Thar She Blew

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A memoir of floods, fires, parades, and plywood

by Cheryl Wagner

At the end of August in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and tore up that town.

Miss Wagner was a native Louisianian who had acheived her childhood dream of living in New Orleans and freelance writing and enjoying herself and her neighborhood. After Katrina, Miss Wagner and her husband Jake, a freelance musician, had to give up the enjoyment and work like dogs to rebuild their home and their lives. Well, not work like dogs exactly, Miss Wagner had two basset hounds, who just lazed around and watched all the work that she and Jake did.

The people who came back after Katrina to rebuild New Orleans, not only had to face raw sewage in the their houses and yards and streets, but they had to deal with human nature in the form of uncaring government and FEMA employees, rip-off construction grifters, drug dealers, copper thieves, and evangelical social workers.

Drugs were dealt and used in the open among the gutted and flood trashed houses without regard for the neighbors or law enforcement. I thought of the TV show, The Wire, where the police designate a certain street in Baltimore to be enforcement free and call it Amsterdam, after the city below the sea in Europe where drugs and prostitution are legal. Miss Wagner and her husband went to Amsterdam for a vacation and a rest from renovating their home and Miss Wagner felt constricted by the Dutch insistence on unvarying order---drugs must only be used in certain places and prostitution was only allowed at certain times and in certain areas. This proves that there really is no city quite like New Orleans, anywhere. What appears to be degenerate license or unlimited freedom elsewhere (Amsterdam and Baltimore) is just constricted restriction for a New Orleanser.

Miss Wagner and Jake were put on the list for FEMA trailers while they rebuilt their home, but after they secured an apartment in an unflooded part of New Orleans to live in while they worked on their Mid-town house, they called FEMA to get themselves off the list. FEMA told them, no problem, that they had been taken off the list a few months before. It was the first that the Wagners had heard of it.

They had to have their roof done twice, the first contractor took a lot of money and did a lousy job. Rain ran down the walls of their kitchen and living room in bad weather. It took them a year to get their electricity back, and they were ripped off by the electrician. The city came by and ripped up the water and sewage pipes every now and again. The Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the levees with newspaper.

The insurance company dilly dallied for months before it finally paid up for the flood insurance that they had on the house. The insurance company paid it to the mortgage company. And New Orleans sent a home appraiser out to calculate what they could get to restore their house. It came to $0. The appraisal got the address right, but the house that they described was someone else's house. Whose? They never figured it out. The whole neighborhood was trashed by Katrina.

But no matter the discouragement and the irrational dishonesty of the various processes, the Wagners stayed and kept working on their home (and they did most of the work themselves).

The book began with a very detailed description of the evacuation of the Wagners and their dogs, and I thought it too detailed. But I came to appreciate the detail and the digressions rebuilding one's home and life after a catastrophe. If one thinks about it too long, one can go crazy. Scarlett O'Hara had that right.