The Futilitarians Page 18

  Aside from all the fear and damage, I came to believe that our sons were lucky kids, witnessing so much post-disaster transformation around town. They got to see buildings imploded, moved across neighborhoods, or elevated to accommodate new Army Corps of Engineers flood maps. They got to see dozens of cranes and bulldozers on construction sites, to ride their bikes on new sidewalks, to enjoy brand-new parks and schools. Yes, the five blocks of old warehouses on the wharves near our house burned down in Katrina’s aftermath, shooting propane tanks like bombs all over the neighborhood, but now we had a lovely unobstructed river view to watch the boat traffic on the Mississippi. Besides, the apathy and stagnation of the town I’d grown up in had evaporated with the last of the floodwater. We were now a city in survival mode, a city imperfectly striving to be better.

  The spectacle of rebuilding also served as a consistent reminder of the existential threats to our children’s new New Orleans. As part of its coverage of Hurricane Isaac, the Times-Picayune published a map of existing and future levees in southeast Louisiana, showing where the storm’s water went and how high. On the page, the wall around New Orleans seemed almost medieval, reinforcing the siege mentality we sometimes have regarding our own environment. Looking beyond the wall, you see the vast scope and cause of the threat—nature’s indifference. Since the 1930s, the state has lost almost two thousand square miles of land, largely due to human activity—three hundred years of levee building, voracious oil and gas exploration and extraction, sea-level rise, and overdevelopment, to name a few—and it continues to lose another twenty-five to thirty-five square miles a year. Since our flood protection is only as healthy as the land that surrounds it, that map in the paper of our walled city starts to look like ramparts around a sand castle at high tide.

  The year before Hurricane Isaac, we’d had another scare: the Great Mississippi River Flood of 2011. Like the Deepwater Horizon explosion the year before and the hurricanes before that, it had the trappings of a typical contemporary south Louisiana disaster: nature versus man, the Army Corps of Engineers versus nature, mass anticipation and catastrophic thinking among your friends that you politely tried to minimize. By late spring, the combination of snowmelt and record rainfall from major storm systems had saturated the river’s watershed to crisis levels. Upriver, people had less time to prepare and react; lives and property were lost. All across the floodplain rippled the panicky checking of insurance policies and the re-remembering of the difference between “crest stage” and “flood stage.” Another wearying opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the power of our natural environment and the vulnerability of our built one, to test the walls.

  Brad and I took the boys to the river, at its highest level in any of our lifetimes. While in “New Orleans Mon Amour” Percy wrote that “the River confers a peculiar dispensation upon the space of New Orleans… a sense both of easement and of unspecified possibilities,” it can also carry with it a set of more alarming, specific possibilities. Climbing the grassy apron of the levee and reaching the top, I felt the apprehension of discovering a bathtub filled to its very lip, water still running, the lurching anticipation of the splash onto the tile floor. And also the urgent pull for somebody to do something, for chrissakes. General anxiety had gripped the city, compounding all other anxieties. Dad, who lived by the levee directly across the river from us, was in a serious but uncertain condition with his leukemia, and the vigilance our family felt toward him and our mother mirrored what many were feeling in this river crisis. Fear, cagey trust in the authorities and technology, disbelief that the worst could possibly happen.

  During the highest point of the flood crisis, I was lucky enough to be invited by a photographer friend to take a private plane ride upriver. A privileged exercise in perspective—seeing at just the right distance and angle, detaching yourself from the anxiety on the ground and observing from the cool, meditative clarity of the sky, getting both a bird’s-eye and bureaucratic view of the flooding, of the threatened and already-inundated “structures,” of the engorged Atchafalaya and disappeared Mississippi River banks, of our myriad flood controls, like the Morganza Spillway, in action.

  The pilot of the plane, a friend of my friend, somewhere in the middle of middle age with a soft, youthful voice, prematurely gray hair, a white linen shirt, and Ray-Bans, executed a smooth takeoff into bumpy weather, and we headed along Lake Pontchartrain to the nearby Bonnet Carré Spillway, several bays of which had been recently opened to divert water from the river to the lake. Cars glided along the top of the highway above the great gash in the river, water rushing beneath them, eddying whitely around the trees that usually have the spillway’s floodplain to themselves, then blending in a muddy whorl with the slightly lighter tones of the lake.

  The spillway was completed in 1931, a by-product of the movement away from the Army Corps of Engineers’ previous “levees only” policy. The nineteenth-century push to build more and more levees, higher and higher, raised river levels, which raised flood levels, putting increased pressure onto the system, which resulted in the catastrophic flood of 1927 and caused a rethinking of this policy. Spillways added some flexibility, a compromise with the river’s complex dynamics.

  We left the forced juncture of river and lake and traveled just under the clouds on our way to the Gulf of Mexico. For a city dweller, it feels good to see unbroken miles of green, opens up a place of relief and hope inside your street-bound self. Behind us, the I-10 thinned to a pencil line, then disappeared into the spring foliage and deep chartreuse marshes.

  My friend had been quiet and busy, aside from asking the pilot for this angle or that tilt of the wing. But as we approached the Atchafalaya Delta she excitedly mentioned that this was possibly the only place in south Louisiana that is actually accumulating land, not losing it. Beneath us were two main channels connecting the Atchafalaya to the Gulf—a natural winding one and a straight, man-made canal. The straight one was an Army Corps of Engineers diversion project called the Wax Lake Outlet, cut through in 1942 to reduce the flood stage at Morgan City. Back in the 1970s it was discovered that the Atchafalaya’s fine sand and silt had been building up at the outlet’s mouth, and now an accidental delta blossoms out at the end of the channel’s stem.

  And through the water you can actually see land forming in transparent layers, different shades of silt and soil around the edges of the splayed fingers of land; in other places lobes emerge like the blooming spores in a petri dish. This buildup is fast in geological terms, creating visual, tangible changes within our lifetime. Hope. There it was. Right below us. After some low circling and giddy speculating, we left the Wax Lake Outlet and followed the Atchafalaya upriver a couple of hundred miles to the suddenly popular Morganza Spillway.

  Of course, opening the Morganza Spillway for the first time in thirty-eight years, and for only the second time ever, meant the intentional and potentially catastrophic flooding of farms and rural communities west of the Mississippi along the Atchafalaya Basin, thus sparing the urban centers of New Orleans and Baton Rouge on the east bank. As a citizen of high-maintenance, narcissistic, though tax-revenue-generating New Orleans, I felt some guilt about this. What is our ethical responsibility to these communities that soon might be sacrificing so much for us? Then one morning in the newspaper in an article profiling the people and communities affected by the imminent flooding, I read the quote “I am a Morganza Spillway farmer.” Speaking with a mixture of existential resolve and fatalism, the soybean farmer explained that he knew the land and the consequences of working that land. No recriminations, no resentment. Know your natural environment. Work with it. And be prepared to pay the costs. But in that same week, in the same paper, another quote from an Atchafalaya Basin resident: “Baton Rouge and New Orleans should be sending us help because we’re saving their butts,” she said. “Y’all pray for us. You can at least do that.”

  On the way to the Morganza Spillway, a large farming complex with fields, silos, and fenced-in buildings turned out t
o be Angola. I’d just read that the prisoners had already been evacuated to higher ground. In the not-too-distant future I’d be down there again, visiting my brother’s client on Death Row, whose high, razor-wire-topped cyclone fences and towers are right next to the grassy wall of the levee, which prisoners helped build by hand over a hundred years before, and I’d get a firsthand account of their evacuation to the old Death Row facility farther inland. Learn how the inmates enjoyed the change of scenery, being back in the old place near the entrance to the prison, where they were able to lie down on real ground in the sun, telling one another to enjoy it while they could, because they might never ever feel grass again.

  A massive mid-twentieth-century engineering project weathered to that same elephant gray of guardrails and bridges across the country, the Morganza Spillway apportioned the Mississippi into the Morganza Floodway and then eventually to the Atchafalaya Basin. With only a few of the 125 gates open, from the air it seemed merely a slow bleed from the river into the fields and trees below, enough to calm people’s nerves back in the city, fulfilling its function as it has waited decades to do.

  As we turned to head south, the Morganza Spillway became smaller and smaller, the river stretching for miles from either end of it, and I imagined the whole Mississippi from Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf, and all the controls and the other spillways, pinpricks in the side of a long garden hose left out on the lawn. I was impatient to get home, to tell the boys about everything I’d seen—all the destruction and possibility. The natural beauty and the works of man. Mostly I wanted to tell them the news of the Wax Lake Outlet, that we’d seen hope, blooming right beneath us.

  For miles we’d been seeing the haze of fires in the east, controlled burns, narrow columns of smoke funneling up from patches of blackened farmland, and soon the smell was leaking into the cabin through the vents of the Cirrus. As we got closer we all marveled at this: smoky, crimson sunset, the river distorted and distended and burnished, peaks of a few swallowed buildings on the east bank and charred squares of land, bisected by thin lines of fire on the west, a sort of peaceful apocalypse. The darkness came suddenly, and with it a visual quietude, and we were all quiet, flying back toward the city, the unreal blackness crowding the smallness of the plane. Now night, it was the pattern and movement of light below us that showed the contours of the land, and the glimmering city in the distance, where our people were and where they were not.

  For all of the upriver mayhem, the downriver levees would hold, the control systems would work, our families, New Orleans, would be safe. As soon as the Morganza Spillway opened and river levels dropped, the apprehension in the city dissipated with the threat. The flooding that ensued along the Atchafalaya and in the spillway floodplain wasn’t as bad as anticipated, and the whole ordeal quickly left local consciousness as other news and other crises overtook our front pages and dinner tables.

  OCTOBER

  The Unwalled City

  I don’t know how we know these things, but that morning instead of just grabbing a coffee at the kiosk in the lobby of the Touro Infirmary and going directly up to Dad’s room on the fifth-floor oncology ward, like I’d done every morning that week, something unexplainable pinned me downstairs. Maybe because it was the end of the week, maybe I needed a break in my routine, but that day I ordered a muffin, too, sat down on a lobby chair and looked at a newspaper someone had clumsily refolded and abandoned there. For the first time, I just really did not want to go up, and I lingered downstairs for about five or ten minutes longer than usual.

  When I did make it to the fifth floor, with my coffee and muffin-greasy bag, his door was wide open, the room empty. It looked like a crime scene—his bed skewed, sheets trailing down, blood-splattered aspirator on the bedside table, sterilized wrappers for God knows what tossed all over the floor. Detritus of a fresh emergency. A nurse appeared behind me and explained that I’d just missed him. A few minutes before, things had gone critical, he’d crashed, blood had filled his lungs, and they’d taken him to the ICU. She told me to gather his things and head up there.

  As I filled his overnight bag with his clothes, laptop, cell phone, charger, and glasses, I knew that this was it. On the too-loud television angled toward the scene came cheerful bantering from Live! with Kelly. For a vertiginous moment, I thought about how all manner of things, imaginable and not, were happening around the planet right then at that very moment. The cacophony of it. I don’t know why that program was even on, as my dad only ever watched CNN and ESPN in the hospital, and please please please God don’t let the Live! with Kelly show be the last thing my dad was conscious of on this earth.

  The special saints of the ICU helped me with the bags I’d suddenly acquired and asked me to suit up and be patient while they stabilized him. The ICU kind of shorted me out. There, you feel the full force of modern medicine—the training, the technology, the money, the bureaucracy, but also the inevitable, glimpsed through the privacy curtains, in the frail, wired bodies. A week or so before, prepping for our first ECRG meeting, held the day before Dad went to Angola, I found an Epicurus quote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” Yes, I thought, we try so hard to secure ourselves against the idea of death, the reality of death, but our mortal vulnerability connects us all. Over the next several months of the ECRG it would become clear that this was one of the main things that kept everyone coming back to our living room, huddling together in the bareness of our condition, with wine and food and fellowship and reading, acknowledging our defenselessness but seeking comfort in connection. But here at this moment, in the open floor plan of the ICU, watching people and machines work in nonstop, almost balletic accord, all I was feeling was the desperation of the species to stay alive, to spend just a few more minutes, hours, days, months, in the unwalled city.

  All week my three sisters had been at the hospital with him most nights, and Soren, too, when his schedule allowed. Mom, who’d been his constant caretaker throughout his two-year illness, had a cold that week and couldn’t come to the hospital. But here I was alone outside the sliding patio doors of his room, in my yellow-ducky sterilized gown, gloves, and mask, making greedy middle-child calculations. What parts of town my other siblings would be coming from, how much time I might have alone with my dad before the crowd arrived. After all, when you grew up in a large family, one-on-one time with a parent was a commodity. This was the rarest and luckiest of privileges.

  Nurse Craig, steady and kind-voiced, around fifty, with the gray, closely cropped hair of a monk or an aging movie star, told me they knew about the DNR order. Those letters used in the concrete and not the abstract have a shocking, disorienting power—a wish becoming a command. He said they were making Dad as comfortable as possible. I was scared and asked whether he had been given enough morphine. He paused and said, “Honestly, we do that more for the families, not the patients.”

  Months later, by the time we read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich for the October ECRG, Dad’s loss had finally become real, the grief absorbed into my everyday melancholy, giving it a weightier, more defined quality. At the same time, the ECRG had also become integrated into my life, an indispensable occasion to focus my often-messy thoughts and feelings. I looked forward to the last Thursday of the month, a dedicated space in life’s tumult in which to question and hash out big ideas, to expand your self while embracing the communal, evidenced in empty bottles lining the wall.

  But there was something about the Tolstoy that destabilized the evening. For the first time, I thought our couch was in danger of having red wine spilled on it due to unwieldy, aggressive discourse. Tom, a newcomer to the group, a handsome, tattooed, older-than-he-looks psychology professor who works with Kevin, had suggested The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He’d begun the discussion by saying that it was the only book he’d ever thrown across the room upon finishing. And words flew across the room for the rest of the night, which was marked by po
sturing and challenging, rare at the ECRG. We disagreed all the time, but usually it was respectful and in the spirit of trying to understand the other person’s viewpoint. The two youngest men in the room, Nate and the surprise guest he’d brought, another writer and blogger (the ones threatening our couch with careless grips on their wineglasses and sudden gestures), needled me about my use of the term “human condition,” which they deemed a “meaningless phrase.” At one point in the evening Tom, curious about the phenomenon of childbirth, earnestly asked the two mothers in the room about the experience. When I opened my mouth to respond, the young men rose from the couch and excused themselves to go smoke on the porch. I exchanged looks with Susan, the other mother in the room. Looks which meant Oh, they’ll get the “human condition” thing soon enough.

  That night I confessed that when I read Ronald Blythe’s introduction to the book, I felt a creeping, cold recognition, and kept thinking about Dad’s last hours in the ICU. Blythe was opining about modern culture’s inadequacy in dealing with the individual’s moment of death, claiming we didn’t treat death with its deserved reverence until after the event was over for the person involved, and the focus shifted to the grieving and their ceremonies—the funeral, the outfits, the eulogies, the interment. Blythe describes how during the death watch over Tolstoy at the stationmaster’s cottage in Astapovo, even Tolstoy’s acolytes, whom he’d directed to ask him if his feelings toward life had changed as he neared the moment of death, were overcome and failed to follow through with his request.