NO, Chapter Two

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8
The smells of the place remind me a lot of India - or at least, the less
pleasant parts of India. Lots of times I’ll be walking or driving down
the street and I’ll get a whiff of dead something - either in the bushes
or in the sewers. Then there are the piles of rotting vegetation -
natural stuff like leaves and tree limbs then add the stuff from all the
refrigerators. You have never seen so many refrigerators plus other
appliances - it’s like Baillo’s warehouse exploded. I guess after a
month the stink permeates the plastic that most fridges are made of and
won’t come out. Some got flooded and the compressors are shot but most
just stink. Mike was talking to a couple who found a brand new stainless
steel fridge, scarfed it up and took it home, schlepped it up to the
third floor, plugged it in and “voila!’, it worked. Then they discovered
that someone had ripped the ice make out so they went back out into the
streets until they found a similar model and got the icemaker. I tell
you, it breaks my garage sale heart to see all the stuff on the side of
the road - cedar chests, tables, chairs - to my scavenging eye it would
just take a bit of cleaning and re-gluing and it would be just as good as
new. Alas, I think this is another by-product of the marriage of our
consumer consciousness and insurance. - “toss it and someone will buy us
a new one.”

Today we are in Chalmette, south and east of the city. Here the
devastation is total; there are virtually NO houses or stores that are
habitable. The water line here was at 8 feet and then came the looters -
there are hardly any windows unbroken at ground level. Roving gangs of
poor folks from the projects north of here and then gangs of cops - one
of which broke into the Walmart and grabbed all the guns - maybe the
rational was to keep the REALLY bad guys from getting them. We had to go
through two roadblocks to get into this neighborhood. It’s truly an
occupied territory - and looks like a bombed out city. It’s hard to
imagine it’s part of the US. But people are slowly putting their lives
back together in most other parts of the city.

More To Come>>>>>