly ask what New Orleans could be without the Lower Ninth Ward or Gentily or the neighboring territory of Plaquemines Parish or any of the dozens of neighborhoods that may never recover from the storm. The city exists now only as a hollow shell and I don't think it's clear yet whether that's enough to revive the substance of what New Orleans has always been.
    There is certainly progress being made, very slowly, in the recovery efforts of New Orleans. Bureaucrats are pushing around billions of dollars, very small amounts of which are trickling into actual effectiveness, and relief organizations are continuing to do the dirty labor of taking rotted structures apart and piecing peoples’ lives back together. But for many New Orleans residents–particularly those that are poor and lacking substantial resources–their home city is a lost cause. They simply can't afford–emotionally or financially–to start over, and are instead settling in Austin or Baton Rouge or somewhere else.  Efforts like the Road Home Project, which is intended to provide people money to rebuild their homes, are moving so slowly that once they finally become effective it will be too late for many.
    What makes New Orleans such an incredibly valuable city to me is that is one of the rare regions left in our country that is infused with a completely distinct sense of place. Throughout the country, and especially in the south, it seems, it's increasingly common for cities to consist of a string of strip malls surrounded by sprawling residential neighborhoods that could exist anywhere. Communities and cultures become totally homogenous. I love that every neighborhood in New Orleans has a distinct character and that every house features some unique flair. And of course there’s the music and food and the wonderful array of characters and celebrations that fill the streets. I’ve never visited a place where people have such pride in the place they live, especially even when that place is totally destroyed. The few residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who had returned when I was last there couldn’t stress enough how tight their community had been and how essential it was to New Orleans as a whole. Even now, there is very little hope that any semblance of the community that was once there will ever come back. There are still houses upside down perched on top of cars, miles of uninhabited and toxic ruins and the filthy remnants of people’s most intimate possessions in huge piles everywhere.
    Another crucial aspect of the tragedy is that in many wealthier parts of town, like in parts of neighboring St. Bernard Parish, some of which are even further below sea level than the Lower Ninth Ward, neighborhoods are fairly well rebuilt after being totally washed out. The permanent destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward and other poorer communities, if it does turn out to be permanent, will be just as much due to poverty and the failures of the recovery process as from the hurricane.