HumidCity

This title is the most important line I take away from Maitri’s report of her trip with Karen Gadbois of Squandered Heritage down the bayou deep into Hurricane Gustav ground zero in Terrebonne Parish.

A good number of the men I talked with on the island work as roughnecks, roustabouts, derrick hands and contractors on offshore oil platforms. They spoke of the irony of working for an industry that destroys their land and ecosystem but offers them a steady paycheck. If they give up working as oilmen and start a petition for the removal of oil-producing infrastructure from their area, how else will they stay economically viable? Everyone agreed that digging their own graves is what feeds them, but their hands are tied.

This is the result of the inshore and offshore oil exploitation political leaders on the right are touting with their “Drill, Drill, Drill!” chants. I want to grab the woman on the American Petroleum Institute TV ad, the one who smiles at the camera and tells us how wonderful and green unfettered drilling will be, grab her by the hair and drag her down to Isle de Jean Charles show her what unrestricted drilling does, and defy her to smile into the camera ever again.

I want to herd all those happy Americans at the end of the API ad, the ones they tell us favor more drilling, into one of the unairconditioned school buses we use in evacuation and drive them down deep into Terrebonne and show them these people, show them what has happened to the land, and ask them if they are still happy to drill.

The ad suggests that drilling for oil is an environmentally sound activity. The ad does not go so far as many mostly Republican pro-oil congressman go and claim that the absence of oil spills during Katrina to demonstrate how safe the activity is. Perhaps that is because that is a bald-faced and willful lie.

Here in Louisiana we have prospered from oil drilling (although we do not receive the same royalty payments the other 49 states enjoy). People with little education whose parents and grandparents wrested a subsistence life off the land and water have made a good living in the oil patch. Louisiana is thick with companies that serve the oil beast, paying good wages and making their owners wealthy. We have dug with our own hands the 10,000 miles of canals that have drowned the marsh in salt and turned land into open water.

And so we have died in the thousands when hurricanes sweep over the open water that was once land that sheltered us. And the land upon which (and off of which) the coastal people have lived for centuries is vanishing around them, and their way of life with it.

We are losing an area larger than Delaware and the unique local culture of the Acadians (and the largely assimilated Houma who are, like my German ancestors from the Cote des Allemandes, Acadian in every way except lineage). At the end of the month, the paychecks are gone and what do these people have in compensation for the taking of their land and their lives? When the oil is gone the paychecks will be gone for good. Then what will they do? The people of the Acadian coast have built a life over 300 years that is as closely tied to the water as your’s or mine is to the air we breathe. Will we tell them to get over it, to move on and move to some distant city to take jobs at Wal-Mart?

If that is the best we can do, then I wish to announce that the American Experiment is over and the results are in: it failed.

I see that API ad (and you can’t escape it if you are watching the hurricane coverage on the news) and I want to stand up and ask all the viewers of CNN or the Weather Channel the question I have often posed, and then ask if they still want to drill:

Imagine this if you will: Los Angeles is the city most closely associated with America’s lust affair with the personal automobile, and production of the oil necessary to make that lifestyle possible is in large part responsible for coastal erosion.

If we applied Louisiana’s coastal erosion rate to the Los Angeles coastline (which Google tells me stretches 76 miles from Malibu to Long Beach), the city would have to move back from the sea a little under one mile a year. Would the Hummer continue to be so popular in SoCal if it were their land they were giving up at such an alarming rate in the name of cheap gas?

People in the nation to the north frequently whine and complain when we ask for help after hurricanes, or for the funding to build our levees and restore our wetlands. Louisiana is the new poster child for government dependence in their play book, the new Cadillac-driving welfare queen. This is no more true than Reagan’s fable from the 1980s. What we seek is fair and full compensation for the price we have paid, for the burdens we carry to make the Mississippi navigable and to provide the nation with oil and gas. America is taking our lands and our lives and pays nothing. It is not a question of the people of the Hurricane Coast of Louisiana depending on you. The question is: how much longer can Louisiana afford to carry America on its back?

When you are finished reading Maitri’s post then run don’t walk to your local bookstore and find a copy of Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell, the sad tale of the slow death of the Acadian Coast.

Mark Folse was the author of the retired Katrina blog Wet Bank Guide, and currently blogs at Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans. A native of New Orleans, he returned to live in New Orleans post-Katrina after a 20 year absence.

We are too much a rabble, leaderless and increasingly dispirited. I heard nothing in the mayor’s 100-day remarks Wednesday to remedy that. We lack the charismatic leadership we need to see us through this dark hour, our Henry V to rally the tired few to the great battle that will remake the world. Instead, we get Mayor Hamlet, Prince of Denmark or somewhere, anywhere else but New Orleans, wandering the ramparts of Perdido Street and wondering how to proceed.

I see more and more on-line commentators, and some in the newspaper, remark that they are starting to have thoughts of moving on, of leaving the city, of giving up. No one I know personally is ready to leave, and people I thought lost to Texas continue to trickle in despite all the challenges. Still, the conventional wisdom of the street points to the sprouting forests of For Sale signs as indication that many who haven’t yet returned, and more than a few who are back, are making other plans.

I wasn’t surprised to hear this sort of chatter in August. The first serious month of hurricane season was filled with an endless tide of contrary news, the threat of a storm in the Gulf, and the looming anniversary. Even for the most heavily medicated population in the developed world, it was a depressing prospect. Can we make it, people asked each other with the breathlessness of exhausted swimmers struggling to make their way to the shore.

The mayor and his circle give us no confidence. Leadership is the rescue we need now every bit as much as the people on the roofs of last year, watching the helicopters circle then leave; the 100-day promise was another lifeline tantalizing dangled before our eyes and then withdrawn. Perhaps we should drape our houses in bedsheets roughly lettered: Mayor Nagin, Please Help Us.

I remain convinced the city will survive. We the 200,000 who have come home can be enough if we do not surrender, if we insist that our leaders step up to the difficult challenges we face as a city, as a collective. We only ask they they work as hard and as ingenously as those who labor all day to save their businesses, and still go home at night to work on ruined homes, that the mayor and his cohorts navigate the paths of Entergy and RTA and recovery finances in the same way the majority of us hack our way through the jungle of insurance, SBA and LRA.

The rousing speech Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his Henry V is something I have carried with me through the years, the product of most of a degree in English Literature from the University of New Orleans, and a number of years spent working alongside a Shakespeare enthusiast. Henry’s position was bleak. He was at the end of a long land campaign, surrounded by the French who had cut off his line of supply and retreat, facing a choice between victory and defeat, with no place for retreat. It is a marvel of motivational speech, a statement that rings true to the American ear across the centuries with its martial setting and its celebration of exceptionalism.

It is the speech I would hear from Perdido Street, but have no reason to expect; the sort of speech we must demand of our own leaders, if they wish to be counted among the 200,000 who saved the city. It is the speech we must all give to ourselves, should post on our shaving mirrors or on the doors of our new refrigetarors, to remind ourselves we are here because we have chosen this place to fight.

Its opening words are the best response I could offer to Mayor Hamlet’s vacuous remarks, and the truest antidote to them. If you read this blog, you are among the 200,000, the happy few. I do not mean to indict those who have not returned, by choice or happenstance. It is mostly beyond their control. Instead, I mean to remind the 200,000 that they are living through a special place and time in history, one that will be long remembered. When people look back on this time, they will read of the president and the governor and the mayor and laugh, or perhaps cry in catharsis at the tragedy of hubris strutting to its doom. There’s nothing we can do now to remedy the leaders who hobble us, except to prove them wrong, to write for ourselves the scene that ends not in tragedy but in triumph.

…proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
and say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
-Mark Folse, Wet Bank Guide