St. Bernard Parish : Camp Hope
Miles Ross
i worked in the kitchen most of the time. the days felt long. between meals i felt worthless. i never woke up early enough to help make breakfast but i got around to serving it and eating it; still, sometimes neither. taking part in making the meals was fun because they were such huge ordeals. sometimes we’d be short of help. you couldn’t blame anyone. there was one time we ran short and had to act desperately. me and the person i helped make lunch with were at the back of the property smoking a joint with two other people. it had just down-poured that morning. i felt bad being there, but i knew being high the rest of the day would be fun. there was a careless atmosphere in the mosquito tent. the couches and chairs we sat in were drenched. one person was pointing to something on a map to another person. one guy with long hair and tattoos was standing and telling a story that made me feel uncomfortable. a woman walked towards us from behind the reefers, calling out the person who was in charge of lunch. she was saying they were running out of food on the service line. we rushed into the kitchen and spread fish sticks out on five or six large baking sheets. he looked at me with red eyes and said, ’i’m so high.’ i laughed. i thought ’whatever’ and felt safe once the smell of the fish sticks reached us from the ovens.
there were different things too. we hung out on bourbon street one night. instead of the local bar we went to two different times. it was just past the giant oil refinery. the ominous, giant, evil oil refinery. there were ultimate frisbee games in the muddy field. one of the dogs got lost. we rode bikes to a near by park. a local gave us a tour of some of the areas of the native people, the islenos. we loaded and unloaded trucks of palates of food. we tried to catch an alligator with store bought chicken. we fished for crabs with store bought chicken and made a crab gumbo. i had lunch downtown and walked around the french quarter. i gutted a house with some habitat for humanity volunteers. some of the time i was bored. i’d walk through the kitchen, out back around the basketball courts and generators, around the reefers, through the empty hallways with graffiti on them, through the empty gymnasium-turned-dining-hall. at night sometimes i’d sit outside the hallway door and stare through the barbed wire fence into the woods smoking a cigarette or a joint. one night a few of the volunteers got a band together and jammed. that night i got into one of those conversations with this guy who just sort of hung around with the e.c. crowd. i still remember him saying ’control breeds more control, man. you see?!’
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