It was dark by the time we pulled into the campground Friday night, between our desire to get to the next town, and the fact that we were now in the eastern part of the Central Time Zone instead of the western part of the Eastern, so we couldn’t see much. Saturday turned out to be a little bit of a shock. We had stayed at a Mississippi State Park, so we stopped at the ranger station on the way out and found that the park had only recently been reopened to campers, because it had been used as a place to house FEMA workers since Hurricane Katrina. Only the campground part of the park was open; the rest was somewhat cared for, but has not been used since Katrina. Playgrounds, picnic areas, and lighted ball fields are all just waiting for someone to be able to get them fixed up and maintained.
Deserted playground
It became abundantly clear to us why parks and recreation areas aren’t being maintained as we drove west. We noticed miles of deserted, destroyed shopping plazas, and through Biloxi and western Mississippi on I-10, there are open tracts of land where something – buildings, woodlots, or whatever – had stood until Katrina came through and flattened them. We had made a comment about litter not being picked up on the sides of the road in the south like it is in the north, and then felt really stupid when we realized that some of the “litter” was composed of things like entire sides of houses, or large pieces of roof, or doors, or truck caps, or other things that had been part of something until Katrina came in and picked them up and dumped them where ever – in the woods, along the road, in somebody else’s yard, or probably in lots of places that had already been cleaned up.
As we drove into Louisiana and approached New Orleans, we noticed more rubble in the sides of the road, and then I-10 started to get bumpy – really bumpy. It’s like our frost heaves up north, but they just go on, mile after mile, one after the other. You can see the cars in the oncoming lane bouncing up and down as they approach, and traffic is forced to slow way down. The posted speed limit is still 60 or 70 mph, but we were doing about 40 in the truck and camper because everything was bouncing and we still lost a hubcap.
That’s bad enough, but what you see as you approach New Orleans from the east is heartbreaking. I actually felt guilty that I had so little understood the extent of the devastation, but I don’t know if you can unless you see it. As any of you who know me know, I’ve lost a few important people in my life over the past few years, and I’ve learned not to always cry, but I haven’t learned how to get rid of that feeling you get in your chest, where it sort of hurts, and it’s hard to get a full breath or feel like you can swallow all the way. That’s the feeling I had as we drove towards New Orleans. The whole Katrina disaster had little or no effect on me personally, but I was still fighting tears and that awful chest feeling. The entire city is devastated. Whole neighborhoods and areas of the city are in ruins. Many houses have holes blown through them, not just the windows but through entire walls. Roofs are missing, and random pieces of wreckage are just lying in yards. We thought about taking some pictures, but decided that pictures don’t really convey it, because the most horrifying thing is just the total lack of life. Nobody is even attempting to fix things, because it’s just not possible to fix that level of devastation, so there are no cars, no people, no pets, no lights, no activity in the yards – it’s truly a wasteland, and a still photo can’t convey the horror of the perfect stillness. And it goes on and on. I know lots of people made jokes about how the city needed to be cleaned up, but Katrina did not discriminate. Katrina demolished both the ramshackle shacks and the pricey homes in the upscale neighborhoods.
We had planned to camp at a state campground and spend a couple of days in New Orleans, but New Orleans isn’t really ready for tourists unless you want to stay downtown at one of the nicer hotels or casinos. The state campgrounds are still being used to house FEMA workers and displaced residents, which didn’t surprise us after we had seen how much work still needs to be done. We were referred to a private campground, if you could call it that. Basically anyone who has a spare parking lot has run some electric cables and water lines, and they line the RVs up in the parking lot, let them plug in, and charge $30 a night to park in a standard parking space in a so-so neighborhood – which is what they all are now. We decided to wait until the city has some time to rebuild before we spend any time there, but on our way out we stopped at a fish market south of the city – in a town appropriately named Westwego (West we go!) - near one of the docks where the fishermen come in. The only sign of damage there was fishing boats sunk at the docks, but whether that is from Katrina or just casualties of the trade, we don’t know. While we didn’t want to spend much time in the city, we decided we could probably live pretty easily on the New Orleans diet – shrimp and crabs and all the yummy salt water fish, cheap! We picked up two pounds of shrimp for $8 which I butterflied for dinner, and went to a restaurant for Cajun seafood for lunch. Tom had gumbo and an oyster po’boy, and I had an alligator sausage po’boy, which was all way too yummy. We also split an order of frog legs; I don’t think I’ve ever eaten amphibians before, except maybe ‘gator bites in Florida, but I could definitely get used to the ‘gator sausage. It’s probably a good thing the freezer doesn’t work, because I’d have been stocking up and then would have had to eat 5 pounds of sausage before we get to Mexico.
Outside the Wego Inn
The funny thing about the shrimp was that the woman selling them was laughing at us because she could tell by how we talked that we were from the north. When we told her we were from NY, she asked if we’d ever bought shrimp with the heads on – which we hadn’t. She then gave us a lesson in how to snap their little heads off, peel their shells, and de-vein them, then told me how to cook them. A couple of other customers came over to throw their two cents in, so by the time we left, I knew way more about shrimp than I’d ever thought there was to know. We also knew more personal Katrina stories than we’d known before, since you don’t have to ask – everybody has one, and everyone wants to tell you. The woman who sold us the shrimp drove out of New Orleans 4 days before it hit with her two daughters and two grandchildren, and wasn’t allowed to come back for 11 months, during which time they lived in a camper. She said she’s glad we’re having fun with our camper, but she never wants to set foot in camper again, and she wants to stay in her house, which cost over $200K to repair. The expense was covered by insurance. Our lunch waitress said that the restaurant and fish market area weren’t overly damaged, and she was only out of her house for two weeks since the water damage was done to the areas “protected” by the levees which flooded and stayed flooded, and the areas on the water had the water come in, and then go out.
The shrimp lady also explained part of why we found New Orleans so much more disturbing than Biloxi, despite the fact that both had been equally hard hit. Biloxi got the wind side of the hurricane, so things were just flattened. New Orleans had slightly less wind, but way more water hit and then couldn’t get out, so the majority of the damage in New Orleans was from the water. The water damage is as or more destructive than the wind damage, but a year and a bit later, the water damaged buildings and roads look okay at a glance even though nothing structurally sound remains. For some reason it’s a little less disturbing when you can see the damage.
We drove out of New Orleans, and wished we had entered from the west, because it was much less damaged. There seems to be more bayou and less building – in fact, most of the highways are roadways rising out of the swamp on concrete supports – and Mother Nature is way better at recovering than we are. That was actually one of the things that bothered me about all the wreckage; it would be easy to say that Nature is just asserting itself, but after people have gone in and “civilized” a place, when the people are gone, there’s nothing but people’s garbage. The stuff wasn’t garbage when people were using it, and I’m sure if it was left entirely alone it would be overgrown in time, but in a year and four months, it just looks barren and ruined however you look at it. There are miles of road south of New Orleans that have become landfill for construction/destruction debris, and from what we could see, they’re filling up fast and there’s still an awful lot to do.
We made it to Lafayette Saturday night, and found a relatively inexpensive campground. Unfortunately, apparently the parking lot approach has taken off in Louisiana, and we were lined up with about 80 other RVs and we listened to traffic the whole rainy night. We’re not sure how our neighbors felt about us sitting outside the camper cleaning the shrimp (Tom is good at breaking their heads off, and I can get the guts out), but in any case it didn’t really matter because we never saw them. We were up in the morning, went for a run, prepped the camper for a night or two of boondocking, had a good breakfast, and were on the road a little after 9:00.
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