NOLA Day Three

NOLA Day Three

Strategic Camp Living

Last night I exercised better bladder management and didn’t have to get up. I was so beat though that there was little chance I could have had I needed to. I also took advantage of an opportunity to address the morning toilet paper shortage. I saw a small, almost empty roll, and carefully sequestered it behind the vent pipe in the portajohn closest to my tent. The door sticks on that one and it doesn’t seem to get as much use. I would have felt guilty taking the TP out of the portajohn altogether, but hiding it inside seemed not to sound my moral alarm.

This morning I got up, and when appropriate, went to my portajohn with my secret stash. It was gone! Someone had smoked it out. I then began the long trudge to the most remote portajohn in the camp. That had worked for me yesterday. Most of the college kids aren’t very adventurous or perhaps desperate. It worked yesterday, but not today. Other people had obviously cottoned on to that idea and that john had been cleaned out. I’m speaking figuratively here. It had obviously not been literally cleaned out in some time. But, on the other hand, it was no more filthy than average. That gave me an idea. Q: Why would a portajohn still have toilet paper? A: Because no one uses it. Q: Why is no one using it? The answer yesterday had been because it was too remote for the lazy people. That no longer pertained. Why else would no one use it? The answer slowly grew in my brain like a swarm of maggots erupting from a piece of meat that has been in a submerged refrigerator for the last six months and accidentally came open when some well meaning but otherwise inept people were trying to move it. (Sorry that was just the first image that came to mind. It was a very graphic image too, complete with smells and sounds of other people retching.) No one would use a portajohn that was horribly, horribly filthy. If I could find that kind of portajohn there was a good bet I would find toilet paper. I knew just where to look too. Fortunately I had come across a very likely candidate just outside the dining tent before dinner yesterday. I admit, I didn’t think myself too fortunate at the time, but among its many other roles necessity is also the laxative of invention. When I got there I found that the portajohn had not been cleaned since yesterday, and there was still an ample supply of toilet paper. The rest of the morning passed smoothly.

Today Black 21 spent the morning finishing up the house we started yesterday. One of the guys described it (prior to the storm) as a “path house.” The kind of house where there are little paths through all the stuff and that’s the only way to get around inside. We worked on the two bedrooms most of the morning. Things got a little slower though because there was only a narrow hallway allowing access to them, and we could only get one wheelbarrow and two people back there at a time. Most of the work is shoveling mostly unrecognizable rotting, mud covered gunk into wheel barrows. I suppose with some thought you could recognize it, but we mostly tried not to think about it much. There’s a real wheelbarrow shortage; that’s the bottleneck on the whole operation it seems. Each team is allotted two as I mentioned yesterday. My team has done a pretty good job expanding that number somewhat. We had five at one point today, but got spotted and had to give two up. Through some incredibly skillful maneuvering, back alley sprinting to keep up with the bus, and outright aplomb we managed to pre-position a wheelbarrow and an appliance hand truck at the house we’ll be starting tomorrow, and then turned in the rest of them. We had pretty much finished the first house a little after lunch, but we made a strategic decision to take our time and pull out all the exposed nails in the early afternoon, a nice but not required detail, leaving only enough workday to get to the new house and make a plan, and not enough time to actually get started. Probably the most interesting part of the day was finding a stash of guns in one of the bedrooms and as per our instructions, notifying headquarters who instructed us to wait for the police to arrive to remove them. We waited, and they arrived, but the officers didn’t want to go in the house and get all dirty so they told us to go in and bring them out. I went in and got them, but on seeing them, or perhaps smelling them, the officers decided they didn’t want to put them in their car and told us to just put them in the house next door that had already been cleaned out, and they would send somebody around for them later (somebody on the next shift I’m thinking). Nobody had showed by the time we left.

Tomorrow’s house looks like a breeze. The main thing is the people weren’t pack rats. The house has a normal amount of stuff in it. The two drawbacks are that the people are living in FEMA trailers in the front yard and we can’t pile the junk out there. That means we have to trek through the backyard to the next street over, but since it’s not their house on that street we can only use the space between the sidewalk and the street to put stuff. We’ll manage that part but it won’t be fun. The other challenge is that the house has a loft area and a vaulted ceiling in the den. We only have a four foot ladder. I’m still puzzling out how we’ll pull that ceiling down. Something will come to me; I hope it’s not a laxative.