This month is the 5 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. So the ‘reflecting’ posts are to be expected. I’ll be moving on to other happier subjects in September.
This week the Times Picayune is running a four part series about Delacroix, a small town in eastern St Bernard that is almost extinct. When I was a kid growing up in western St Bernard (which is right next to the Lower 9th) we referred to all the swamp villages like Shell Beach, Hopedale, Yscloskey, Delacroix, and even parts of Violet as “dow’na road”; a kind of coonass “here be dragons” on the map. While us kids in Chalmette were playing football and Nintendo around our suburban brick homes, kids dow’na road ran around half naked, shot wild pigs, and lived in ‘camps’ on stilts. Two totally different civilizations, only 20 miles apart.
Still, I’m melancholy about the loss of any culture, especially since globalization has turned out to be a massive bore. Although I joke, the place was not that foreign to me. There was better fishing dow’na road, and we had friends in the area, so I did spend some of my childhood there. So where am I going with this?
Inevitability, I guess. Some places are meant to take a beating and come back, but for others the end is near. Their moment in time has passed. Extinction and evolution and all. And yet even accepting this, it still hurts. I never thought I’d be the last generation to grow up “dow’nehr” when it was at its peak at a population over 70k, not the 20k it is now (most of whom are close to the city end, not the swampy end).
I left St Bernard and moved into Orleans Parish after college, but I visited a lot because my family was still there and they owned a restaurant where many friends and family regularly met up. It was like a big party whenever you walked through the door. After the storm I stopped going dow’nehr and to the cafe that never reopened. My parents rebuilt and live in Arabi today, right past the parish line, but when I visit them I go no further than the border. It’s been three years since I’ve ventured down to Meraux where I was raised. I thought for a while it meant that I just didn’t miss it, but now I know that it really just hurts me to look at it. The last time I was there, the only thing remaining was a slab (and now even that is gone too, they tell me). In 2007 I remember looking at the spot where my house used to stand, and suddenly all I could see was 25 years ago exactly the way I remember it from childhood. Remember that sappy final scene in Titanic where Rose is asleep and dreaming about the present-day sunken ship and then it morphs into the past, the way she remembered it – lively, happy, with people she knew and loved greeting her? Yeah, that’s why I hate going back. Because that’s kind of what it feels like (only I hear crickets instead of Celine Dion music). All I can see is my little brother climbing trees, my dad washing his boat, or my mom calling from the door for us to come inside. I see myself playing ball in the street, and running two houses away to swing on the back porch with my grandmother, or running two houses the other way to ask my aunt if I could swim in her pool. When I finally did see the present day slab again, I looked around for evidence that I existed there, wondering how so many years spent in one place with so many wonderful memories can mean absolutely nothing to the marshlands.
And so, I avoid it. And try to enjoy where I live in New Orleans right now, for however long it lasts.
Here’s to a miserable-ass 5 year Katrina anniversary.
Photo: St Bernard Katrina victims memorial in Shell Beach, LA
| A PARADISE LOST |
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
How did I not know that you were from St. B? I grew up there, too, only I lived in Poydras. I had more of a connection, culture-wise, to suburban Chalmette rather than Hopedale, although my father and his generation were more connected to “dow’na road”. I often regret that I was not taught the ways of the people down there – I don’t know the land, or have any instincts to hunt and fish. I work with some people who are only one generation removed from living in Delacroix, and it does seem like that way of life is gone. Katrina put the final nail in that coffin. They know the people who used to live there, and can remember faces, but after they die, that too will be lost. My parents returned to Poydras and rebuilt here, and this is where the offices of our construction company are located, so I get to commute for 55 lovely minutes each day from my home Uptown. It’s strange, this connection I still have with lower St. Bernard, but I think it ends with me, although it pains my family to hear me say it.
Amusing that we both ended up Uptown :) I too only learned enough about the land for fun purposes, not to make a living. My dad was a fisherman for a while when I was a kid though. We had dense woods behind our house and I played in the canals and kept snakes and little gators as pets. But it was nothing like my friends’ houses in Shell Beach.
In some ways it’s like the people who live there now moved on and made the best of it. But for the people who never came back after Katrina, it’s still emotionally jarring to see how different it looks five years later.
Beautiful tribute. You’ve got me crying here in San Francisco. I’m feeling nostalgic for a way of life I don’t even know. I’m a native Californian but the loss of dow’nehr and “dow’na road” is heartbreaking no matter where you come from.
Your memories and your writing are what will keep the history alive. Congratulations. You are now one of the historians telling the stories of what it was like “dow’na road”.
I love NOLA and love the history. You are lucky to have grown up in such an area rich with so many gifts. Katrina, the weak levees….awful. Remembering Katrina, so painful. Even for me, an outsider from California. The richness of the culture there….AMAZING! That is something I believe you will never loose – thanks to the local historians and story tellers!
Awww, thank you :)
This is an extraordinary, evocative piece of writing. People study for years to learn to write with this sort of directness, simplicity and feeling.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. It helps that I meant it :)
Uh oh, you’re keeping Editilla sane? Sheesh, that’s quite a burden.
Great post.
Excellent post. I never lived there but spent many evenings visiting people from Chalmette, partying, going to parades. The parish is a culture into itself.
Now I visit St. Bernard for lunch sometimes. Working at the Michoud Facility, Chalmette is the closest place for food. But it is still SO depressing driving through the neighborhoods, seeing block after block of slabs.
I know some people who’ve rebuilt and moved back. Bless them all.
Thanks for the article. I worked at Nunez college in the mid-’90s, and that was my first real exposure to St. Bernard Parish, though I later learned that my grandfather came from Arabi (and his people before him from Toca-Kenilworth). I don’t speak Spanish, but it seems that the other real casualty of Katrina and BP has been wiping out the last few remnants of Isleno Spanish speakers — hastening its “language death.” It’s sad to go to those Isleno cultural-society events and witness that no one there–apart from a handful of septuagenarians–can speak any of the Spanish dialect that survived 200 years in isolation. All that’s left are those silly costumes and a bunch of people with genealogical aspirations playing dress-up. It was amazing in the ’90s to interact with real hardcore swamp-rat throwback types like Irvan Perez and Chelito Campo, both fluent in the dialect and walking repositories of orally transmitted folk songs. Those are the guys I’d want in my foxhole, though they would have little use for my effete hedonistic candy ass.
Great post, Pistolette. Glad to see you haven’t lost your voice after July’s marathon blog-a-palooza.
Your fan,
Arthur