...getting a handle on what happened down there................

My Reflections on Katrina's Aftermath
Pictures and text by Scott Hassen ©2006

New Orleans has signs of vitality. The Ports are active. Tall buildings stand. Some proud and healing, others obviously deeply wounded. Signs of their purpose are hanging by rusted threads, leaving torn and twisted remnants. Others proudly having their makeup reapplied like expertly sutured plastic surgery.

On the streets below, old green street cars run intermittently where the bright shiny new red ones should be running. The greens, once again are a prime attractant to the slowly growing throng of curious tourists. They think aloud, "Is there still a New Orleans? Will it ever be the same? How about the food! Can they remember how to cook my favorite foods?"

For right now things are truly different. Changed, like a child's electric train set, stepped on when his big brother tripped on it in the dark. Some of the little buildings stand untouched while others are crushed beyond recognition. The real pain is that plastic people can easily be replaced. The lost and dead of New Orleans can't, ever, come, back, again. Ever!

Thinking about it hurts down inside right to my spine. It makes me want to cry. A personal loss, I miss seeing the black women waiting on Canal Street to catch the street car as they go to and fro. I miss the hairdos that adorned their heads. I always enjoyed that sight. It was like visiting a live display of pride and tastefulness. It was a cultural treat. These women left with the masses of folks who fled to higher ground, to another town, another state, and another state of being.

How odd. It's hard to believe I witnessed the aftermath of the destructive forces that hit a flawed but great American city.

I wonder how weird it must be for the children who lived in the miles, and miles, and miles of now uninhabitable neighborhoods. Oh, the bad dreams, the repeated wakening at night. The knowledge that what once seemed so solid, stable, and safe was actually an illusion. The truth for them includes returning to see a foundation that once was a home, washed so clean that they could barely tell which plot was theirs.

The church was hit so violently that the once seeming impenetrable brick walls were huffed, puffed, and blown down like a straw house by the Wolf in Hurricane's clothing, Katrina the Terrible. Why does nature have to prove her strength is superior? Why can't we have a little more time to savor the delicate sweetness that was once the old, dirty and crumbling New Orleans?

Now it's gone from crumbling to crumbled!

Out of the mess, will it resurrect? Will the green cars return to St.
Charles where they belong? I don't know. Will the red cars return to Canal Street? I recall tourists sitting on ancient wooden seats that slide to face the other direction at the end of the line. It's much simpler than turning the entire car around like in San Francisco on the cable cars.

For now, there are only busses on St. Charles Avenue. They aren't quaint. They aren't green for God's sake! Busses can't ever create the same excitement as the real thing approaching you along the tracks with it's solitary light shining at you from the past. A bus simply isn't a street car. No tracks. No little stations. No familiar noises. No struggling operator.

The street car wires are down, their poles bent by the raging winds. Tracks still covered with moist earth and trash and downed trees are heartbreaking sights. Now I have surreal memories of what it was like to see the street cars approaching, day and night, rain or shine. I can still here the bell ringing, creating a momentary alarm. The street car is coming! Can you here it! The Street car is coming! Get out of the way! The city and its' people have undergone the same overwrought change.

At the restaurants in the French Quarter, the service from the new hires isn't even close to what it was before the storm. I would love to hear even one of them say, "the service was that great because I'm a professional!" Sadly, the gumbo in Downtown Disney tastes better than the local fare. Many of the displaced restaurant workers were taken in by the Anaheim replica.
That explains the dramatic improvement in the dishes they now serve.

I am still so numb after being immersed in the seemingly boundless stretches of destruction. As my protective anesthetic wears off, I'm getting a handle on what happened down there. I even have the obligatory survivor's guilt because I thought, I'm glad it wasn't me! It wasn't my house, my neighborhood, my possessions, my memories.

At this moment I realize that I was also one who only got out with their life.

I can't revisit many of my old haunts.

I suffer for the loss.

Katrina Death Toll May Never Be Known, click here to read why