Slate on Slat
by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08
The second time I came back into New Orleans was the Jewish New Year. After weeks, I’d finally found a company in Baton Rouge that was willing to nail up some felt and protect my roof. With the visqueen the only protection between my house and the elements, I was desperate. In retrospect, though, I see I was clinging to this one problem because it was the only way I could understand how to proceed. Some people go crazy by going crazy, and other people go crazy by acting sane.
The city was still under armed guard, and people from outside didn’t know how to get in. My Baton Rouge roofing company was about to give up on me, because Baton Rouge folks don’t much like New Orleans to begin with, and because they’d wasted a whole day driving down there and getting turned back the first time. So I pleaded with them to try again and I said I’d follow behind them to make sure they got past the checkpoints. It was before dawn when we set off. They’d wanted to get to New Orleans and get to work before it got too hot. I helped them through the checkpoint with my press pass, and we rolled to the house. The street was completely quiet.
A city of 600,000 souls was down to fewer than 10,000. There was a feeling of serenity, the sky at dawn with pink edges. As I looked up I saw three white heron flying overhead, something in ordinary conditions you’d never see, because heron don’t like loud noises, rumbling trucks, or frat boys. Heron like clear sky, quiet. You could almost hear the lifting of their wings as they sailed. What had once been a busy street was returning to nature, and I saw the beauty of it, the thin sliver of the new moon, the Jewish New Year moon.
The roofers climbed up on the roof and hammered down the felt and, within a couple of hours, my agony was losing its burning edge. There’d be much, much more to the story before I settled the business of the roof, and settled whether at heart I’m a restorationist or a renewalist, a slatist or a shingle-ist. More twists and turns, surprises and losses. But that morning felt good, and after the roofers took off, my wife and I decided the right thing to do was to go to the Rosh Hashanah service. As we rode down St. Charles Avenue, which had no traffic and no traffic lights, we heard the sound of fire engines and saw that a big old house was burning. And it burned to the ground.
With all the fallen branches drying out and lying around, I thought this might be the beginning of the end. But it wasn’t. The little chapel they were using for the service was filled to overflowing, so I could only hear the rabbi’s voice. We sat in the back with the other survivors, the FEMA guys from all over the country, and the locals who were putting pieces back together, and we exchanged stories about what we’d lost.
It was a new year all right, and it began when the roofers came to our house and I stood outside and saw the thin sliver of new moon, and the three heron flying overhead.
It wasn’t the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of the beginning.
