Plaquemines Parish : An Average Day
Matthew Sheard
Dust, dry clay and oyster shells crunch underneath the tires of the Jeep as I pull into Site.
“Do you see this,” I say to the first person I come upon.
One of our neighbors has already been yapping about the anomoly but people haven’t realized how close to us all they are. Word that they are right behind us telephones through Site and people start making their way from the YMCA building to the gymnasium out back. Standing on the platform where we have set our tents, we can see over the levee, through the blown out walls.
photo by Kate Mrozowski
The view is good but not satisfactory. We make our way around the olympic pool and start hacking our way through the brush behind Site, back toward Highway 23. A sole truck drives by and we cross the four-lane. We are stopped on the other side by a drainage canal. A few of the volunteers start jogging toward the dirt ramp that crosses the canal and leads to the Buras dock so they can get pictures from atop the levee.
Someone who was talking to the resident explains that they are waterspouts. Tornados that form in the Gulf that are made more out of water than wind and that rarely come on to land. They are awesome.
I look at the people around me who are watching the waterspouts. They sleep in tents in a blown out gymnasium. Cook bulk meals in a kitchen draped in mosquito netting. Shit in port-o-pots and shower at a fire station a mile and a half away. Pull 12, 16, 20, 24 hour days, seven days a week. Drink flood liquor and smoke rolled cigarettes. Clear debris and build. Walk toward tornados.
People trickle back to work.
The priority for the day is water. Luke has repaired a crack in the main and run a line up to the side of the building. That line will branch off in three ways; to hoses running to the kitchen, to pipes running to the laundromat and to showers in a gazebo twenty paces to the left of the main building.
My brother and I are filling the hole that was dug to repair the main and a few feet away from us Matt and Seth are diggin fresh holes which will serve as drain basins for the showers.
“Can you imagine being a slave down here. Literally being worked to death in this heat.” My brother Chris has his shirt off, hanging loosely around his neck. We both look like we pissed our pants from sweat.
“No,” I say and exhale a dramatic puff of air, “I really can’t imagine it. I know it’s true, I know it happened and I can picture it. But I can’t imagine it.”
We join Seth and Matt. Each hole for the drain basins has to be 32 cubic feet and the ground is more shell then earth. We take turns pounding it with hammers and pick-axes, shovelling the loosened ground and pounding again.
news
stories by author