Bargewatch: An Elegaic Farewell (part I)

by Adam Peltz

Adam Peltz at the Industrial Canal breech waxes elegaic for the barge and the future of the Lower 9 in the first of a two-part story.

“No wonder we found ourselves rootless…”-- Gregory Corso, from “Elegiac Feelings American”

The once-figure of the barge, after quick transformation into iron splinters and parts coupled with a contractor’s sparks, has been trucked away and the copper-sunned hull preserved for an investigation. But for many, the barge’s image of funereal poise cannot come undone. For a spell, the disembodied red top posed in a neat stack beside its base, readying to be shuffled through and wagered on by the however biased determining body, somewhere down the line. Atop and seizing a rare opportunity, a worker sat in a collapsible green camping chair behind a camera and tripod.

Five days after many returnees received their Lenten ashes, this Sunday scene of disappearance fused the verge of a visit from the president, and the release of “key” state budget issues, with a mayoral race just out of the gates and a federal denial of 4.2 billion dollars for home building. For tourists, this leaves the event of bulldozers parting the neighborhood entrails in the playing field of shock. Will the Lower Nine rise again?

“Some find America in songs of clumping stone, some in fogs of revolution.”

Sometimes I try and define the word happy, to explore what I mean when I use it, to see if it explains a part of my life that is able to block, on some level, the decimated section of the same ward in which I have lived for years. Is happy when the shit, or murky water, flies in the other direction? Are certain people in positions of change – happy?

“…[F]or indeed ours was a time of prophecy without death as a consequence…”

And what will be discovered in the scrapes and scratches on the preserved underbelly of the barge? – that owner Ingram is covering its ass six months after the vessel rammed into a Lower Nine living room; that the barge was left behind in order to rip through the levee wall -- saving upper nine industry, classists, racists, tearing away the poor, the trash, those who settle for less; that the barge was maneuvered through the already torn open levee by the hands of Irish sub-slaving ghosts, payback for yellow jack; that a toxic symbol of poverty and a nearly impossible rebuilding ahead has been cut down and removed so to make us believe in progress or even that the enormous monster never existed, for, how could it have happened?

“Yours the eyes that saw, the heart that felt, the voice that sang and cried.”

These installments of semi-meditative Lower Nine coverage began as an ode to a neighborhood on its deathbed. “We came to announce the human spirit in the name of beauty and truth;” now, I must say this: I cannot celebrate the end of this watch because I do not believe that there is any end in sight. No lookout, no vista of glory; tell me otherwise. Well, some of the roads have been cleared and there is much fussing with dirt and chain link, yet why did the barge pile-drive a school bus – a symbol of our public education legacy – in a Jourdan Street dwelling, for so long? Was it an attempt to vanish Carnival visitors or for the president’s gander and gait?

Is there more to the answer than the breadth and never-before status of such a “natural” disaster? Though wind cannot be manufactured (some would say otherwise – the Japanese did this to us), through mismanagement, negligence, history’s deliberations, suited folks playing as gods, was the flooding…here we go…invited?

“like a bird in hand, harnessed and engineered in the unevolutional ways of experiment and technique”

As I write this drawn out farewell and although we might appreciate the removal of the barge, the name Ingram and the barge’s long-standing presence, like a gigantic hunk of road kill or a dead body left out in the sun, will not disappear completely at the torch of a hired hand, himself a leader in the movement of skeptics and breadwinning struggles. We watched and some of us fought through the horror only to return to the stagnation after death, which continues, and will continue.

For a number of folks, the fall of the Lower Ninth Ward and its mostly poor, displaced constituents has been pinned on a group of some bodies. My middle finger, though, when pointed at the levee holes behind the then-barge’s carved carcass and the now-Jourdan Street barge memorial, finds an attack of futility on overworked, sad contractors and a collection of unprecedented though recognizable American sorrow.

“O and yet when it’s asked of you ‘What happened to him?’ I say ‘What happened to America has happened him—the two were inseparable’ Like the wind to the sky is the voice to the word…”

Adam Peltz has covered the fate of the barge and the Lower 9 for NOLAFugees.com since November, 2005. Part II of his elegy will run in the next issue.

photos courtesy the author.