Leaving The Harbor

Leaving the Harbor
Rev. Kathleen Ellis
Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church
February 19, 2006

Live Oak is a harbor for many of us—familiar, comfortable, friendly, and lively. Voyagers come to this harbor for Sunday worship or one of our many activities, sometimes just once and some of you since the early days in 1992. Providing safe harbor is one of our primary functions. Adlai Stevenson once said, “We travel together, passengers on this little spaceship dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”

At the same time, we are often encouraged to move out of our safety zone and reach out to others.

Outside the harbor of the church is the harbor of family and friends we have adopted along the way. To whatever extent we can, it’s important to maintain those connections. When I travel for various reasons, if there’s a chance to meet my sister, cousins, nieces, nephews, the trip is that much more special.

As it happens, the Southwest UU Ministers’ Retreat this year was at the Solomon Episcopal Retreat Center near Covington, LA. We had made our reservation at least a year ago, well before Katrina and Rita made landfall, but it was the first time for many of us to travel to that region. My niece Bridgette Benton and her sons live in Slidell, about an hour east of Covington. The nights before and after the retreat I arranged to stay with them.

On January 30, Bridgette drove me around to show me some of areas hardest hit by Katrina. Residential streets are still lined with piles of debris and tree branches. Refrigerators have been wrapped with duct tape to keep them closed. Destruction stretches for miles along Highway 11. This is the same highway where Nathan Ryan, our Director of Religious Education, used to visit his grandmother. Her house is gone now, and she is living with his parents. Nathan has nearly 40 relatives in Slidell.

While we drove around, Bridgette told me more about her experience after the storm. Since she is a nurse, she worked pretty much non-stop at Northshore Regional Medical Center. It was the closest functioning hospital to New Orleans, so there were helicopters coming and going every few minutes with more patients or medical staff. On the roof and stationed in the hallways the National Guard kept a watchful eye. Though she was glad for the security, it was disconcerting to see all those automatic weapons in a center for healing. Bridgette says she is most proud that she and other hospital staff were able to assist in airlifting 75 dogs, cats, and other small animals from the New Orleans area. Now she works 12-hour shifts and gets a day or two off each week

Bridgette’s older son Matthew lost his apartment and his job, so he came home to Slidell, bought a chainsaw, and went to work clearing debris from dawn to dark. Now he’s on a sheetrock crew for the repair of salvageable homes. Bridgette’s younger son Cody had spent the weekend with his dad, who decided not to evacuate from Metairie. They were out of contact for four days, a lifetime for a mom.

The rest of my cousins, my sister and I couldn’t reach any of the Bentons for several days, until a text message got through from her cousin. It’s funny—my memory recalls that high anxiety within the family lasted for weeks—but actually we located Bridgette the evening of September 3, one week after landfall. It just seems like it had been forever.

For the first couple of weeks after the hurricane, Bridgette, Matthew, and Cody all lived at the hospital because there was no electricity or water at home and the door wouldn’t close properly. Military meals-ready-to-eat sustained them all until businesses finally began to come back to life. When Wal-Mart finally opened, it took three hours for long lines of people to go in a certain number at a time. Even then, not all products were available.

A month or two went by before Bridgette first spotted a mail delivery truck, a cause for celebration in the neighborhood. Family members could finally send care packages. But my visit this month really helped us all strengthen our connections.

After the retreat, the Rev. Matt Tittle (minister of Bay Area UU Church in Clear Lake City, TX), Jon and I drove to Violet, just outside Chalmette, LA. Bay Area’s church sexton lives in Texas City, next door to a Katrina evacuee who needs help cleaning out her flooded home. Matt had hoped more ministers could have come to help, but most of us had made travel arrangements already and most had planes to catch. Jon had driven over from Austin and wanted to see the damage for himself.

With just three of us, there was not a lot we cold do, but it was a far worse mess than I could have imagined from videos, photographs, and stories. At first we couldn’t open the front door all the way; the back door was boarded up. I slid in sideways and started grabbing what I could reach and handing it out to the guys—sheet rock, pieces of furniture that broke easily in my hands. Matt used a board to scrap some of the muck out from behind the door and finally we got it open.

The muck was several inches of black gumbo, very sticky and slick, probably toxic. Masks, gloves, long sleeves, long pants, and sturdy shoes were a must. We pulled out small furniture like a chair and a couple of small tables. The smaller table’s glass top was intact so I leaned it against the outside wall. I started a pile of sheets of broken glass in the yard so it was visible and perhaps less hazardous.

The three of us managed to haul out a large screen TV unit and a love seat. A couch fell against my leg and I held it that way until I could get my hands clear to shove it back. The bruises are healing nicely.

We set salvageable items at the corner of the fence closest to the house —wine glasses, trophies (a sports trophy and another trophy for “Parent of the Year”), a two-tier serving tray, some DVDs (could they work if cleaned? I have my doubts, but it would be worth a try.) I started a black trash bag for small, unsalvageable but maybe precious items like notebooks and pictures so no one would have to see them in their ruined state.

Then while I was outside pulling branches off the roof, Jon and Matt started moving the larger sofa. To their surprise a snake suddenly appeared and aggressively thrust itself toward Matt. They couldn’t see any markings in the dim light, but they noticed its a diamond-shaped head (not a good sign). There must have been a nest of them inside the couch: there was movement inside the cushion. Jon took a picture and later, on the internet, identified it as a water moccasin. We decided that was all the cleanup we could do.

Matt originally wanted to get a crew from Bay Area to go over for a weekend cleanout, but now he thinks it’s not a job for volunteers. We certainly needed more tools—a Bobcat would be great, for instance; or at least shovels, chain saw, pickaxe, maybe some pry bars.

Matt had brought some supplies that we left on the porch of the FEMA trailer parked in the yard—trash bags, latex gloves (too thin, really), toilet paper, bottled water, and Gatorade. There were no utilities to the trailer, but they were gradually coming to the neighborhood.

Though we were there for just a few hours, I am glad to have seen the devastation for myself. It’s worse than I could ever have imagined, even after all the photographs, videotapes, and written accounts. House after house for blocks are either still filled with a wet, impossible mess, or have been gutted for possible salvage. Cars have just been left in yards, glass broken, engines and interiors ruined.

As my tank top said, “The Good Faith Is Messy.” That was the theme for SWUUSI 2005 by theme speaker Dick Gilbert. He meant that a good faith makes room for things like paradox and doubt. In this case, I took it to mean that a good faith requires that we roll up our sleeves sometimes and help it along. If you can have faith in the future in the midst of utter devastation, then you must have a strong faith indeed.

After the brief cleanup effort, Jon and I followed Matt to Slidell where we had lunch. Matt headed back to Houston, but Jon and I wanted to see my sister Jean’s house, the one she designed and had built, the 5,000 square foot, two-story house on pilings. I remember fondly my stays in the guest room, with its comfortable furnishings, private bath, and private porch with its own exit into the wooded back yard. Every room in the house has a porch or a balcony. (I wonder if geckoes still live there? Jean had kept a couple of them in the house to help with roach control!)

I remember the two-bedroom garage apartment where I sometimes stayed during those long visits when Jean was so ill with cancer. Her son Buddy’s soundproof band studio was downstairs. He wasn’t allowed to play past 10 or 11 PM when people were staying upstairs, but he did love his drums.

Since the house is on pilings, the house got only 4 feet of water downstairs (where the bedrooms are). All of the native trees and plants she had put in are gone. The gazebo and tree house are gone, along with that band studio. There’s tree damage to the roof and various broken windows. The winding wooden sidewalk to the road is gone—maybe taken out even before the storm since it was getting a bit old when she died seven years ago.

But the house is still standing, and work is being done to remove damaged contents.
I remember things that used to be there. In particular, there was Mama’s wicker rocking chair, the child-sized wicker rocking chair, the children’s card table and two little folding chairs, red and white. They would certainly have been ruined, but they’re gone already, anyway. After she died, everything was divided up, moved, stored, and/or used in different homes in Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas, and who knows where else. It’s all just stuff—the stuff of memories—memories also captured in photographs. It’s that kind of stuff that is now waterlogged, moldy, and piled in landfills, multiplied by thousands.

Next to the house is a small cemetery, even fairly recently in use. I made my way through the mud from recent rains and the debris of branches to look at the gravestones up close. Someone has a cemetery recovery program under way. It was rather poignant to see above-ground tombs empty of their contents, a row of caskets lined up on one end of the lot, graves half full of water, and caskets halfway out of their tombs. May those souls and their families rest easy.

All of these scenes replay themselves in my mind, 17 days later. Three hours of my time in the tiny village of Violet, an hour or two in Slidell; a few pages of description. The whole experience has left me a little less patient with minor complaints, a little more aware of sudden misfortune.

It is important, from time to time, to be confronted with great loss, to lend a hand where you’d rather not go, to slog through the muck in hope of salvation, to test your resolve. I am humbled in the midst of these comforts: clean running water, comfortable chairs, art on the walls. I am blessed to have dipped one toe into another world of ruin and recovery.

I have witnessed the strength of character tested in the aftermath of a huge wasteland. The levees could not withstand nature’s force. Instead, people have had to build their own personal levees of faith. In the event that one of us, or this community as a whole, is threatened, we would do well to have constructed levees of faith, courage, and strength. We would do well to stick our fingers in the dike, to fill and stack sandbags, to join together when everything seems to collapse around us.

This is our community of faith, our harbor, our place of refuge. The levees we build here through tradition or covenant will strengthen us against threats from the world out there and bolster us against threats from within as changes take place. Live Oak grows, new generations grow up among us, time marches on, and we will see change.

Let us not become complacent. We need our safe harbor, but the rest of the world needs us, too. Take my hand. Let us help one another venture into lands unknown. This vessel of community deserves to be filled with integrity, respect, and love. May these qualities become our way of interacting with one another in our messy, faithful journey.

Amen