Bargewatch: A Holiday Tale

Although my imagination stumbles these days, in this tale, my scope sadly tries for the glorious moments, such as when the sun reaches out and grazes along the oxidized hull of the Lower Ninth Wards’ road-blocking barge, a sign of man’s ability to create big things and explosive noises. After the sun has risen, I am happy as an elf who knows there’s an unopened bottle of whisky waiting at the end of another day.

Beyond the barge, I can imagine the house lots, the splinters, and the concrete slabs, first bulldozed by toxic canal water and then knocked down further, where applicable, according to contract. In place, the new low income homes that sort of look like New Orleans grow up to kiss the sky, and even a plot of space is left for a wonderful park, where children sing songs and double-Dutch, like we used to when we were kids. The petroleum has been vacuumed from the skin of the earth, and the people return. The Lower Nine once again flies its banner high.

In this tale, all of the overturned cars become carriages in a pastoral watercolor. They seem to run by themselves, no driver in sight, until the bronze and muscled faces of unperturbed mules rise from a drinking trough, and each one stops and picks you up for delivery – anywhere you want to go, there’s so much life to witness. And once a day, all of the citizens gather together on the new, super sturdy levee wall along the western edge of the neighborhood, as in Jerusalem. The people’s voices wail, collectively. The citizens leave notes for the loved ones taken from them and light candles that they send off along the dark surface of the canal. We asked. A better levee system was the overwhelming request on most of our wish lists. And they have promised it won’t come crashing down.

In this tale, St. Claude Avenue bustles with folks again hanging around, businesses too busy to keep up, the pocked street itself shining as if paved with gold. At the corner store, a person, any person, cannot make it into the store without undergoing a hug. Dozens of musicians beat drums and speak their brass in the healthy neutral ground, all day long, blowing and blaring and thumping. Fats Domino walks on his hands and hums deeply in his classic tenor. No one shoots no body. Were things like this before the flood surge? Who can remember?

It’s almost time to unscrew that bottle cap. Of the barge, the people’s stories grow in abundance. Along Jourdan Avenue, one woman sipping a cold drink on her front stoop, which now rises twenty feet off of the ground, calls down, "A dozen white men dressed as reindeer done cut that barge to bits." An old guy next door, waving a juicy drumstick from the local Chicken Box, shouts from an adjacent stoop "Naw, that ain’t true, I seen them roll the thing away, say they was gonna float it into the ocean, throw the trash in -- baby dolls, soaked clothes, Jesus' many faces, all of it-- and let go."
"
Two teenagers, clinging to their low riding jeans tucked into loosely laced timberlands, have another version. Puffing on that fire, they sum up their story. "Man, it was flown to somewhere in Mississippi, blocked out the sun for a long minute. You know, they’re making it into a casino to replace the one that blowed up."

"Can you believe that? They just flew it out of here, ya’ heard me?"

And the children -- the sweet things who truly make a city a city, have returned to their flawless public schools, with smiles and endless attention spans. As a choir, they confirm: "One day it was gone, they’d taken it away, just done and gone away."

But out of this tale I wonder: Who are “they” and “them” that we keep relying on to save our city? And while the lanes are slowly being cleared and a new fence is under construction, to keep bystanders from getting too close to the levee and its debris, I ask for a toast, to a healthy, better new year for all: To you, New Orleans.

Imagine...to Double-Dutch, like when we used to.

The unperturbed mules, ready to deliver you to witness.