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August 12, 2006
Practical activism
Today I finally got the opportunity to do what I came to this city to do: get dirty. I gutted a house with Common Ground.
It's one of those things that is both rewarding and fucking awful at the same time. You're basically knee deep in the wet, slimy, moldy, toxic muck that used to be the stuff of somebody's life. We were in a house on Andry Street in the Lower 9, and if I had to guess I would say this house probably belongs to grandparents raising a small child or two. There were retirement plaques and Jesus stuff and Sunday church hats everywhere. There were also stuffed Snoopy dolls and Little Mermaid videos and coloring books.
Imagine taking a three-bedroom cottage, filling it with water, and shaking it like a snowglobe and then letting all the clothes and books and pictures and appliances and furniture settle back down on top of each other in random piles. Then drain most (not all) of the water out, seal it up, and leave it out in the sun for a year.
Beds on top of dressers with more dressers on top. Sometimes you have to climb through a pitch-black room full of damp moldy debris to find the window so that you can open the blinds to let light in to see what you're doing. Head to toe in mold suits, with respirators and safety goggles and work boots. Temperature and humidity in the mid-90's outside, but much worse inside.
I tried to put myself in the owners position. If something is salvageable (and anything water-permeable is not salvagable) you want to set it aside for them. So you'd look at a glass bowl or a candle-holder or a coffee mug and you'd think "Is this just crap for the debris pile?" And then I'd think like a father and think "If my kid gave me this for Father's Day, I'd want to save it" and I'd set it aside.
Most of the furniture came out in pieces. It would literally fall apart when you picked it up, all rotted moldy decomposing wood, so you'd bring out a dresser and its contents in multiple wheelbarrow loads.
There were six of us. A few college students donating several weeks of their summer vacations. Two people who were in town for the APA conference and decided to play hooky one day and gut houses instead. Afterwards I drove them back to the W hotel where they were staying, and we got out of the car in front of all the rich tourists heading out for dinner in their finery...all of us in our bare feet (mucky boots were in the trunk), filthy dirty, one guy with his shirt off. The valet looked at us appalled and a hotel manager ran over thinking we clearly didn't belong there, until the APA folks flashed their room key and told him we'd been gutting in the Ninth Ward, and then he was all smiles. Thanked us repeatedly. I think he would have hugged us if we weren't so clearly disgusting.
I was a little nervous about meeting the Common Ground people, because after my experience in the early days of putting KOOP Radio on the air I have a real serious aversion to certain kinds of pathological political-correctness that can infect progressive activist groups. I am happy to report that what I saw today was free of any hint of hippy annoyance. These people are energetic and sincere and completely focused on the practical aspects of the jobs they have to do, and refreshingly free of bullshit attitudes. I hope to join them again down there in a few weeks. They fucking rock.
That being said...I don't know. It's so huge. So much work by so many people, but the list of houses seems endless. I'm trying to keep either a can-do attitude or at the very least some righteous anger going, but fuck, man. It's hard to keep out the little voice in the back of your head telling you that this is futile, that these people can never come back, that a year from now we'll still be gutting and shoveling muck while New Orleanians get more and more settled into new lives in Houston and Memphis and Atlanta.
I don't know. Right now I'm tired, I guess. Tomorrow I'll want to do battle again, I hope.
But fuck.
Posted by ray at August 12, 2006 9:34 PM | Permalink
Categories: [katrina | new orleans ]
Tags: worthy
Comments
You rock!
Posted by: TravelingMermaid at August 13, 2006 12:47 AM
Oh, Ray, what a description. Even having been down there, you broaden my picture of what was inside all those houses I saw, considerably. Good for you. Every impossible task is done one little tiny step at a time.
Posted by: Sophmom at August 13, 2006 12:33 PM
Ditto. Thanks for painting a picture of the magnitude of the work being (and still to be) done in the areas hit hardest.
Posted by: Lisa at August 13, 2006 8:47 PM
Wow. I can only imagine (thanks to your vivid description) what you are experiencing back home in New Orleans, Ray. I am so impressed and inspired by what you are doing. What an example you are for your children. You rock!
Posted by: Kelly at August 14, 2006 7:56 PM
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