1 Dead in Attic (39 page)

The book, by former
Miami Herald
columnist Jim DeFede, takes the reader to a faraway place called Gander, Newfoundland, a fishing community of about ten thousand residents in the northeast corner of Canada.

Newfoundlanders have always had a proud and separatist mentality, living in harsh weather and rugged terrain, a place so singular and isolated that it operates in a time zone all its own—ninety minutes ahead of U.S. eastern standard time.

On September 11, when the World Trade Center was attacked, there were more than 4,500 airplanes over U.S. airspace, and every one of them was ordered to land immediately at the closest available airstrip to await further instruction. Most of the planes remained grounded for several days.

Planes headed to the United States from overseas were directed elsewhere, and that's how, on that fateful day five years ago, thirty-eight planes, most of them jumbos, carrying 6,595 passengers from all over the world, came rumbling down the old airstrip in Gander, waking the population there to a world of suspicion (are there more terrorists on those planes?) and challenge (what the hell are we going to do with 6,595 people?).

Sound familiar?

The story, as it unfolds in DeFede's book—which I highly recommend—is a compelling narrative of people of every shape, stripe, and color all thrown into an involuntary communion.

If you think the Pilgrims and Indians made for an odd dinner pairing on the first Thanksgiving, imagine the implications of a Nigerian princess, a world-renowned Italian fashion designer, and a group of Orthodox Jews all foraging for meals—and it goes without saying that kosher products run scarce in a place like Gander.

To say nothing of the many animals stored away in the cargo holds and exotic medical necessities of the elderly and add to this the fact that, for security reasons, the passengers were not allowed access to their luggage during their stay.

Suddenly, Gander, Newfoundland, needed 6,595 new toothbrushes. And it somehow found them.

The townsfolk and the visitors, most of whom wound up staying the better part of a week, meshed in magical, comical, heartwarming ways. The town gave everything it had to make the situation work, and the town's only barroom became an epicenter of cultural exchange—poetry, music, folktales, and even romance—and the whole damn thing makes you feel good about the fundamental nature of people, all people.

Well, most people. There were small clashes and difficulties and plenty of temper tantrums—how could there not be in this sudden and involuntary gumbo?—but, overall, the story just makes you stand up and cheer.

The Newfoundlanders opened their homes and bathrooms and cooked up massive meals and donated every article of clothing and bedding that they didn't need for themselves and collected all their toys, toiletries, and medicine and all the businesses in the area cleared off their shelves and asked for no remittance (doubtful that the local hardware store takes euros, shekels, or nairas anyway) and it all just feels like that old Coca-Cola TV ad about peace, love, harmony, and all that other squishy stuff that seems so hard to remember and embrace in the cold harsh light of the cultural conflict and ubiquitous greed of America in 2006.

And then, in the days after the disaster, the thirty-eight planes gradually reloaded and took off for their original destinations and all those people just filtered away from Gander and some folks made lasting friendships and still keep in touch but no doubt the majority—imagine all the language barriers, all the distractions, all the stuff of life that gets in the way—just went away and went on with their lives. And all that's left on them—both the visitors and the hosts—is the imprint of the triumph of the human spirit, that dependency on the kindness of strangers that is so much a part of the fabric of our own New Orleans culture.

And here's what this book got me thinking about—and you're probably ahead of me on this point: Isn't that, now fifteen months after Katrina, the way it goes around here? So many of us have tried to settle back into our old lives—well, new lives would be more accurate—and move on and up and away from time and memory, but I am stuck in my head with the mystery of how many stories like Gander unfolded for our own people, how many ancillary tales of generosity, how many ripples in faraway places unfolded that we may never gather into the collective consciousness of post-Katrina life simply because the story is so damn big and stretches across thousands of miles.

Maybe you've heard this story about Gander before, but I never had and no one I have talked to since I read this remarkable and uplifting book has, either.

So how will all of our own stories be collected for the final record of the storm? Will it take five years to figure out who did what for whom?

Will we ever know just how big a human enterprise it was, the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Americans across this land, people arriving on distant shores with nothing but a grocery bag full of belongings and no home, no job, no traction, and a whole lot of fear, to be met by strangers who opened their hearts and their lives (and their wallets) and made everything work as best as it could under the circumstances?

There are thousands of stories we'll never know—a legion of mini-Ganders out there that tell a story of the day Louisiana and Mississippi came to town and that town—Anytown, USA—rose to the challenge.

Big Government failed and politics failed but the people rose up, giving us such an abundance of things to be thankful for that it boggles the mind. And the strange thing is that—outside of each of our own singular experiences (those who sheltered us, gave clothes or money or provided whatever needs were most urgent)—most of us don't even know who it is we're supposed to thank and what it is they did for us. But there are hundreds of thousands of them—no, millions!—who made sacrifices of time, money, travel, labor, and spirit to help the people of south Louisiana and Mississippi get back on their feet and become some small semblance of what we once were and of what we will become again someday.

So today, Thanksgiving, just who do we thank? All those people. But how do we tell them, the soldiers and doctors and Common Grounders and church groups and corporate groups and school groups and animal rescuers and the uncountable and unknowable masses who came to our city to clean us up, dust us off, give us a meal, and give us a hug before going back to their own homes forever changed, just as the folks in Gander will never be the same?

It's weird: I just feel like picking up the phone today and randomly dialing some small town somewhere and saying thank you for what you did for us because it's inevitable that they did something for us.

Maybe they took in evacuees or maybe the local elementary school collected a water jug of pennies or maybe a local corporation sent $5 million. It's hard to know who did what—as I said, this thing is so damn big—but I swear that it seems as though everyone I meet every time I travel did something.

So when you look around this town, this region, and see the small steps we have taken on our long road to recovery, realize that there have been guardian angels at our side every step of the way. And since we'll never take stock of who they all were, really the best way to thank them is to succeed here, to become a city and region better than we were, a place strong enough, unified enough—and good enough—to take in thirty-eight planes full of strangers when it's our turn to answer to the call of membership in the human race.

I remember sitting down to write a year-in-review column last year at this time and how it all seemed so easily collected and categorized. The year 2005 essentially boiled down to just the final four months—the previous eight being filed under The Past, Life Before The Flood, The Land That Time Forgot, The City Before The Thing.

Man, we took a powdering; sometimes it's still impossible to wrap your head around it, all this time later.

Those final four months were a blur of activity and emotional upheaval, but they also were easily compressed into a thin file folder labeled Destruction & Sorrow, a time capsule of memories not so much buried as washed away, set adrift, not something we can dig up in a poignant ceremony one hundred years from now. Last year ended with everything so unsettled; just a million questions piled up on the curbside like so much debris, the answers just beginning to be formulated in our heads.

What the new year would hold was anybody's guess, and unfortunately it has indeed all seemed like guesswork, a roll of the dice, the handiwork of card readers on Jackson Square; the lack of a competent and cohesive plan seems to have been all but ignored by the powers that be. While elected officials and developers offer us golden towers and jazz monuments and glistening cities and rail lines drawn up on pretty paper, the true rebuilding has been left to the busy worker bees of the city, carrying physical and emotional burdens a hundred times their own weight while the queen bees abdicate their responsibility and turn circles and sideways in an endless buzz of blame.

They need to get out of their hives more often.

The official New Orleans government Web site is
cityofno.com
, and doesn't that just say it all? The City of No. No plan. No answers. No confidence. With government headquarters on Perdido Street, which is Spanish (perfect) for “lost,” it's all just perfect symbolism.

Ah, but let's move on to this year, the 365 days of transition that will define the next thousand days, two thousands days, ad infinitum.

Trying to wrangle all the events and emotions of 2006 into one narrative is a whole 'nuther kind of challenge, the ups and downs, highs and lows, triumphs and disappointments reaching such extremes that they set the head spinning, all summations amounting to a hill of beans.

It's just one small step at a time, small triumphs of family and community—the aquarium reopens, City Park gets a scrubbing, the Crescent City Steak House and Brocato's reopen, residents dribble home, the sound of children's voices brings life to once-darkened streets, a grocery store opens in Gentilly, a playground gets rehabbed in the east, flowers grow on a front stoop in the Lower 9, your in-laws finally move out of your house in Slidell, back to their rehabbed cottage in Mid-City.

Who says there's no good news?

There are a million little things, small victories, signs of life, signs of living, manifestations of love for a city, desperate reaches to regain a sense of place, our place, our home, our time. The Saints mantra is now transcribed as a city motto: Just wait until next year! But only a fool would try to predict what 2007 holds for New Orleans and its environs. For what it's worth, forecasters at the nation's preeminent hurricane study center—Colorado State University—announced this month that 2007 would be a busier-than-average storm season with at least three “intense” hurricanes.

Use that information for any planning purposes you wish, but without a companion prediction on whether the levees will hold in the case of rising water, I don't know what good it is. It's all just a numbers game, trivia, the means by which we as a civilization try to make sense of things that don't make sense.

They said 2006 would be a busy storm season and look what happened. (Still, I recommend keeping that generator and the extra red gas cans on hand, just in case “they” are right this time.)

'Tis the dawn of a new day. Just to show how brave the new world is,
Forbes
business magazine recently rated “America's Drunkest Cities,” which may or may not be indicative of our nation's current business climate, but the results might surprise you. Based on “availability of data and geographic diversity,”
Forbes
rated Milwaukee as America's drunkest city, Minneapolis–St. Paul second, on and on down the list until you get to New Orleans at No. 24. Yes, 24. The Saints are in the playoffs. White voters re-elected Ray Nagin and William Jefferson.
GQ
magazine says New Orleans restaurants suck. The city has just one assessor. Britney Spears is, well . . . ah, never mind.

Hell has indeed frozen over.

It shows that anything can change anytime, and it probably will. It's in our own hands. Let the queen bees buzz over their pots of honey. We've got work to do and a life to celebrate.

At Aidan Gill's fancy men's barbershop on Magazine Street, the proprietor recently hosted a fund-raiser for a peer across town, a man named Chill the Barber, whose shop got wiped out in the flood. Gill charged forty bucks at the door and gave away top-shelf drinks and smokes, and folks mingled, and Chill sat in a leather barber chair soaking in a plan to rebuild his life and business, courtesy of an Irish barber on the other side of town. Presumably their paths—Gill and Chill—rarely crossed before the storm, but now one whose business survived (but house did not) helps raise capital for the other to begin anew, a gesture born of nothing more than a sense of community, because it's the right thing to do, lend a helping hand, brother can you spare a dime.

I have quoted Aidan Gill several times in other columns, and I will quote him again here—and perhaps at the beginning of every new year—for his words are the call we must live by: “A time will come when someone asks you, ‘What were you doing about it?' You can't tell them, ‘I was just watching it. I was just an innocent bystander.' Let me tell you something: There are no innocent bystanders in this.”

So what are you doing about it? What's your plan for 2007, other than getting sucked into the Saints's vortex? Joining a playground cleanup crew in 2006 and writing a check to Habitat for Humanity were fine things, but that's last year's news. We must keep working for the common good.

What survives here in the crucible of the old city is the historic architecture: the mighty fortresses of the Garden District, the impenetrably walled blocks of the French Quarter. They are as good a symbol as any of the unbreakable (and unfloodable) determination of the city's remaining residents—and those who still break their backs trying to get back here—to raise up a great city, a great region, from ruin, defy the odds and the naysayers (and the forgetters), and live life to its richest possibilities, which was always the best thing about New Orleans anyway. The infinite possibilities of the night for those who chase dreams and dreamers. We choose to be in that number. To go marching on.