« Corpse Bride | Main | Real life trumps bloggeringosity »
October 11, 2005
Omega Man Chuck
Chuck recounts his trip to New Orleans to help clean out his parents' house in N.O. East. Go read the whole thing here and check out his flickr pictures here.
It's eerie, and so different from the stories of plucky rebuilding that you hear elsewhere.
We worked from about 10am to about 5pm, and we got a lot of stuff out, and we were exhausted. Mom and Dad drove back up to the North Shore, and I stayed behind for a bit; I wanted to head about a mile south toward the Chef, to see the neighborhood where I grew up.It was complete desolation.
Every house took 5-6 feet of water. For blocks and blocks in each direction. And I was the only soul in the area.
There was nobody.
No one surveying their houses, no one bringing out trash or soaked furniture or refrigerators. No one tearing out sheet rock or doing mold remediation or trying to gut and rebuild. Nothing. No one.
The lawns were all dead. The streets and sidewalks were covered with chips of dried toxic mud that crunched under your feet, sending up clouds of toxic mud dust that made my nose itch and burn. And I was utterly alone.
It was the creepiest, most unsettling feeling I've ever had in my life. I felt like a character in a Stephen King novel. As I walked around the neighborhood where I was the only living person for twenty blocks, I began to wonder ... when I fall asleep tonight, who will I dream about -- the old black woman or the Man With No Face?
Posted by ray at October 11, 2005 9:59 AM | Permalink
Categories: [katrina | new orleans ]
Comments
Post a comment