Category Archives: Community

Hurricane Laura, Eight Weeks Later

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This past week I spent the day visiting my hometown of Lake Charles, in Southwest Louisiana.

The old Calcasieu Marine (now Capitol One)

The first blue tarps appeared about 60 miles east of town, accompanied by the occasional snapped off tree or branch. By the time I was 20 miles out, the tarps and the trees alongside I-10 were joined by blown out billboards, crumpled metal buildings, piles of debris, and my growing sense of nervousness.

Driving into Lake Charles, a modest city of 78,000 and 200,000 in the metropolitan area, my sense that a catastrophe, an indiscriminate bomb of sorts, had hit, was overwhelming. I have driven through the aftermath of a tornado, and this was similar — but multiplied by a thousand. Instead of damage extending a few blocks, the swath of Hurricane Laura’s wrath reached 25 miles across. Estimates are that 95 percent of the buildings in the city itself sustained damage, and that does not include the impact to the areas directly outside the city limits or the parishes south and north.

I pulled off the interstate onto Enterprise Avenue, a major thoroughfare that cuts through the city north to south. Driving down the long-familiar street, I felt like I was being struck by a continuous gut punch. Eight weeks post-Laura and homes were still tarped, trees, belongings, and other debris still stacked high in yards and at curbside. Shuttered businesses — the triple hit of Covid, then Laura, then Hurricane Delta — haunted a landscape that will be fighting for years to try to recover. (The poorer side of town that I was driving through might just not make it at all.) Whatever financial resources a small-business owner might have had at the start of the year were gone, blown away.

Downtown, the old Calcasieu Marine building I helped build in 1982 stood as a silent memorial to 150-mile-an-hour winds: 22 floors of blown out windows, a contemporary folly to building a skyscraper on the Southern coastal plain. A few blocks away, a brother-in-law’s music venue lacked a second floor. It had spilled out onto the street like a ruptured bag of groceries during the storm. Throughout the city was the whine of chainsaws and tree crews mulching downed timber. The churches were not spared; one side was solid and welcoming of the faithful, the other side split open like a ripe melon, its pews and carpet piled up at the curb.

A landscape after a hurricane has hit is markedly open. Previously obscured buildings are now visible, a large percentage of the trees gone in a vast instant, as if a particularly greedy timber company has put in a big order.

the “open” landscape behind the family home

It was without surprise that I pulled into the family drive and was greeted by yet more splintered and severed trees and the ubiquitous tarped roof. Entering the house, I found my father, now 93, waiting at the kitchen table, along with a sister and niece. Rain from the approaching Hurricane Zeta (A record five hurricanes have hit the state so far this year) had poured onto the floor in what my sister jokingly called the “family swimming pool.” A living room that had sustained heavy damage from a fallen tree still waited on repairs by the overloaded construction crews. The house had been tarped and reinforced by another brother-in-law after Laura, but in a climate that deals in repeated storms, a thin layer of plastic is no substitute for an actual roof.

Throughout the day, family members collected for my visit to hang out, share stories, catch up. I remarked that this time the damage seemed more severe, much more so than for Rita. They all agreed. And if Rita was the benchmark for previous storm damage, then the catastrophic scope of Laura was off the chart.

But through it all I was struck by how resilient they all were. No one complained, just laughed off the destruction all around, if anything, grumbled the most about the never ending Covid restrictions. There were ongoing shortages, particularly of building supplies. Lake Charles is competing in its need with the rebuilding from the damage in the West Coast wildfires. And, of course, all of this is set to the backdrop of the ever-present pandemic and the related global supply chain deficiencies.

Schools are closed because of the pandemic and the storm damage. Senior care facilities are closed, their residents rehomed hours away in sister centers. Few restaurants are open, though many have food trucks parked in front of their buildings, serving meals as the work of cleanup goes on inside. Because most voting precincts were damaged, residents of all 34 citywide will vote on November 3 in the Burton Coliseum, the agricultural arena.

Hurricanes, like all disasters, test the mettle of a community. Some pitch in together, clear the debris, and rebuild. Some, riven by divisions and lack of will and resources, drift away and disintegrate. Lake Charles will likely be among the former, though there are areas, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods, that will need active assistance to get back to any degree of normalcy — whatever that looks like as we leave this year of 2020.

Late in the afternoon of my visit, as I drove out of town, I passed a stately live oak known as the Sallier Oak that serves as the symbol of the city. It had survived Laura in all its twisted beauty. Many of its leaves were missing, a few limbs gone, but it stood more or less as it had for 375 years, anchored in the earth of Southwest Louisiana. As I pulled onto the interstate and headed east, I smiled, thinking that that old tree was an apt metaphor for both my family and my hometown: battered yet still standing.

A Great Divide: repeat

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Note: There will be another new post tomorrow on a trip I took this past week to Louisiana. But with the election coming up on Tuesday I wanted to repost this piece. Surprisingly, it remains one of the most viewed of all my posts. And although evidence of progress is meager, the message is still the same. The hard work of dialog by all of us must be done civilly, while working out disagreements, with a language of respect and understanding. We should not wait on “leadership” from above. 

In this country we have a long tradition of alternatively praising the work of the farmer and disparaging his lifestyle, the latter often accompanied by the epithet “hick” or “hillbilly.”

I was reminded of this these past few weeks with the ascension of the Tweeter in Chief, when a new broadside of vitriol was being fired at rural America. At a recent march, one speaker actually said, “We are tired of these people living out in the middle of nowhere telling us how to run our government.” On his Inauguration Day late-night show, Bill Maher referred to voters in the rural state of West Virginia as “pillbillies.” Closer to home, my own doctor condemned complaints by rural Tennesseans about lack of services by saying, “Who needs rural America anyway?” My answer: “Anyone who wants to eat.”

To say that basic respect has broken down between the cities and the interior seems at this juncture in the Republic an understatement at best. Any attempt to find a middle ground gets shot down by the left and the right as a defense of the other side. “Communication” is now a cracked landscape of carefully parsed conversations, tweets, and blog posts, all looking for hints of a wrongward tilt.

Example: An economist being interviewed recently on NPR suggested to his host that to better understand the anxiety in the country, the interviewer drive 45 minutes out of DC to see firsthand the economic dissolution of the rest of America. The interviewer glossed over what seemed a reasonable suggestion and, instead, asked the economist to explain why rural America has failed to endorse a laundry list of popular cultural agendas — a connection whose relevance I failed to comprehend.  

Our farm is located in Appalachia, an area that has long been the subject of scorn and mockery. The region’s people, although poor in ways that matter to a money economy, have traditionally been rich in independence, resilience, and self-sufficiency. It now seems that the language used to denigrate this area historically is to be applied across the land to anyone outside the belt of the bright lights.

And that is a mistake. First, because as the wealth of this country dwindles, as the climate becomes increasingly unstable, as the resources that provided this amazing historical interlude run out, we may very well be looking to the hicks and hillbillies to teach us the skills that have long sustained their culture.

Second, because history has shown that it’s imprudent to rile an armed and downtrodden population. Fully 86 percent of our military is drawn from rural and small-town America, and following policies that erode rural families and communities and ignore skyrocketing permanent unemployment, culturally mocking that same population as “pillbillies,” is a recipe for revolt.

As the economist on NPR said, it might be wise for the elitist policy and cultural trend makers to visit the hinterlands and have a non-condescending conversation with the inhabitants. But I don’t hold out much hope for that to happen. Instead, the hard work of dialog will be left to us — town and country, middle America and the coasts — to create anew a language of respect and understanding.

 

Neither Past nor Future

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“It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”—Sarah Orne Jewett

Corn fritters, crowder peas, tomatoes, and cucumber salad.

Well, this wasn’t going well. The employee had been babbling on for some minutes about how stupid Southerners were, bashing neighbors, co-workers, and everyone who lived within a few miles of her rural farm. Finally, she drew breath long enough for me to make a point. “You do know I’m from the South, don’t you?” I waited a few seconds, knowing exactly what was coming next. “Sure,” she said, “but you’re not really Southern. You are smart.”

It would take a long time to unpack the ignorance that lies behind that colossally impolite statement. That I have heard variations on the same theme from dozens, maybe even hundreds, of others about the South in general and the rural South in specific is enlightening. As many thousands during this pandemic rethink their commitment to living in the suburbs or the city, I’ve been mulling over what a move to the country might mean for them.

When someone moves to rural America, the South in particular, the fault lines of prejudice are often laid bare. And here I speak of the newcomer’s prejudice, much of which is centered in the post-war suburban ideal that you can filter out contact with those who are different from you. Like the Democrats who jettison blue-collar politics because they are uncomfortable associating with workers as a class and wish to trade them in for something different, outlanders who move to the country often ring clear their biases from the first day and dissatisfaction with what they consider their provincial neighbors on the second — as if the people whose family has lived on the land across the road for four generations could be taken back to Trader Joe’s for a new and more comfortable model.

If you are one of those considering a big move “back to the land,” then tuck this piece of advice in alongside your cultural baggage and worldly goods: Prepare to be lonely. At least until you have demonstrated an old-fashioned liberal willingness to accept people as they are rather than as you wish them to be. It is an age-old fault of humanity, holding up the exotic or at the very least the quaint and the picturesque as more desirable, more noble than the mundane. The reality seldom meets the dream.

Your new neighbor is unlikely to be an Amish farmer who plows with horses, conveniently providing a pastoral backdrop for your Instagram shares. Nope, he is going to be a part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, prone to washing feet on Sunday and voting for Trump on Tuesday. He is going to gut deer in his front yard. His very existence is going to affront your Peace Corps beliefs, and it sure won’t provide your cultural mining more than a meager payout for your social media posts.

Yet that same man can weld your broken bushhog (but will take offense when you offer payment); he’ll show up and help you mend a fence when your friends in the city only wish to text or Zoom their assistance. His kids will look after your animals if you’re called away, and his whole family will look after you when one of your family members is called home. Just don’t — and this is important — open your mouth to tell him how you did things back in Orlando or Ann Arbor.

Still thinking about that move? Let us do a final check, making sure that you are not that sad, clueless, insulting individual who moved to the country but wanted a different rural population from the one you are going to get. Start by asking yourself a question. Would you really move to rural Thailand and expect to find the cultural options, the governmental services, and the same people you get in a hip Upper West Side New York neighborhood? If that is the case, then you’d better prepare for a life of loneliness. Or, better yet, stay put.

Or, and let me just toss this out as an option, learn to embrace an actual, nonacademic notion of “diversity.” The choice is yours. And who knows what you might discover.

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Reading this weekend: Kilvert’s Diary (Francis Kilvert) and The Country of Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett). The former is a new discovery (of mine) that has quickly become a favorite to read before “lights out.” The latter, at Cindy’s suggestion, I read this past week. It partly influenced this post.

Going Home: A 2006 Journey, Part 2

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This is the second of a three-part installment recounting a trip I took to Louisiana 14 years ago. Since travel this year is either perilous or completely joyless, I have stayed home instead of making my annual migration to Lake Charles. The three posts were copied mainly as written from my farm journals. 

Cold Dixie longneck in hand? Or maybe a freshly made Sazerac? Then let’s go.

My trek across Northeast Louisiana culminated in spending an unremarkable night in Pineville. Pineville is just across the Red River from Alexandria — the city at the center, though not the heart, of the state. This morning, I woke up early and left the pinewoods and Pentecostals behind, crossed over the river, and turned left on LA 1.

I start the day by working my way through the river district of Alexandria, where the old warehouses, juke joints, and shotgun houses gradually give way to middle-class black neighborhoods on the south side of the city. LA 1 winds alongside the Red River on the way to Baton Rouge. Like all small highways ghosted by the interstate system, this one is infinitely preferable and more soul satisfying to drive, leaving me plenty of time to absorb the landscape and history.

After his defeat at Mansfield in April of 1864, General Nathaniel Banks and his army retreated south on the river, with the plan of regrouping at the Union-occupied stronghold of New Orleans. Unfortunate for Banks, however, the massive flotilla of boats presented a 200-mile slow-moving shooting gallery for pursuing Confederate troops. Four of the six great-great uncles on my mother’s Lewis side participated. (The fifth uncle had died in the bloody Mansfield engagement. The sixth son, my great-grandfather, was too young to enlist and instead carried mail for the Confederate government.) The Northern loss to the smaller and outgunned Southern army — most Louisiana regiments fought with hunting shotguns loaded with buckshot — left Banks in disgrace, and he hunkered down in New Orleans for the duration of the conflict, consoled with the old-world comforts of that city.

A few miles out of Alexandria, I turn onto a remnant of the old river road. The route is a carriage’s width and the area sporadically settled. Modest homes with large gardens, flocks of chickens, horses, and pecan orchards are all overhung with live oaks and Spanish moss, signaling the transition into Acadiana. The beauty and serenity of the river and levee have me thinking, I could live here.

It is April and the first hay has already been cut and is laying in the fields. At 7:30 in the morning, already hot, I have the window open to smell the rich curing of the forage.

The river road will continue on to the southeast, but my destination points elsewhere. I turn off on another small road and head across Rapides Parish, through the small towns of Latanier and Lecompte, where I stop for pie at Lea’s Lunchroom. At the risk of starting a fight, let me just be clear, the piemaker’s art is most evidently on display when making an old-fashioned meringue. A covered crust pie is all fine and dandy, but let us see the steep white waves of meringue with high brown peaks atop banana or coconut filling and we soon separate the men from the boys. That Lea’s is in the Louisiana Food Hall of Fame for its pies — which, shall we all now admit, is several orders higher than being in the Ohio Food Hall of Fame — makes it worth the stop.

As the waitress sets down my coffee with a “breakfast” slice of coconut pie and “honeys” me, I’m reminded of a bit of family lore. Aunt Jo (she of the recent 100th birthday) tells the story of dining at Lea’s with her parents and sibling in the late 1920s, when her younger sister, Lucille, got up and danced the Charleston, to the amusement of one and all. [For those who knew Cille, they will know that dancing seems quite at odds with the more severe Baptist temperament she embraced in later years (starting from, say, age 8 until her death a few years ago).]

Back in my truck, I continue my journey. From here on, the land becomes flat again and the rice and crawfish fields begin to appear. My maternal grandfather was one of the early adopters of planting rice in flooded fields. He raised Early Prolific and Blue Rose varieties on 359 acres. Following the October 1929 Great Crash, he had $200 cash left over after paying the Federal Land Bank. He lost the farm soon after, then supported the family by working for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression and later as a rice broker. His oldest daughter, my aunt, said he always regretted not being able to return to farming.

It is 11 a.m. as my truck rolls into Crowley, and I stop and ask for directions to the old Old Crowley Cemetery. I buy some flowers and head off to find my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves, as well as those of his parents, my great-grandparents, all of the Roberts name. I tramp the cemetery for an hour in 90-degree heat. I come away as wilted as the flowers, yet unable to find the graves.

South from Crowley, I head for Lyons Point, a couple of dozen miles short of the gulf. It is here that on the night of September 27, 1819, 14 pirates of Jean Lafitte sailed up the Mermentau River and then up Bayou Queue de Tortue before attacking the plantation of my fourth great-grandfather, John Lyons. An article appeared on October 22 of that year in the New Orleans Courier, giving details of the raid and identifying marks on the slaves captured. There is a wealth of information on this particular raid, because it was a direct challenge to the authority of the new owners of Louisiana. The U.S. Navy dispatched the schooner Lynx to chase the villains. The Lynx caught up with them at Lafitte’s headquarters at Galveston Bay (then part of the Texas Republic). Lafitte hung the leader and turned over the rest of the men in a show of cooperation, disavowing any connection with the crime. He did, however, arrange for his lawyer to defend the men in New Orleans. The stolen slaves were returned to their owners and continued in slavery.

I leave Lyons Point (nothing to see now but a crossroads) and drive on toward Lake Charles. Passing through the community of Mermentau, I see a dozen pickups parked outside of C’est Bon, reminding me that it’s been a long time since Lea’s breakfast pie. I pull in and am soon eating both a plate of crawfish étouffée and a bowl of chicken sausage gumbo.

I finally arrive at my father’s home in Lake Charles in the early afternoon. My younger brother, Daniel, and I have coffee and talk until other siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews arrive. I spend the evening catching up on the family news before we all decamp for dinner at Pat’s of Henderson.

Driving the backroads of Louisiana is to wash in the rivers of time. The heroes and the villains are often related; indeed, they are often the same. Nothing is permanent in this landscape except the waters; nothing is stable, but all is of value; everything is kept, including the pasts.

No one leaves this state, even when they do.

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The next day I surveyed the damage from Rita (the previously posted Part 3 in this series).

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Reading this week: Lessons from History (Will and Ariel Durant) and The Culinary Plagiarist (Jason Peters). The latter is a cross between John Mortimer’s Rumpole series and Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour, and possibly the randy lovechild of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is certainly mine.

Waiting on the Egg Man

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History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. — Mr. Twain

Light on the farm from the setting sun, after a storm.

Our phone has been ringing off the hook, again, and we are glad. But now I have some questions without ready answers.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, small farms did, if not actually thrive, at least fare better than they had for some years before. The population, already primed by Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., deluged us with requests for sides of pork, quarters of beef, whole lamb, chicken, eggs, and produce. We held workshops on foraging mushrooms and raising hogs. We conducted classes on butchering chickens that had real estate agents lined up next to home-school moms, waiting to wield a knife on a live chicken. The job loss, the foreclosures, the crash of the banks — the societal disruption was such that virtually everyone feared being relegated to living a quasi-medieval life before that year or the next was out. For the first time in a long time people thought and acted local. That lasted for a few years.

I have been thinking about that time in this current crisis: What does the future post-COVID-19 hold for small farms? Where will the small farm fit into the economy, or, more to the point, which economy will the small farm fit into? Because, like history, an economy ain’t static.

A recent NYT article mentioned offhandedly that Americans eat 75 percent of their vegetables at restaurants. That stat shows the outsized impact of our consumer economy on what used to be a family or communal experience, that is, whether it be sitting down to shell beans or break bread. We have, in one generation or two, outsourced the love and care of food preparation and delivery to businesses. (Which begs the question of what the heck is in those veggieless home-cooked meals.)

Dan Barber, in his 2014 book The Third Plate, spent several hundred pages eloquently reimagining the dinner plate of the future at his elegant Blue Hill restaurant. One of the questions that still rattles around in my brain is, Does a future knocked from its pedestal by global catastrophe —pandemic, climate change, collapsing resources — really allow for high-end restaurants? Or, indeed, for restaurants at the scale we have today?

A local producer’s economy (or as it is now fashionable to say, the maker’s economy) remains only a twee option in the global consumer economy. I’ve written too many times about the customer seeing “local” as a consumer’s choice: “I bought some lovely pork chops from Winged Elm Farm, honey. Run to Costco and pick up the rest of the meal’s ingredients.” While that “choice” continues, most small farms will be but a rhetorical flourish for the politician, the food writer, and the conversationalist at the restaurant dinner table, a footnote on the farm-to-table menu that proudly announces sourcing local ingredients “when available.”

Small farm culture simply is not relevant in large-scale capitalist or command economies. Indeed, it exists in the margins of most economic models; it endures, in moments of time, as a particular cycle of history expands or contracts. The census used to have a category for the “self-sufficing farm,” an entity that produced the majority of a family’s needs and bartered in a primarily cashless economy for the remainder. That model, while not so sexy to policy planners, politicians, or, frankly, you and me, is closer to how most small farms have existed across the centuries, across the continents. Perhaps the small farm thrives when there is minimal choice?

One day next month or next year, this particular crisis will pass, no doubt. But it has left exposed the limits of global supply chains. It is encouraging that those limits are now being questioned. Yet, I do not hold my breath that good questions or good answers will change our trajectory as a species. Just as likely is that the planet will make the choices for us. Then the question becomes not Where does the small farm fit into the economy? but instead, How does the larger population learn to live a life of reduced choices?

Older farmers in this valley recall that growing up, an egg man used to come around twice a week to collect eggs. He would take them to sell to the family-owned grocery store in the nearest town. He provided some much-needed cash for the farms to buy what they did not themselves produce.

Maybe that is the best outcome we might hope for. When the clearest sign that we have launched ourselves on a new and better course is that one fine spring day, as we are hoeing in our gardens, we hear the sound of the egg man coming up the drive, once again.