Slate on Slat
by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08
From the roof that I had before Katrina, I have only one slate left.
It’s a jagged grey oblong, about the size of my head, thin and sharp at the edges. It flakes easily; after a hundred years, this old slate has lost most of its integrity. It’s a slate that’s been written upon: a history of wind and sun and rain. It protected me and my family, and the families before us who lived here. It was a roof over our heads.
There was a time when I had piles and piles of these slates. I was a mad collector in the months after Katrina and stacked them around my porch and in the crawlspace underneath my house. Every time I heard the shovels scraping a roof in the neighborhood, I ran over to see if I could get the Mexican guys to save some slates for me. It was always Mexican guys working on roofs in New Orleans after Katrina, which is a sad fact that people make into politics: the old Creole craftsmen who built this city by hand and pride hardly exist any more, the men who passed on specific knowledge of the wood and stone and plaster. The Mexicans came in to do the roofs, and they worked quickly and just slid the slates off the roof with shovels. As the slates cascaded to the dumpster below in a cloud of gray dust and fracture, you could feel your heart breaking with it, and the sound when they hit was like disaster all over again. But when I explained I would pay fifty cents a slate, and once they got the idea from my rusty Spanish, they seemed to like it a lot. In Mexico people understand materials and recycling and the old ways.
I became a militant slate preservationist. I didn’t really understand why, since our obsessions only look like obsessions in retrospect. It just seemed like the only thing to do. We hadn’t had much water damage at my house, but the wind had torn through the neighborhood pretty badly—130 miles an hour, some said. An amputated branch of the sycamore in front of the house shot over the driveway like a white rocket and somehow landed high up in the ginger fronds. And the wind ripped off a bunch of the hundred-year-old slates on my roof, leaving the attic exposed to wind, rain, and ferocious winged termites. I lost a lot of sleep over those slates—for me there was something fundamentally wrong about a house with an open roof. Every minute that went by, I felt more damaged.
The first time I got into the city, about two weeks after the storm and levee break, I used a fake press pass that I’d made in a copy shop in New York. I’d left just before the storm to drop my daughter off at college and got stranded. I’d noticed from the news that nobody was getting into the city but paramilitary and journalists—so I faked myself up an impressive-looking press pass with a lanyard and got an editor friend to sign it. When we came to the checkpoint, the guardsman just shook his head and let us pass.
That’s when I got my first look. At the dead refrigerator with the maggots hopping inside a foul stink. The wrack of Lake Pontchartrain washed up on the lawn: driftwood, tampon, coke bottle, tennis shoes, excrement, and death. Several shutters had blown off and a huge pile of branches and wood blocked the driveway. A neighbor’s roof tile had crashed through the back window of our Toyota. But the worst for me was the sunlight cascading in the attic.
Me and my buddy Jim Bennett went up there in the hundred-degree heat and stapled visqueen to the rafters. It was a desperate measure, but I knew I couldn’t sleep with the roof broken open like that. The thing is, the house had worked: the attic was bone dry, the house was bone dry. What I’d feared was a big rainstorm after Katrina, but there wasn’t any rain. We stapled up the visqueen. Now I needed somebody to put some new slates up. But that wasn’t going to be easy. There just wasn’t anyone left in town that knew how to do the work.
My house must have shaken and swayed when that wind came; it shakes when a bus goes down Broadway a block away or when the water truck comes lumbering down Pine Street in the morning. I think it shakes if a crow lands too heavily on a branch. My house was designed to shake in the wind. It shakes with purpose. It was built by people who knew where they were, how far away from the lake, how far from the river, what the wind could do, what the water could do.
In New Orleans no one speaks of north, south, east or west. There’s just Lake, River, Downtown, Uptown. We live inside a geography defined on two sides by nature and on the other two sides by human nature. I live in the extreme corner of River and Uptown, and by the time the waters of Lake Pontchartrain reached us, they were no more than eight inches deep. The folks in canoes got out right in front of my house.
The water didn’t get us this time; our house was built too high for that. The wind got us. The wind ripped through the urban forest of live oaks and magnolias. The odd sycamore tree that leans in front of our house, the pine trees some fools planted in our backyard because our street is called Pine Street—they suffered. The sturdy live oaks did well, but most of the magnolias died when the brackish water from Pontchartrain hit their roots. They curled up and died and we have them no more. My lemon tree in the backyard went mad that year and produced hundreds of lemons, the first and last time it was so prodigious. I used to think it was something in the water—dead fish, dead people. Then I thought, this is what trees do in crisis: send out a mighty barrage of blossoms and fruit in hope some seed will land on fertile ground.
The wind attacked every slate roof in the neighborhood and sent the individual pieces crashing. The lost slates and gaping roofs were the main damage to the exterior. The folks with the snug architectural roofs saw no damage. The broken trees piled up for months as tinder for a bonfire I knew would come. After the flood, after the water—didn’t the book say the fire would come next time? The city was poised to burn all through September. Not a drop of rain fell, as if Katrina had swept every cloud out of the sky, along with our old ideas, our old life, our old hopes, and our old way of being. All that, too, got swept away.
