NOLA Day Five

NOLA Day 5

The Plot Thins &

A Close Encounter

So here’s the rest of the story. Last night I’m having dinner with Sven (no, not that Sven, Elizabeth) and it turns out he’s the director of the camp. Well actually I was having dinner with Frank from Notre Dame, Tom from parts unknown, Earl from Alaska and Dale, a 100% genuine coonass from here. That’s not a bad word; it’s what the Cajuns call themselves. He lost everything in the flood and was telling us his story, most of which was obvious hyperbole, but he told it well. In the spirit of Geoffrey Chaucer, I shall relate it here:

Dale’s Story

Whan that Septembre with her showres fierce,

Okay that’s a little too much of Chaucer’s spirit. Let me tone it back a bit. Dale lived here is St. Bernard Parrish with his two Alaskan Malmute dogs and perhaps a wife, though she seemed to come and go in the story and I could never figure out if she actually existed or not so let’s leave her out. He was home when the storm hit and chose not to evacuate for reasons which were never clear. Perhaps he was waiting for his wife to rematerialize before he left. Anyway, after the barge hit the nearby levee and ruptured it (insert 10 minutes of your favorite elaborate conspiracy theory here) Dale’s house went from bone dry to having five feet of water in it within 15 minutes. As the water continued to rise Dale raced outside to get his malamute puppy. The mother malamute was already in the house. He found the dog lifeless in its pen. He picked it up and brought it inside and carried it and the mother malamute up to his attic. He pressed on the puppy’s stomach to get the water out, but the puppy didn’t revive.

While he was doing this the water kept coming up and started to come in the attic. There was no exit in the attic so after considering his options Dale dove into the house and swam underwater to the outside. He apparently took the mother dog with him but left the lifeless puppy. He put the mother dog on his roof, then dove in again to swim into his garage, where he was able to free his canoe, get it to the surface and climb in. He rescued the mother dog off the roof. He paddled back from the house and then was shocked to see the puppy swimming to the canoe. He rescued it and started paddling, trying to think of someplace to go. A few minutes later a tree being swept along by the current hit the canoe and spilled Dale and the dogs out. Worse something in the accident hit Dale in the head and he passed out. He figures he was in about fourteen feet of water.

When he woke up the mother malamute was pulling Dale to water that was only about 4 feet deep. He had her leashed and had the leash around his wrist, so as she swam she pulled him along. (The puppy was right there too.) From there he managed to find shelter and safety. Now here’s my favorite part, the reason I told Dale’s story in the first place. Dale said that the whole thing had only taken about 45 minutes. Frank said “That must have been the most exciting 45 minutes of your life.” And without missing a beat Dale said, “Naw, I used to date two pretty women at the same time.” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t kidding.

So anyway, those guys all left but I decided to have a piece of cake for dessert. I go and get the cake and when I come back Sven is sitting there across from my place. I didn’t of course know that it was Sven at the time, that took a few minutes. (Weather Advisory: I’m writing this in my car which I finally today realized is parked right here and has comfortable seats. There are no comfortable seats in the camp and no places to sit at all outside the dining hall. The wind is fierce outside. Five portajohns were blown over just as I got back to camp this afternoon and I think the rest could go at any second. We are to be prepared for a mandatory evacuation but they haven’t called it yet. The car is shaking like a kid’s ride though.)

Sven tells me that Billy Graham’s son (BGS) is in the camp and is doing a live interview with Hannity and Colmes on the Fox channel at eight pm. Sven actually told me it was Billy Graham himself, but it was pretty clear Sven didn’t really know who he was. I found out later it was the son. I realize that Billy Graham’s son must have a name of his own and I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard it a few times at least, but it hasn’t stuck with me yet so let’s just go with BGS. I go back to the tent to tell my roomies and pandemonium erupts. They scramble like ants in a kicked over mound. Within a few minutes Micah, my next door cot mate, comes running in the tent shouting he was picked to be in the crowd standing behind BGS. He has to find a shirt with their school name written in big letters on it. Within seconds college kids from all the nearby tents are running in with t-shirts for Micah to try on. They are all either too small (Micah enjoys some girth) or didn’t have a big enough logo. Just when it was looking like he would have to go in a small letter shirt, someone brings in the perfect one. He has seconds to run to the HQ tent where he then waits for an hour and a half for the live interview.

Meanwhile technicians had set up a projection screen in the dining hall so the rest of us could watch the interview live on Hannity & Colmes. The finally managed to get it to work and frankly I was amazed how many Spanish language channels they get here. The interview finally came on and that was when the plot began to thin.

I felt like the interview was a serious misrepresentation of much of what was happening here. First they made it sound like everyone here was with BGS’s organization. In fact, they represent about a third of the people here. Habitat represents about another third and the remaining third is made up of various other small groups. (Interestingly, from several overheard conversations they regard the Habitat folks as just this side of heathens.) (And speaking of other small groups, the Southern Baptist Convention got into camp night before last and they were not looking good. It was a highly geriatric group and many of them seemed to have a hard time just making it to breakfast. I haven’t seen any of them at all after what would have been their first day’s work. I think the Baptists may need to do some replacement proselytizing).

But remember the nice lady, who gave me the three t-shirts on the first day? Well a whole lot of us who aren’t with BGS’s group got those t-shirts and have been wearing them around camp. So if you were to walk around say filming the place, (which by the way, photography is strictly forbidden in or even of the camp, unless apparently you plan to broadcast it on national television), you might think that most of the people here were with BGS. I think that’s why they gave us three of the shirts too, to increase the odds that we would actually be wearing the shirts when the big day and the press arrived.

The second thing they misrepresented is that no government money is being spent to help these people. They made it sound like all the funds are coming from BGS. In fact, the BGS group, and every other group, supplies the tools that we are working with and consumables we use in the field (masks, gloves, etc). The entire rest of the camp (food, shelter, security, etc) is funded by FEMA (about whom more later) through the St. Bernard Parrish government. Okay enough on that. Micah did get on the show though. Did you see him? You could see a part of his left eye and all of his left ear just behind BGS’s head.

So we gathered this morning at the house from yesterday to do a final walkthrough and make sure we didn’t leave any tools behind. But before we could start a man from FEMA comes up and gives us a welcome pep-talk and a stern lecture about being sure to stack the stuff we pull from the houses on the curbs and don’t put it in the big white trash trailers. None of us has ever seen a big white trash trailer, and we have been stacking stuff on the curb for five days now, but we are all polite and agree and wish him a good day. I’m thinking, hey, it’s FEMA. Five days late is pretty good for them. \

As we finish the walkthrough I hear this shouting coming from behind the house where we had stacked the trash. I head over that way and see Norman from South Dakota, who is a small man, backing away from a white guy in a wife-beater shirt who is just screaming at him. Veins popping out on his neck and spittle flying from his mouth. Norman is looking pasty. Now part of having 10 or so years of martial arts training is a kind of feeling that in situations like this you have some kind of moral obligation to do something. I didn’t want the guy to get over to where the group was sitting and I wanted to get Norman out of there. On the other hand my arms were so tired I could hardly lift them, but the obligation feeling won out, so I took off my mask and dropped my helmet and equipment bag to the ground and headed the guy off. Norman ran back to the front of the house and the guy turned his attention to me.

He was mad because we had stacked the trash from the house we had cleaned out in front of his house, which had been cleaned out a several days ago. Note that this means his house was a gutted shell and no one was living there. We had been told by the fire department to put the trash there and we were very careful to only put it from the curb to the sidewalk, which is property the county controls. There’s not much space in that area though, which is why we had to go down the street and put it in front of his house too. He was livid. I think he was on speed or something. He was hopping up and down with his fists clinched cursing about what he was going to do to whoever did this. Well he and I both knew at this point that his choices for whoever did this was pretty much limited to me. I started trying to figure out how he was going to attack me and what I going to do about it, while at the same time agreeing out loud with every word he said and asking him any question I could think of to distract him from why he was mad. “How long have you lived here?” “Did you get caught in the flood?” “Have you ever had a dog?”

This did seem to calm him down a bit. Mostly I think he couldn’t switch mental gears fast enough and had to drop his rage to process my questions. I could tell that the rage was winning though and he had just about taken all the distraction he going to put up with. I eased back a bit to give myself more space to react, when out of nowhere this cop comes walking up with a can of pepper spray in his hand. “You go on out of here,” he says to me. “Yessir,” I say, and did.