Hurricane Katrina: Big Broken Drive By

I was heading down into the Deep South to
live out of my vehicle indefinitely, deep within a natural disaster
zone. By that night I would finally be joining a group of proven
nutcase art festival volunteers I had yet to meet. I trusted enough
through past associations to know this would somehow be an opportunity
of a lifetime. Everyone who showed up at our camps stayed longer than
they had planned. The place and the need was like that. And so, rather
like that weird jelly in donated canned hams, that salty stuff that
fills in all the odd gaps and somehow helps to hold it all together, we
similarly coalesced in Mississipi, 80 miles east of New Orleans, as Burners Without Borders.

As
I approached the city of New Orleans for my first time ever, listening
to an old Neville Brothers CD, Yellow Moon, headed toward America’s
musical Holy Land, I started to cry. Alone in my VW Vanagon, I had the
space to sob freely. I was finishing a 3,000 mile road trip which began
in Northern California and approaching a city I’d yet to experience,
but had always wanted to. How odd…still looming some 35 miles in the
distance, it was already bringing me to tears.

The sheer Size Of It All was beginning to seep in. This was January
7, 2006. Four months had passed since Hurricane Katrina had razed the
region. Yet every mile approaching the looming grey shell of a city was
an abandoned landscape of increasing destruction –neon sign skeletons,
their colored plastic skins blown away; boat-strewn lakeshores and
fields; forests of trees stripped clean of their last speck of
greenery. Many pine trunks were randomly severed at their thick
middles, like brittle garden stakes overrun by some invasive, endless
herd...

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