Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006 - (Page 60)

care center, and opened a going-away present from our Danish son-in-law, a bottle of Larsen’s brandy (Le Cognac des Vikings, according to the label). Marsha and I sank down on children’s chairs around a table 18 inches high, nibbling pretzels for our dinner and savoring cognac in red plastic cups. In the morning, we would see what the hurricane had done to our house. But after five weeks away, we were nearly home. Oct. 13, 2005 So Where Do We Begin? Marsha and I slog through the waterlogged books in my study, still damp two weeks after the flood receded from our house. All the free-standing bookcases collapsed at some point, spilling even the volumes I thought might have survived on the highest shelves into the slimy floodwater that filled our downstairs for three weeks. Some of the books, now sprawled open on the floor and blooming with orange-and-yellow mold, give the appearance of tropical flowers crowding our steps in an overgrown garden. And other mold, sometimes brown, sometimes red, has spiraled up the walls, covering much of the room in a delicate, poisonous vine whose tendrils reach almost to the ceiling in spots. “So where do we begin?” Marsha asks through the heavy mask she is wearing, sounding like a petite Darth Vader. We want to salvage as much as we can before the mold spreads further. “How about the kitchen?” I wheeze through my mask. But the kitchen is, in its own way, worse than the study. At first we think it’s just a skim of mud on the pots we find still neatly stacked in a swollen cabinet we manage to force open. But when we squat to look more closely before we touch them — not easy in the knee-high rubber boots and protective jumpsuits my wife wisely insists that we wear — we see that the veil of scum on our pans and kettles is actually quite delicate. Up close, it looks like dirty cotton stuck to a wound, fine gray strands of it puffing up over the copper and cast iron, sheathing our cookware in darkening clouds of mold. Marsha has talked to her mother’s stepson, an oceanographer who frequently works in Venice advising on that city’s problems with floods, about whether we can use things that have been submerged. So we already know about the overnight baths of bleach needed to kill just the biological contaminants and the much more complex problem of contamination of household items by floodwater fouled with industrial pollutants and motor oil and mercury from automobile switches and gasoline — not to mention all the poisonous cleaning agents stored under our sink that leached into the kitchen floodwater. She closes the cabinet door as far as it will shut. “Let’s look upstairs,” she suggests. We clamber up the bottom steps carefully. Two have cracked, and another has swollen and bellied in an angle difficult to climb in our rubber boots. At the top of the stairs, we strip off our boots and gloves and jumpsuits, leaving our masks on only until we can close a bedroom 60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005 Contents Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina: “It’s time somebody woke us us up.” Missing New Orleans On Perilous Ground The Buildings of Louisiana (Architectural History by Karen Kingsley) Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums Back to New Orleans Diary of a Displaced Person Jazz Notes (Music History by Bruce Raeburn) Cradle of the Stars The Terrible and the Brave Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by James Lee Burke)

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

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