good-lace's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Orleans - 4 months later NEW ORLEANS -- It is dark. Not just ordinary nighttime darkness. Pitch black. No streetlights. No house lights. Almost no car lights, except for an occasional careful driver, headlights beaming through the darkness as if through a tunnel. There is no electricity. There are only ruined houses you see come daylight, their sides ripped off, their power lines dangling from poles, their trees reduced to sawed chunks whose exposed roots look like giant tangles of dirty hair. And there is silence. In the neighborhoods of New Orleans ravaged by flooding, block after block, mile after mile, the people are gone. It's as if Brookfield were rendered uninhabitable. And Norridge. And Robbins. Four months after Hurricane Katrina, some may have imagined that on some level, life in New Orleans is returning to normal. It would be normal if normal meant seeing a refrigerator on a rooftop. It would be normal if you normally saw signs at the airport instructing you to wear masks, goggles, gloves and heavy boots while cleaning your home. It would be normal if a chic city street normally included a half-collapsed building with a spray-painted sign saying, "Looters will be shot." It would be normal if toy stores normally closed at 5 p.m. two weeks before Christmas; if mail came only twice a week; if people drove around with dirty sweaters in their cars for days on the off-chance of finding a dry cleaner still in business. Imagine streets in Wilmette dotted with Porta-Potties. Imagine Michigan Avenue with ruined refrigerators sitting out on the parkways. Imagine every front door in Beverly spray-painted with bright orange X's noting the dates the houses were searched and how many bodies were found. Now you're in New Orleans, where they don't have to imagine. A visitor to New Orleans at the dawn of a new year will find a city operating, but deeply wounded. - - - By Barbara Brotman 8:25 a.m. - 2006-01-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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