Plaquemines Parish : We Do It For Love
Chris Sheard
I sometimes try to imagine the feeling of being in that fucking thing, that lonely travel-trailer, cold from air-conditioning while the sticky Louisiana night is hanging around your window outside. No electricity on the street, just whatever the generator could muster. I think about Andy sometimes, sitting in that trailer with his wife and daughter gone and the Sisyphean effort it must have taken that man to get up every morning.
photo by Blair Allen
But that’s how people in Buras were, real matter of fact. To be perfectly honest there weren’t a lot of books around town. Even before the town got knocked off the state map I don’t think the public library was often patronized. To us northern city-types that might seem ignorant but people in Buras weren’t ignorant they were really living, not sitting around reading.
A particularly perceptive volunteer once said it perfectly. He said of the residents: “Everyone knows how to do everything and if they don’t someone down the road does.”
And it was true. Theirs was real, practical knowledge, the kind of knowledge and wisdom that comes from hard work, using your hands and your back everyday.
So when something like Katrina came in and destroyed their homes and shook their lives they didn’t crawl up and sink into a self-engulfing spiral of self-pity and wallowing, paralyzed by the meaninglessness of their existential metaphysical journey through the seemingly objective whatever-the-fuck.
The weight on their shoulders was incredible. I really believe “smarter” people could not have gotten through it. No northeastern intellectual could have lived a week in the shoes of a resident. Not a week.
Anyway, like I was saying I saw Andy pacing around up front and I went over and gave him the usual “hey”.
Andy gave the shortest answers ever. He had a real quick way of saying things in his sharp Tennessee accent.
-Andy, did you get some dinner?
-Yeah
-How was it?
-Good
news
stories by author