Elements: Earth

I'm putting a spin on Shari's Elements Challenge today, plus posting it late.

Tomorrow is the Katrina anniversary. I was going through my photos from my trip last spring - one of the greatest I've ever taken in my life. I'd never visited the city pre-storm, and loved it so much when I went that I can't imagine how I'd have felt if I'd been familiar with the place as it was prior. I took some photos of the Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District, which is actually just up the street from the friend's house who hosted me. It's the cemetery Ann Rice based her LeStat books on, and where some of the movie was filmed. I went in the early morning. The light was gorgeous. I never captured it like I wanted to, which is to say, exactly as I saw it. It's just not possible.

I find too many metaphors in the "earth" and "water" collision here, none of which need elaboration. New Orleanians bury their dead above ground, still below sea level. The monuments and the crypts of these ancient graves are cracking, grown over with new weeds, dirt spilling out of the cracks, through names so worn away (water?) you can't even read some of them anymore. We saw it all on the news, but the people who lived there saw it in person. They still see it in person, if they've managed to come back or never left in the first place. It's a place where the two elements have always lived uneasily close together, but not in a bad way until the earth lost its grip. All of the rebuilding efforts are really an effort to shore it up so it doesn't collapse again.

It's strange to read about instability in a place that's so solid in so many ways that can't always be seen. The hands that went up in the air at JazzFest were powerful. It's a culture and a place that's always existed in obvious acknowledgement of the relationship between earth and water. This will never change.

The people who rebuild, in whatever way it's possible, will do so because this is earth they were planted in, no matter how soggy the ground gets. Or maybe they don't know how to replant themselves - don't have the means, or the will, or the support they need to figure it out. But there are many who do, who choose to stay, even if they went away for a bit. I saw that when I was there. I saw a certain faith I've seen in few other places. I don't know if I have it, myself. I don't know if I'd have the courage or the crazy dedication to a landscape to put myself back in the path of a sea that I simultaneously love and fear. Many of us cling like hell to our illusion that some different patch of earth will hold us steady. Then again, if it's a patch that doesn't understand a jazz funeral or the lilt of Creole, it's the wrong one for a lot of people, no matter how safe it might seem. Today I remember images I'll never forget, of people clinging to earth while the water tried to carry them away. Helicopters. Roofs of shanty houses. Black marks on buildings. Old, dark faces, left to rot outside a physical symbol of our nation's obsession with sport and millions of dollars that go in the wrong direction. 

I know I'll never be the same, and I only tasted it from a thousand miles away. I don't believe any of us can truly understand what it is that happened to the people who saw their homes and their lives literally wash away. I don't know what kind of reparation can fix that kind of loss. I just know I think about them a lot. I wish them well. I read the stories and contribute what I can in the way of supporting the economy and telling the story. It's too easy to forget them, and it would be the worst kind of tragedy if that happened twice.