Terry Marotta:

New Orleans: Where Did It All Go?

I wasn’t in New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath.

I was nowhere near the city over those long nights and blistering days when the people huddled on their rooftops waving to helicopters that for them did not descend.

Me I was sitting in front of my television, one hand over my mouth in that gesture that is the instinctive response to witnessing the unimaginable; the classic human expression of pity and dread.

I watched in my own dry rooms where window fans lifted my lightweight summer curtains as if they were petticoats; as if they were veils. In these comfortable rooms I watched for eight days straight, then packed a suitcase and went—on vacation.

My plan: to spend the next eight days on a lovely barrier island lying just off the coast of Charleston SC.

This island once belonged to a family that in 1860 owned 150 slaves according to the historical records, though this fact is not mentioned in the literature of the resort that now occupies it. A person playing golf on one of its five championship courses would not likely be aware of what bones and shards and stories might lie beneath his well-shod feet.

The small house we rented, standing as it does on little sandpiper legs above the dunes, sits in a section named for this family, another fact I had no awareness of upon our arrival.

I say "we" meaning my husband and our three children, our daughter-in-law, our shiny new grandbaby and myself, a person upon whom awareness dawned on a number of fronts as the eight days passed.

It may have been seeing the suffering of all those forgotten ones along the Gulf coast that caught up with me.

It may have been the seas-sound, like a thousand pebbles being poured from one plastic bucket into another and back again.

It may have been the way our beds all trembled faintly in the thin incessant wind that blew day and night.

It may even have been the presence of this baby, who routinely gets me seeing things up really close and from a great distance all at once.

At one-and-a-half he is plain crazy about any kind of truck or backhoe. First thing every morning he wanted to go look at the construction project next door, a private home so immense it looked like a grand hotel.

"Some house!" we called to one of the men working on it who had left off his hammering to wave to our Eddie.

"Thirty million to build!" he yelled back.

Thirty million, I thought; then went down to the beach to help Eddie with his own construction project.

He went right to work. He made a hundred trips to the water with his little pail.

By 9 a.m. we had a nice big pile of sand and nice big moat of water. But as early as 11, when we came back to the spot we had nothing at all, because the ocean had swept it away, causing our pre-speech tyke to hold his arms out palms up in that other classic gesture meaning "Where did it go?"

Ah but there is the question.

Where did it all go, from our old sense of safety to that quaint social compact we all once held dear, that kept us remembering about our poor and our ill and our elderly?

A new wind seems to be blowing now. And it makes me wonder about our tender and civilization-compromised coastlines, and if, in a hundred years, even fine strong $30-million houses will be standing along them.

Write Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net or at PO Box 270 Winchester, Mass., 01890

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