"Ow, goddammit!" The words fill the air like the song of some ill-tempered bird. This is the call of the amateur carpenter, a species usually native to the suburbs, that has migrated in flocks to New Orleans over the past year-and-a-half. Since joining the flock, I have been hearing the squawks all morning. It is day five of a weeklong trip to New Orleans to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity building houses. I am here with my parents.
"I think I'm going to lose my goddamn thumbnail," the man says. It is the third or fourth time today he has hit his finger. Each time he says 'Ow, goddamnit' a little bit louder. A few days ago he said this and I made the mistake of looking over instead of paying attention to my own hammer. I too may lose my thumbnail.
Thankfully, Habitat for Humanity doesn't let volunteers use nail guns. We would almost certainly hurt each other. We are mostly office types who are no more qualified to use a nail gun than we would be to run a marathon, perform an emergency tracheotomy, or go outside without first lathering in SPF 40 sun block. This morning, my mother accidentally nailed one of her work gloves to an interior wall without the help of a nail gun. I didn't tell anyone about this since she is still embarrassed from cutting off the corner of our work table with a circular saw two days ago, which she also told me not to tell anyone about. Discretion is one of my strengths.
As volunteers go, my parents and I are about average craftsmen. If anything, we are maybe a little better than the average volunteer. My father takes every opportunity to point this out to our supervisor, Dan. Dan is a guy in his twenties who works for Habitat. My father has had a very successful career and is a full forty years older than Dan. Still he insists on pointing out every success to Dan. 'Did you see that, Dan?' he said after we made a mildly clever cut in a piece of siding that saved maybe a square foot of material, 'That's advanced carpentry right there.' Dan could not have cared less if he'd been in a coma. 'I bet your other volunteers didn't cut siding like that, did they?' Dan may have nodded. He may also have fallen asleep.
About half of our time here is used actually building something. The other half we use to tear something down that was built incorrectly. For those of you counting, this should end in a wash. If Sisyphus were given a choice between his work and ours, he would probably just keep pushing the boulder.
Somehow though, we seem to be accomplishing something. On Monday, we finished putting the siding on the front of a house. On Tuesday, we sided the back. Wednesday I put up F-channel to brace the soffit under the eaves. Thursday I learned what the words 'F-channel' and 'soffit' meant and then installed a door and four windows. Today we are back to siding.
The neighborhood we are working on is called Musicians' Village. 'No,' one of the Habitat representatives said to a group of us on day one 'that doesn't mean that only musicians live here. We don't require that.' There was no laughter. One of the volunteers nodded. 'I guess that makes sense,' he said. Habitat volunteers tend to use their good intentions as a buffer against humor.
The Habitat houses fill one entire square block of Musician's Village. If you look at them side by side, you might think they were designed by a pastel-loving six-year-old. They are boxy and square and they look like a rainbow would in a Norman Rockwell painting.
If you were to turn 180 degrees from these new volunteer built houses, on the other side of the street you would see a more common sight in the new New Orleans. Most of the houses there may once have been bright, but almost all are now abandoned. They have sinking doors, speckles of shingles still hanging to their roofs, and rotting porches. New Orleans lost about half of its population after Katrina, but in this neighborhood the number appears to be much closer to 80 or 90 percent.
This is depressing enough, but to add to my own sense of the mess New Orleans has become, the New York Times published an article yesterday about how returning refugees are now getting up and leaving again, disgusted by the city's continuing crime; the impossibly slow city services - including police and ambulance services that frequently show up 12 hours after they are called; and the generally depressing nature of a city that seems, at times, to be in its death spasms.
Still, Mardi Gras will continue this year in its usual insane fashion; New Orleans refugees still seem to be trickling back in; and in almost all of these dismal looking blocks, there is at least one house being ever-so-slowly built by a flock of amateur carpenters. 'Ow, goddamnit!' is hardly a cry of hope, but it's better than silence.