Back to Tulane: Tearing down a house, New Orleans style
On Saturday I took an ax to the walls of a house. That's the nature of community service in New Orleans these days.
I would be hard pressed to remember the last time I saw the front end of a Saturday, but at 8:30 in the morning, I was sitting in front of Tulane's McAlister Auditorium learning where we would go that day. I went with a couple of friends who'd been volunteering all semester. They said we were going to St. Bernard Parish. I've never been there before. I didn't even know where it was. They said it is past the Lower Ninth Ward that you always hear about on the news when they talk about areas that were demolished by the storm. Apparently the damage in St. Bernard was even worse.
We drove through the Ninth on the way there. The Wal-Mart was back in business, and other shops had reopened as well. Some parts looked like the architectural equivalent of a car crash—like some drunken homeowner had lost control and crashed his house into his neighbor's. We saw more new sights on the way to the community service headquarters, where we would get our materials and assignment. You get a whole new perspective on physics the first time you see a minivan stuck in a tree. I wonder what the fire department would say if you called to say your pet Toyota had climbed up the old oak tree and was afraid to jump down.
We arrived at a nondescript building and a church, where a student service organization called Safer and a larger organization called Common Ground are based. There was a makeshift donations tent, along with a bunch of equipment deemed appropriate for house gutting. We each got a fly white jumpsuit made of something in between paper and cloth, a respirator, goggles, gloves, and big rubber boots. The guys in charge of our group said we would split into two teams. One to gut a house and one to "demo" a house. My friends and I opted for demo. Demo as in demolition. We got back into the car and drove to a one-story, wooden house. Most of one side was already off. The guy who lived there was happy to see us. We were there to tear down the house he and his father built together about 35 years ago. Sort of a strange circumstance for introductions when you think about it. His neighbor is a kind lady who lives in the two-man tent across the street. The tent sits on the concrete slab that one can only assume once held an actual building with walls and ceilings and all the other amenities of the modern world. Her son lives in a FEMA trailer next to the house we were destroying.
It was time to start taking the house down. First, we were going to knock out the drywall (leaving the studs in place for now so the house wouldn't come down on our heads). The tools of destruction were piled inside a big brown trash can. The sledgehammers, mauls, and crowbars may be a little bit more practical, but why not demolish in style with a big ax?
Destroying something with just the primitive tools in your gloved hands should be cathartic, but I didn't really feel that way. For some reason, putting the blunt end of an ax through three sheets of drywall doesn't release the tension when you find you are standing on a pile of teddy bears.
We weren't just destroying blank walls. People actually lived here. They didn't move out; they fled for survival. The kids didn't come back. They live with their mother up north somewhere. All the stuff here was abandoned, sitting wherever the floodwaters dropped it: Ninja Turtles half hidden under a pile of insulation, the board game Hungry Hungry Hippos facedown on the floor with a roach scurrying around the back of it. Even the hippos aren't hungry enough to eat that.
It was depressing being inside the house and looking at all the damage, but when I was outside, I had a good time. There was a simple reason for this: the people who live there. The lady from the tent across the street came over and asked if anyone was going to feed us. We told her we had sent people, and our lunch should be coming shortly. Half an hour later they had not returned, and she and her son brought a bunch of food: all kinds of candy, energy bars, canned food, and granola bars.
These people lost their homes. They live in trailers and tents. They have lost pretty much all that they had. But still they were more than ready to give us what little they had left. They were grateful that we came to help. It was amazing how positive they were about their situation.
They all seemed to want to stay in New Orleans but had different plans for the future. The man whose house we tore down planned to rebuild. A student in our group asked how high off the ground the new house would be. From his perch on the roof, where he had been helping remove shingles, he jokingly held his left hand about a foot above the apex. If his house had been that high for this storm, the house would have still had about nine inches of clearance above the water level. The water rose higher than his house. But he came back, and he is going to rebuild.
Despite his upbeat attitude, you can tell he is losing a lot of memories as this house becomes a pile of studs and drywall. One of my friends found a photograph of his kids that hadn't been washed out by the waters. The man was overjoyed to see it. It was one of his daughters at her second birthday party. The child is an adult now. For all we know, this is the only picture he has left of her at such a young age. As I stepped over two photo albums whose pictures were all washed out, I could see plainly that a lot more was lost than found.
Volunteer work is supposed to be rewarding, and in some ways it is. But when I got home after a long day of work, I didn't feel like a better person. I was touched by the kindness and optimism of those we had helped, but I felt more sympathy for the nice people who had to go through this disaster the hard way than satisfaction for any sort of achievement on my part. I put an ax through his wall; he is the one who has to put up new walls. And not everyone is trying to rebuild. The next-door neighbor has given up on getting his house back up. He is just going to stay in his FEMA trailer until the 18 months run out, then buy the thing and stay there. He didn't seem to be upset about this plan, but it is still pretty sad to see a guy who couldn't have been older than 30 giving up on getting his home back forever. I am going to keep on doing this, for a variety of reasons, and maybe after I have put in more hours I will feel that I have made more of an impact, but for now I am just left in awe of the dramatic extent of the damage in the areas outside the city and what kind of effect it must have had on the people who once called this place home or still try to.