the drive back

Feeling pulled into blogging practice. Starting to actually use Bloglines. Reading through a friend’s recent posts from New Orleans this past month, I was inspired to read through some posts I’d copied and pasted from an earlier incarnation of this blog I never really got into and eventually took down.

My first post was from 3.29.06, my last night in a visit to New Orleans, just about a year since I was there for the INCITE! conference:

The flight over this time was different. There was a general consciousness of the fact that we were all traveling to New Orleans, after Katrina and Rita. People were asking each other if they’d been “back since the storm,” sharing information about the condition of specific buildings on Esplanade Avenue. I found myself wondering why people were going. Were they returning home? Visiting as journalists and documentarians? What were those long tubes they were holding? urban planners? land-grabbers? developers? Tourists? disaster tourists? seasonal tourists returning to the Big Easy before the next hurricane season starts up again?

I spent today visiting members of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian community two hours south of New Orleans in Southern Louisiana. Lunise, who I later find out has lived in the same turquoise-colored house for 60 years, waves as I drive by. I end up spending the better part of my afternoon chatting with her and her family members on her porch. As we talk, she continues to wave to neighbors and others driving by in vehicles, and we watch kids ride along on bicycles and fisherman and crabbers float along the bayou. Lunise points across the bayou, telling me that the blue house and the two to its left now serve as weekend houses for sport fishers, who have also come back. Chuckie, the tribe’s chairman told me there were about 400 residents in Pointe-au-Chien, mostly Indians and some whites who have moved in within the last 10 or 15 years.

Pointe-au-Chien stayed dry after Katrina but suffered “a lot of wind damage” with roofs, shingles, siding, and windows blowing in, Chuckie told me. One person lost his trailer from the wind. There were lots of fallen trees. But Rita brought between one and four or five feet of water for people living on the marsh. “That’s when it really hurt,” Chuckie told me. Lunise showed me a picture her neighbors took when she and her husband left during Rita. The water came up to their door knob. When they returned, they didn’t have a bed to sleep in. Their kitchen counters and table tops were wet. People returned to mud and debris from the marsh and “flipped-over sofas.”

Federal money to rebuild took its time getting to Pointe-au-Chien. Some received funds after three or four months. Others are still waiting for insurance and FEMA. Some were refused altogether. But people came back, helping each other clean up “the best they could”. Chuckie told me they’d rather live in their own home than somewhere else. Storms have come and gone “all through history,” he explained, sharing his grandmother’s story of a storm in the 1920s and others in the 1800s and 1906. Those who stayed through after those storms are the people here today, the ones “that just hung it out.”

It’s been six months now. I still don’t quite know how I feel about my going and listening without writing or reporting. Part of me wonders if I didn’t fulfill an obligation, part of me wonders if writing would have played into sensationalization or into the story folks outside of the Gulf Coast wanted to be read and heard. The acknowledgement of generational story, that maybe I didn’t put on my journalist hat for reasons I’ll never be able or want to say in words, that maybe it’s good sometimes to just listen.

What I remember now from that visit are the turquoise of Lunise and her partner’s home. Their porch, their neighbors, a cat, some birds. The coffee and conversation we shared.

I remember the drive there, a car with a radio, a radio that played sappy country heartbreak songs leaving me crying as I passed the green of trees, the hum of the highway as I navigated my chicken-scratch notes from Mapquest.

Roadside mailboxes as I neared Pointe-au-Chien. Two journalism students from California pulling up with the same rental car at Chuckie’s house as I was leaving. That they gave me their business cards.

Wondering why, if the Spanish colonized the area after the French, the elders all still spoke French.

I remember the sun that day, the drive back to the city, the return to a familiar block with a few pink lobsters laying on a blue news rack.

i haven’t rtfm, but here goes…

Last weekend: rather than sit down and work on two deadlines coming up next weekend, I went out to see Red Doors with my mother opening night in SF, stressed over video equipment, exercised, and eventually hopped onto BART to get to SF again. I’d signed up for a blogging workshop with Min Jung Kim as part of APAture, and was recently reinspired to get a bra fitting (they do them for free at Nordstrom).

I’m glad I went.

And not just because I now know my bra size (according to this story I googled today, most folks go through life wearing the wrong size, or in my case not having worn any size, since I had it wrong).

Thanks to Min Jung, the folks at Kearny Street, and Alex of Read the F* Manual…Please and Glenda of Agendacide.com who came out to support and share, I also was inspired to set up this blog and see what happens.

Tonight: after riding the bus home from work, I walked over to the local cafe to work some on one of my deadlines, then came home, and here I am writing the first post to this blog.

Welcome!

For now, what’s coming up at APAture: I missed Saturday’s film night, but will try to make it out to Wednesday’s Performance, Literary, and Film/Video event. There’s also a comedy night Friday and an open mic Saturday.