Benjamin Johnson
There are chickens here, scuttling around concrete porch steps that once led up to homes. This used to be a hopping town with 20,000 clapboard houses cheaply made by soldiers bolstered by the GI Bill after returning from World War II. Even so, this was the only land they could afford in the peninsula because it was the worst, so far below sea level, so precariously close to the eight-foot canal walls. They made the best of it, though, lining the streets with beautiful live oaks, whose tangled branches seemed to foreshadow the carnage of the coming years. The live oaks remain (those that survived the storm surge), but very little else.
The houses that weren’t washed off their foundations are still blazed with spray-painted Xs put there by National Guard troops marking which of them had been searched for survivors. Painted around each X are the date the house was searched, the troop unit and home state and the number found dead. The earliest dates here are Sept. 11, nearly two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. In the interceding time, people died from contaminated water and mold.
I’ve never seen a people so furiously disaffected with their government. They used to joke that they had the best politicians money could buy, but now abhor the apocalyptic incompetence of their “leaders.” Ray “Gaffe-a-Day” Nagin, William “90K in the freezer” Jefferson and David “I
