#24 Slidell...Part II

Today we all drive back to Slidell to do the walk through inspection. SInce I have been there, I go with "Mo".We take along "Anna", my only good recruit. Boss goes with cleaning boy and the environmental b-word. Driving down, we talk and talk and talk. We hear everyones past and present. We are girls yakking. We get there in no time flat. Same turn off, same houses with blue tarps,but this time we know where we are going, and there is no invented emergency.

We drive up and are greeted by the now familiar staff. There is still no water. Boss, the Boy and the b-word all go on an official tour of the joint with the staff Brass. "Mo", "Anna" and I peel off on our own, snapping pictures, smiling and talking under our breath. It is worse than we thought. Nothing in this shelter is regulation. Nothing about this shelter is safe. The food is all placed directly on the floor in the middle of the sleeping area. which is the only area. The cots abut the open food containers which are placed around randomly.

Most containers are open. Perishables, diapers, canned goods, paper goods, fruit, are all stacked on top of each other open and closed, with no regard to inventory or contamination possibilities. The cots are placed within inches of each other and inches of the food. We interview the volunteers and are told that the clients have been eating on their cots until today. They have to eat on their cots as there are no chairs or tables for them. There is also no refrigeration outside of one Coca Cola point of sale cooler that has no temperature gauge and that we can tell without one is way too warm to prevent bacteria from forming.

Leading this charge is "Anna", who back home is the manager of a popular restaurant. She is horrified at the conditions. "Anna" tells us that if any of these violations had happened at her restaurant, someone would have been arrested. This was just the tip of the iceberg. We realize that there are lots of elderly and diabetics at this shelter and the staff tells us that they have nothing for them to eat other than crackers. Crackers.... Many of these folks are on oxygen and bed ridden. I know we are all doing the best we can, but ai yi yi!

Someone else approaches us and tells us that the shelter Nurse wishes to speak to us privately. Nurse Nancy tells us that the incidents of illness are rising rapidly, that the bio hazards are stored right behind the only freezer in the shelter, and the meds in the fridge are surrounded by food and water. All violations. She also tells us that because of the storage problems, the clients have been helping themselves to food at night causing even more contamination and escalating the cases of diarreah that was increasing daily. Compounding that is the lack of water and facilities that threaten to possibly go on for days.

Through all of this, I am snapping pictures and the girls are taking copious notes. We get going finally, after I explained to Boss and the others the importance of Vienna Sausages being ordered for this shelter post haste. I took a lot of ribbing for it, but that is what was important to these clients, so nurtz to the nay sayers. Boss finally got that I was dead serious and promised to hand deliver that weenie greenie, (invoice), himself when we got back.

Before we drove back, the three of us decided to tour the area. "Mo" had been here before, so she pointed the car at the worst of it. Yesterday was a cake walk compared to this. More and more houses, more and more destroyed. Empty lots with just boards sticking up from the ground where houses used to be. Across the street fields and fields of what looked like large toothpicks and what used to be bits and pieces of homes. Every square inch was covered with the woody sticks. In one case we saw the front of a beautiful house near the water with a lovely palm tree still standing untouched, only to realize as we passed that only the front half of the house was intact. The entire back section was sheared off. Like when a kid takes a swipe of icing from a cake with his finger.

The girls and I continued into the woods.We saw that every building was collapsed, flattened or destroyed. In some places only the roof remained of what looked like a house of cards when it collapses. At other houses, thirty foot trees had been uprooted and lay on the roofs, or what was left of them. The trees and houses looked like battered old toys that kids had finished playing with and forgot to put away. It took our breath away. Deciding to drive farther in, we pass something that looks like piles of kindling. It was a house. The only thing left standing to let us know that, is a bright blue curved slide. One that used to be on the edge of a swimming pool. The house is gone, the pool is unvisible. Filled and covered with pick-up-stix. Just the blue pool slide remaining. It was weird.

Because we are near the water, boats are everywhere. Everywhere but in the water that is. Unless of course they are underwater, but then all we see is an occasional mast sticking up a foot or two to let us know what's down there. We see boats on the grass, in the trees, in houses, on houses. We see boats upside down, ripped in half. We see one boat way off in the trees, nose pointing straight down trapped in branches twenty feet up. That boat was at least fifteen feet long. We see boats on cars, cars on boats, boats on boats. The remains of a former seagoing people are everywhere. As we pass one woody area, we see trees festooned with crab pot and their red floats. It looks like a forest full of funky christmas trees decorated for the holidays. It makes us crack up. It almost makes us cry.

A we approach a large hangar-like building, on one side is a jeep upright but ripped apart, its tires shredded. We see that the corrugated sides of this building have been peeled back like a sardine can. Everything in it and around this building is decimated. Where one side has ripped off we can see eight perfect, retro, red cushioned bar stools......still bolted to the floor, standing neatly in a row in the middle of the carnage. Nearby is a Coke machine tossed like a dog toy. It must have been a restaurant or a bar. The image is stunning. We take pictures and press further on.

Turning into a road by the sea, is a long grey line of brush smoldering along the length of the road. It gives off a ghostly smoke floating ahead of us. The telephone poles all tilting precariously towards the road at an almost toppling angle. This reminds us of all of the pictures we have seen in magazines and in the movies of WWII. The clasic burning aftermath of war. What used to be houses are only empty concrete pads where houses used to stand. There is no kindling, there is no debris here. Just what could cling to the earth in the eye of the apocalypse. It is as though the earth has been scrubbed clean of human imprint. Hurricane whipped and scoured. One house alone, heavily damaged stands among tens of the missing. It is raised, still on its pilings, painted pepto bismol pink. We wonder why it survived when there is virtually nothing that remains of any other house for at least a mile?

Up the way, we see a big rig. It is torn in half. The cab is upside down on one side of the road. The battered thrty foot trailer is wrenched and twisted, lying across the street some three hundred feet away, inside of where another house used to be. Small trees somehow remain. That is amazing. Some of the trees have some sheets of clunky black stuff wrapped around them. We realize that it is layers of asphalt that have peeled off of the road like so much scotch tape, flown away and curling around anything left standing. Other layers of what used to be the road have been lifted and carried, laid in sections like so many mixed puzzle pieces on what used to be lawns.

There was little of what used to be road left. The wind had somehow torn it out and taken it somewhere else. We decided to stop. The girlz slowly opened the doors of the car, and one by one we unfolded ourselves to stand and look. We had become somewhat numbed to the destruction and total devastation in the past weeks, but this landscape truly looked as if bombs had been dropped and detonated, again and again. There are no words to express our hearts twisting as we looked at this mess. It takes a second, but we realize that here on this little road to what is now nowhere, there seems to be a cloak of complete and total silence surrrounding and muffling us and everything around us. There is an undescribable closeness to the air. We remark on it. The auditory sense is as if we were in some way miles underground, buffered by the earth and yet still somehow in the sun. There was not a sound to be heard. Nothing. No winds, no rustling of leaves. Our words once spoken somehow hung dead in the air and then clattered around us. It was as though the world had ended, and only we three had been left as witnesess.

When the shock wore off, we walked forward a bit, and noticed the strangest thing. Butterflies. Butterflies were everywhere. Flying, landing, opening and closing. They floated all around us. It was though every coccoon on earth had been dropped in Slidell Louisiana, and opened all at once. When the surprise of the butterflies began to subside, we noticed that there were actully a few small birds flying around among the insects, zipping about like so many little arrows. Although their sharp little songs were barely cutting through the dead air. It was a hopeful sign.

In thinking later about the loss that the people of Louisiana experienced and are still experiencing , one of the single strongest images that I will carry forever with me, was that barren landscape, the quiet, the butterflies, and the bird song.

"Anna", "Mo" and I got back into the car and made it back to the highway. On the way back, we saw a hand letterd sign posted to a tree on a lot where there used to be a home. It said" take a Break", "We will return","Not for sale". These people are a tough breed.

We stopped in a small town on the way at a sandwich shack that posted a sign reading" Shrimp lover parking only. All others will be shelled". We each ordered shrimp po boys. We didn't talk about what we'd seen. For the rest of the return trip. Instead, with me on the laptop, the three of us collaborating wrote up our entire report and the recommendation that this Slidell shelter be closed. By the time we got back to headquarters, the pictures had been uploaded and attached. All that remained was for us to print it out and sign it. That took about ten minutes.

After work we were whacked. I was grabbed by a bunch of people from the department, and went to dinner at some cheesy chain crab shack. We made jokes,insulted each other and decompressed. I didn't talk about the day, but it was on my mind. It still is. I was sorry that I hadn't thought to take a picture of the butterflies. I was sorry that it all happened in the first place. What was next?