Hard Return

This year, my Thanksgiving hosts erected their deep fryer next to a heap of bricks and shingles that had fallen from the roof near the back of their house. I had returned home to New Orleans for the first time since Hurricane Katrina decimated it three months ago, and, by Thursday, I'd seen enough of the city to regard the unsightly gash that the fallen debris had opened in their patio--juxtaposed quietly against the vat of bubbling turkey-- as something of a blessing. It could have been so much worse: Their basement had flooded and their chimney had crumbled, but they still had a home and a roof. It was something to be thankful for.But, around town, there were many other things to fear, to regret, to miss, to curse, and to laugh at. It was the most bittersweet homecoming I've had, not least because I don't know who among those at my Thanksgiving table intends to stay in town. New Orleans has begun, in the most tentative way, to be a city again. Langenstein's, our neighborhood grocery, is stocking its shelves, even if it didn't prepare any of its famous turducken for the holiday; restaurants are opening, with limited menus of easy-to-buy ingredients; and bars fill up at night with exasperated hangers-on. But, traversing the debris-clad streets last week, I couldn't help but fear that these cursory signs of recovery won't propel (or reflect) the city's return to cityhood. For one, New Orleans must marshal incredible manpower--and, perhaps more importantly, tame its own worst instincts--to recover. For another, the destruction is almost apocalyptic in scale. In neighborhoods that weren't completely obliterated, the slightest gradations in elevation made the greatest difference. In the Garden District, the lawns of Victorian mansions on one block are manicured and watered; on the next block, facades are obscured by mounds of rubble, carpeting, drywall, and furniture ruined by the flood. Brackish water stagnated long enough in Hollygrove, a neighborhood in West New Orleans, to stain empty houses at the tide level, like unwashed coffee mugs. Not every sign of devastation is so poignant; some are absurd. Driving along West End Avenue out to the harbor, I pass laborers fashioning tree branches and other storm detritus into 40-foot mountains, like ziggurats to Mother Nature. At the marina, sailboats clump together in odd patterns. Some are stacked atop one another like heaps of unassembled Legos; masts and booms and keels puncture hulls above and below them. The gales bunched other boats together like schools of fish. A few vessels were lifted clear out of their slips by the storm surge, then deposited upside-down on the piers. The famous stenches of New Orleans have subsided with the onset of autumn. But the worst nasal assailants--abandoned refrigerators--are still everywhere. By the time the city lost power on the morning Katrina landed, most New Orleanians had already fled; they weren't allowed back until weeks later, at the earliest, by which point their refrigerators were spawning every kind of fungus. Near Lake Pontchartrain, where the flooding was worst (neither power nor people have returned), houses still have fridges out front, standing like sentries before unoccupied property. Paradoxically, these neighborhoods have the fewest fema-sanctioned "blue roofs"--thick tarps the agency has installed free of charge on any leaky roof--since nobody is around to solicit them. Katrina's strangest effects have been social. The city feels lawless, but not in a dangerous way. Everybody is peering around and breaking the rules with the same sense of innocent rue and wonderment. At the marina, I find people crawling through overturned boat carcasses and over electrical lines as if they know no better. Traffic laws are suddenly irrelevant: Red lights (where they still exist) are optional, as long as you stop first; the neutral ground (what people elsewhere call the "median") on St. Charles Avenue, where streetcars carried tourists from Carrollton to the French Quarter, is an auxiliary parking lot; U-turns are encouraged everywhere that left turns were once forbidden. There is a 2 a.m. curfew in effect, but last call hasn't changed. It is not unusual to see people getting out of their cars to inspect someone else's ruins- -storefronts, houses, schools, whatever looks interesting. Since only 16 percent of New Orleanians have come home, the streets are eerily empty (navigating Claiborne Avenue, a central thruway, at 7 p.m. feels like it once did to cruise home at 4 a.m.), but, because stop signs have replaced stoplights, traffic is worse. Even the U.S. Postal Service--"neither snow, nor rain"--is struggling. First, officials said they couldn't deliver mail because there were not enough carriers in New Orleans. Now, they say there is not enough mail to justify each route. So, until Monday, residents had to pick up their mail at post offices--which, as it happens, are open for only a few hours daily. My parents are still receiving mail from September, which must mean that hundreds of thousands of insurance checks are sitting unopened somewhere. Normalcy is making inroads elsewhere, but slowly: My childhood barber is seeing customers--hair still grows in postdiluvian New Orleans--but the grocer on the next block is not. Just a few miles away, officials plan to raze 50,000 houses. Can New Orleans right itself? The signs aren't good. Last week, the state House killed a measure to consolidate levee boards. Currently, the levees are divided into tiny patronage fiefdoms (the specter of Huey Long still haunts Louisiana) that hide behind hollow locals-know-best rhetoric and persuade congressional appropriators that federal money will be wasted. Yet evacuees say they won't return until they know the levees can protect them from Category Five storms--something unlikely to happen for another decade under half a dozen autonomous boards. Still, in a few ways, New Orleans is already its old self again--impossibly slow to change, abject in its corruption. Its worst traits may hinder the revival of its beautiful historic persona. It's possible that, in the spirit of comity and collective determination, the city will heal itself. But it's just as likely that a skeletal population will learn to fry its food resignedly amid the heaps of ruin.

By adam b. kushner