katrina: part one

This is the intro for a draft I’m currently wrestling my way through.  I think the reason I’ve avoided any in-depth writing about this trip is that it’s simply too big to put into good words.  This is my attempt…. finally.  This will probably change a ton between now and the end of the quarter, but I thought I’d throw it on out there anyway.   

The click of my camera’s shutter won’t respond fast enough. I cautiously maneuver my way over splintered boards and scattered piles of rubble, snapping photographs as quickly as I can before I have to move on. Glancing down, a Cabbage Patch doll stares up at me wide-eyed from where he lies in the debris. Torn earth partially covers a lonely shoe, once white. Both ends of a brass doorknob lie twinkling in a patch of grass. A tire swing hangs listless from a giant tree; behind it, what was once a home has been flattened beyond all recognition.

Mundane objects have now become extraordinary.

All is quiet save an occasional rustling breeze. A faraway bird calls whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, and to me it sounds just like a television jingle I’ve heard about a thousand times. The imposing silence resumes. I continue to work quickly, sifting through the remains of what was once a neighborhood. Aim, shoot. Aim, shoot. Then – a voice calling me back to the van. We’re moving on. I hesitate, wanting a few more moments here. There’s so much to see here, so much I haven’t captured yet. Please. Just a few more minutes.

I am here only a week. This is my first day here, and I am amazed by what I see.

***

I sat glued to the television just like everyone else during that last week of August in 2005. Entranced, I stared at the mass of color as it spun counter-clockwise, moving northward over the warm ocean. Green. Yellow. Red. The colors froze, quivered, and began again at the bottom of my screen. The swirling image repeated its pattern, making landfall over and over. While it devoured the tiny grey states on the satellite map, I listened to solemn newscasters talk about evacuation efforts and what “Category Five” means. Like everyone else, I crossed my fingers, said a prayer.

When the storm changed course and missed a direct hit on New Orleans, I naively thought all was well, but when the spinning radar gave way to footage of wind and waves surging over miles of coast, it became clear that all was far worse than anyone had imagined. Awful as it was, looking away was impossible.

A few months later, I sat in an air-conditioned board room watching first-hand camcorder footage recorded at the height of the storm. A marketing company I worked for raised funds for non-profit organizations, and one of my clients was working in the disaster relief area. The shaky cameraman tried to capture every bit of the violent destruction he could, while trying to make sure his family was as safe as possible. Due to his wild panning back and forth across the scene, I was quickly growing nauseous, but I was so drawn in, I couldn’t stop watching. No matter how bad the train wreck, it seems I have a compelling need to watch it happen, although I am not totally sure why.

Television has made voyeurs of us all, I suppose. We are quite used to watching things crumble live on the morning news.

***
Today I am part of a small group that is driving over to Melanie’s place to help clear her yard and search for some of her belongings, now that bulldozers have removed what was left of her house. Mere walking distance from the beach, her neighborhood is particularly hard-hit. As we take a right onto the street where Melanie lives, I think I see a home that somehow escaped severe damage, but then I see piles a story high of the home’s innards in the front yard. Even the homes that remain standing are empty, ruined shells only. The waves spared none.

We park the van, and Melanie is instantly out her front door to welcome us. Whatever I initially expected of a person who has lost nearly everything, Melanie is none of those things. She’s been cooped up with her husband and teenage sons in a small FEMA trailer for seven months now, yet her grin is as wide as her face. She hugs each of us instantly upon introduction, and insists that we have some sweet tea before beginning work. I take my first sip, am instantly addicted.

We work in pairs, each of us taking on a section of the yard. My attention is instantly drawn to a small upright piano lying on its back. Melanie says it washed up from a few houses down, and it lies right where the waves left it. Grass grows through each crevice and the wood is weathered gray from exposure to sun and salt. The keyboard is warped and rickety. While some keys have miraculously remained in place, others are strewn about the shelf where music must have rested once.

I imagine these keys were once played regularly, perhaps during a child’s dutiful practice time, perhaps during a recital, perhaps accompanied by a voice. The lifelong pianist in me aches at this sight. Picking up two of the loose black keys, I wipe off grains of sand and quickly put them in my pocket. One of the men has begun breaking the piano into pieces with an axe. I wince with the first two blows. Carrying each mangled piece carefully, we throw the piano bit by bit over the fence into the ditch. If the garbage trucks ever arrive, they’ll start with the ditches first.

An unwritten code exists here. Anything considered trash is thrown in the front ditch. Anything that is potentially salvageable is set apart, in case the family returns. All that’s left of the house across the street is a floor and chimney, yet in one corner there are neat little stacks, Melanie’s doing. Vases. Chipped china. A Pyrex dish. Forks and knives. A toy or two. Framed pictures. I see this pattern repeated in each neighborhood I visit.

The afternoon is a series of small victories sandwiched between long spells of fruitless searching. It is slow work, even as we are trying to move quickly. We dig gingerly, not wanting to break anything we uncover. I unearth a ceramic dog’s face, which turns out to be a cookie jar. By some miracle, we also find the lid intact – a wagging tail. I sheepishly show Melanie our find, sad I don’t have something better to report, but she is grinning, excitedly trying to explain: this was a wedding present from her grandmother, who owned one just like it when Melanie was a child.

Beneath an overturned bathtub, her mother’s silver. Over in the grass, a large photo from her honeymoon. Each time, Melanie acts as if we’ve placed the whole of her old life back into her hands.

I am humbled, and quickly becoming overwhelmed. Any help we can give isn’t even a drop in the bucket. It is more like a drop in the ocean.

new favorite timesuck

Creative nonfiction essays, all 750 words or less.  Brilliant.

Brevity: The Craft of Concise Literary Nonfiction

the little blue house

(This is a piece I turned in with my midterm portfolio in my Intro to Creative Nonfiction course.  Those of you long-term WEW readers will find familiar material.)

Before my heart ever belonged to the man I married, it belonged to a tiny, cheery cottage called The Little Blue House. If I were talking with you, you’d hear an unmistakable depth of affection and tenderness in my voice when I say it: Little Blue House. I’m not sure it was justifiable to have this degree of emotional attachment to 525 square feet, but regardless — I was in love.

This was no palace: the ten-second tour of my home took literally ten seconds. It had what I liked to call quirks, such as orange-brown rusty water for the first two seconds I ran water in the tub, and a sloping floor in my tiny kitchen which caught my feet off guard more than once. My brother had to duck to enter the doorways when he came to visit; if I stood on my tip-toes all 5′6″ of me could touch the ceiling with ease. There was a 35-40 degree temperature range in my home at all times — somewhere around 50 degrees when the heat was off, somewhere around 90 when the baseboard heat was on. Mornings were so frigid, I found it difficult to brave the chill long enough to turn on my coffee pot. Extreme temperature variances did nothing to discourage spiders from sharing my home with me, much to my dismay.

My new home’s beauty far outweighed its many quirks, however, and such trivialities were soon forgotten. A collective seventy years of old-fashioned charm shone in polished hardwood floors, a huge porcelain tub special-made for bubble baths, a desk nook, prismed glass doorknobs, and old-fashioned light fixtures — the kind made to look like candles on the wall. My tiny lawn took about fifteen minutes to mow, but to mow it made me feel handy and self-sufficient nonetheless, and the rosebush I freed from weeds my first weekend in residence quickly grew heavy with hot-pink blooms in gratitude.

I loved living alone for the first time and having walls all to myself: for once, there were no screaming neighbors downstairs, no thumping car stereos out in the parking lot causing my too-thin walls to shudder at 2 a.m.  No longer did I hear a motorcycle directly outside my window coughing and sputtering in vain attempts to start at 5 a.m., when I typically would be trying to squeeze in the last few precious moments of sleep.  Here, the only sounds to reach my ears were the whoosh of cars driving by, the light hum of the refrigerator, and the steady tick-tick-tick of the second hand on the clock above my stove. These sounds lulled me to sleep more than anything.

The peace I felt simply in existing here extended far beyond an absence of noise. The moment I walked through the front door at the end of a long day, I was surrounded by my favorite things. (One could argue that I was surrounded by the things I love merely as a result of how tiny my place was, but I leave them to it.) My treasured, full-to-overflowing bookshelf was the first thing in view when I opened the door. My guitar rested in the corner. Pictures of those I love smiled down at me from the walls, in case it had been more than five minutes since I’d seen them (the home I grew up in was a short walk away). There were more candles around than my landlord would care to know about. Add to this my well-worn, comfortable couch and The Reading Chair, and to be honest, I really couldn’t have asked for more. (Not even cable).

A few months into my lease at the Little Blue House, I was startled to realize how much I was enjoying this little life I had fashioned for myself. This quiet home provided a backdrop for appreciating small joys: Enjoying the companionship of friends I loved. Being challenged daily in my new grown-up job. Finding peace in this place I came home to at the end of the day. These seemingly small things suddenly took on huge new realms of importance.

This was no Plan B, although my younger self certainly would have thought so. Many of my friends graduated college young and married soon after, and I simply assumed this would be the case for me as well. I thought I’d be done with college in four years and marry within a year or two afterward. That’s the way the plan is supposed to go, right? (I laugh now at the thought of me being capable of domesticity at twenty-two, and grieve for many of those friends who married too young, who found that growing up meant growing apart.)

Real life didn’t know about my plan.  It never moved along at the pace I expected it would, and there were detours and dead-ends thrown in that I could not have known to prepare for. If there is anything I learned in my early twenties, it is that we each of us move along at our own pace in life – five year plans be damned. As soon as I let go of the need to be on anyone’s schedule but my own, I began to feel pride in my independence, pride in the adventures I was able to experience as a single person.

This isn’t to say that I never faltered. Each of the four times I was a bridesmaid, I experienced a slight emotional hangover after watching my friend drive off into the sunset with her new husband. At this point, usually some well-meaning older gentleman would ask when I was going to find myself a man, when it would be my turn. At first, I sighed, wondering if perhaps life wouldn’t be complete for me until I had that ring on my left hand. Later, I learned to smile sweetly and say I would be getting married as soon as my beloved made it out on parole.

I would travel home from the party, change out of my fancy dress into clothes I could breathe in, and sit cross-legged on the beach behind my house, a glass of cheap white wine in my hand. I allowed myself time to catch a split-second silver glimpse of fish leaping from the gently lapping waters of Dyes Inlet. I sat in awed solitude as the last light disappeared behind the rugged grandeur of The Brothers’ peaks. As the sun went down, the gnawing envy in my gut would grow quiet, if not completely still.

It happens at different times for different people, but it was then I discovered that I am responsible for my own happiness, that I could not place that burden on anyone else but myself – especially not an as-of-yet fictional life partner. I learned to be a good companion to myself. I slowed down, allowed myself room for what makes a life (or at least my life) satisfyingly full: time to think. Time to breathe.

I reveled in it.

More than once I wondered if I might be setting myself up for lifelong spinsterhood in the Little Blue House. After all, I reasoned, I was happy on my own. I wasn’t sure I could trade the ability to sleep sprawled out diagonally, bed all to myself, for the company of a mere man. Not any current acquaintances, anyway.

Life turned my plan topsy-turvy once again, and I ended up losing that ability to sleep undisturbed far more quickly than I saw coming. Not long after as I’d grown comfortable with a life on my own, I stumbled upon someone I wanted to share it with, someone who thought all the same things were important.

In March, seven months after I first set myself up in the Little Blue House, the walls in my living room observed as I obsessively checked my computer for more words from this witty new presence in my life. They witnessed my cheeks growing rosy the first time we nervously spoke on the phone. Later, I would skip along the stepping stones from my front door more than once each day to see if the mailman had made his rounds, hoping for a new set of precious, handwritten words. In July, my bedroom walls would see a tall man kneeling by my bedside, Starbucks coffee and ring in hand. They’d see me, pajama-clad, sleepy-eyed, accepting.

I said goodbye to my tiny home, my first love, a few months later. I ached the day we packed up all my boxes and I locked the door behind me for the last time, but I was also thrilled for what lay ahead, for fashioning a new home together. College in a new town beckoned, and we moved soon after we were married.

It’s been over a year since Justin and I said our vows. My life is vastly different. My life is much the same.

It’s different: I’m still getting used to shaving stubble in our bathroom sink. I steal my husband’s holey socks (to which he has no reason for such an emotional bond), throw them away, and triumphantly replace them with new ones. So I can sleep, a fan blows all night to cover the sound of Justin’s deep breathing, which begins about eight seconds after his head hits the pillow. I’ve learned to cook. We watch football. (Every Sunday. I know most of the players).

It’s the same: We have two overflowing bookshelves now, and two reading chairs. Our apartment, while it doesn’t exactly inspire an affectionate name, is quiet and comfortable, and our balcony overlooks long, tranquil Sunset Pond. With the enthusiastic finger-pointing of small children, we watch bald eagles dive and soar in the wind, does and fawns literally graze in our backyard. Whenever I point out the sun’s brilliant display at day’s end, Justin stops, grabs my hand, and shares it with me, knowing how important this is. I wake up most mornings to steaming coffee on my nightstand in the morning dark.

I always thought that when people got married, they traded their old life in for a new one. I was wrong. The simple joys I learned to appreciate while I lived alone aren’t much different.

They’re just doubled these days.