While I'm generally and somewhat notoriously bad at remembering what happened when, tomorrow, August 29th, sticks in my head both because (a) it's my birthday (!), and (b) it's the day when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, in both Louisiana and Mississippi, two years ago. Just after the storm in 2005, I made my way down to the New Orleans area to do some reporting on how the region was coping with the storm. This past April, I went back to the Big Easy to see with my own eyes how life was progressing some 20 months after the storm blew through.
Or maybe more accurately, how life is not progressing at all. Tomorrow, I'll be a year older and we'll all move on to August 30, then August 31, and into the excitement of early fall. But in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, time doesn't move ahead at the same natural pace. There, it's always August 2005.
Driving through New Orleans East on my first trip about a month after Katrina made landfall, I screeched my rental car to a halt when I came upon the Sheralane Dog Grooming Shop on Downman Road. I had spent days and days taking in human misery, but the signs spray-painted on the side of the shop -- "Dead Dog Left in Crate" and "Dead Dog STILL" in bright orange safety paint -- made the bottom of my stomach drop. Human pain on the scale of Katrina was too much to process. Animal suffering was removed enough from my experience to be visceral, and horrifying.
Returning to New Orleans this past April, one of my first stops was, yes, the Sheralane Dog Grooming Shop in New Orleans East. Here we were, more than a year and a half later, and almost nothing had changed. The shop was still boarded up in the same way. The only concession to the passage of time? "Dead Dog Left in Crate" had been gone over in white paint, and "Dead Dog STILL" had been scrubbed from the front door.
Of course, Sheralane Dog Grooming is little more than a stand-in for the stagnation that persists in New Orleans. Throughout the city, from New Orleans East to the Lower Ninth Ward, from Lakeview to Chalmette, houses are empty, street lights are out, cars are abandoned, schools stand as they did the day that the flood waters washed in and washed out.
Just down the road from the Sheralane shop this past April, I happened upon an empty building that a sign told me was once the Barbara C. Jordan School, named the former congresswoman from Texas. As I drove slowly by, I noticed that, while I was the only sign of human life for what seemed like miles, the door of the school was propped open.
As I stepped into what must have been a bustling school at some point, I decided that I must have been the first person to have set foot in the space for months and months. Someone must have been here at some point after the storm -- desks had been piled haphazardly out in the courtyard, but it sure looked like no one had been here for quite a long time.
Classroom floors were still caked with mud, chairs overturned, and a single globe sat in the middle of one room. At the risk of excessively anthropomorphizing a globe, it looked for all the world like it was lonely, waiting for some students to come back and give it a spin. But some 20 months after Hurricane Katrina hit, in April of 2007 those kids were nowhere in sight. They were in an apartment in Houston or a trailer park in Baton Rouge or a house in some abandoned part of New Orleans East.
There are a million reasons why life on the Gulf Coast remains battered and broken in the same way it was just after Katrina hit. Politics, policy, poverty, poor planning. A governing philosophy that rejects government. A governing practice that gambles on the big problems happening under someone else's watch and on someone else's dime. And the truth is, we could let this city, this Gulf Coast, fall into the dustbin of history and the responsibility for it would be spread so far and wide to make blame more or less meaningless.
We could get away with abandoning New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. And that's why what becomes of the region defines who we are, if anybody, as a people. Life goes on in the rest of the United States. It hasn't on the Gulf Coast.
Are we perfectly comfortable moving on to August 30th, when New Orleans sits stuck on the 29th?