Louisiana's Road Home: It's a Long Way There

Posted: 26 August 2006

by Davida Finger

As I passed through the checkpoint in lower Plaquemines Parish along Highway 23, a group of parked cars and people mulling about caught my eye. Naturally, I pulled over: a crowd in rural Louisiana guarantees a lively and interesting conversation. Alligators. Alligators were crawling out of the marsh, stopping on the grassy incline, and looking around.

Onlookers traded alligator details:

“When I was 2 years old, there was one under my house and it snatched a little girl.”

“I’ve seen these things crawl right onto the road.”

“They’ll eat ya’ if you skip school.”

I was stunned. After spending the winter and spring months in Plaquemines Parish without seeing many children, there were eight kids standing around staring at the gators. Kids! I felt great as I continued south down the road thinking about Plaquemines Parish residents returning home with their families.

When I got out of my car close to Venice, the thick humidity took my breath away for just a second. Here, less than 100 miles away from New Orleans where I grew up, I as at the tip of the raggedy coastline of southern Louisiana. It has always been known as “the end of the world” and post-hurricanes the phrase has taken on new meaning.

For residents throughout lower Plaquemines and on the East Bank of the Mississippi, Katrina and Rita left nothing behind. In some places, even the land—long ago stripped of its natural protections—was taken away with everything else. And people in the lower parish, like so many others, have been left to fend for themselves.

“Back in October when I was living without electricity or water, FEMA told me I had to fax in my papers,” one fisherman told me a few days ago. “I didn’t have enough gas or time to go find a fax. I had to fix my roof.” He told me that he wanted to wake up and look at his piece of the sky, repair his boat, and get back to work.

For many small, commercial fishers, getting back to work has proved close to impossible. As I drive down Highway 23, I’ve seen some of the same landlocked boats for almost a year now. And, so many of the boats that were found and moved are sitting idle—waiting for a day when there will be enough money to buy fiberglass and enough time to make the repairs-- to get ready for the next season, whenever that might be.

Still, many people are ready to try something new—pouring countless hours of energy into community meetings and discussions about the future and devising local strategies to keep things from getting back to “business as usual.” At a recent organizing meeting for a fisher cooperative—a group that hopes to work collaboratively to control the marketing and sale of their catch—a fisherman’s wife explained, “We’ve been making money for other people our whole lives. I just realized that. We have to try something new.”

New is not easy. Today, after walking through the skeleton of a home with most of its walls still down, I sat with the homeowner working out calculations on what a new house would cost. After factoring in the money--still only a promise--from the Louisiana Road Home (the state's recovery plan), minus the flood insurance coverage that this homeowner had, there would be no money coming in. There would be nothing for home repairs. The full sum of the insurance payment went directly to the mortgage holder as it wrongly has for so many others with insurance.

As I drove back up 23, I thought about the kids I’d seen earlier in the morning--and what a long journey the real road home actually is.