10:15 AM Dancing Trees

The wind has shifted directions. I ventured out to snap a few photos. I stepped out into the jet liner roar. There was little rain and a lots of wind. I walked the 30 yards to the corner feeling relatively safe. I felt as though this was as bad as it was going to get. And it didn’t feel like it was that bad. Then another surprise, this one startlingly frightening. A huge gust of wind cranked up. I was standing at the corner, thirty yards from my protected front door, holding the camera, marveling at the way the sycamore trees were bending, like huge rubber pencils. I was facing river bound, south. As I raised the camera to document the beauty of the resilience of the trees, I heard a gruesome, Frankensteinian, terrifying, electrical arc generator sound, the sound of the high voltage power lines that run above my place, arcing across a two foot gap! Thriteen thousand eight hundred fucking volts (I think) of high octane juice, fucking arcing, shooting a big blue/white flash to accompany the unmistakable humming buzz of an electric arc. It sounded like a 23 foot tall Jimi Hendrix plugging in his 15 foot long Statocaster into a 30 foot high Marshall stack. I nearly pissed my pants. Seriously. Truly. I had a corporeal, full body, fear response that was completely unencumbered by volition, unencumbered by thought, unencumbered by rationale. I was quite literally physically frightened.

I did not take the photo. I did not make a visual record of the alluring sway of the sycamores dancing with the wind. I did not think a single thought. I ran. Or, more accurately, something deep inside me commanded my body to run. Something inside literally ran, just took off in a frenzy, a fit of self-preservation. That blue/white arc had scared the shit out of me.

Two tall trees,
dancing with the wind,
rubbing and grinding
all up on each other,
rubbing and grinding
all up on a
live,
all the way live,
full on,
high voltage,
for real,
source of
piped-in electricity.

Bound to be
sparks.
Bound to be
arcs.
bright blue/white sparks
arcs jumping
and shooting
and punctuating that
swaying dance,
wind,
trees,
sparks…

The awesome power of that dance made me feel vulnerable, squashable. I nearly pissed my pants. Without a single thought, without volition, I ran. I simply ran.

For about thirty minutes after I’d heard that initial arcing buzz, I sat in the what I perceived to be safety of my living room, nervously picking on my guitar, listening to that oh so disconcerting buzz. I physically recoiled each time.
I just got a text message (I can receive texts but cannot send them — a quirk of the phone.) that informs me that the Industrial Canal levees have been “over-topped.” Over-topping is when the water rises so high as a result of the tidal surge that it spills over the tops of the levees and/or floodwalls. Over-topping is different from a breach; a breach is a failure, a structural breakdown, a washing away of mud and concrete and steel that make up our levee system. That same canal, the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, the official name for the Industrial Canal, is the same canal that breached during Katrina flooding the Lower 9th Ward. I can only assume that over-topping these levees means some flooding on both sides of the Industrial Canal, this is, assuming that the levees and flood walls are the same elevation on both sides, the upper side, closest to Downtown New Orleans, The French Quarter, The Bywater, The Marigny, The Treme, The 7th and 8th, Gentilly, Uptown, Lakeview, Mid-City, Central City, The Irish Channel, Broadmore, and the lower side, away from Downtown, away from the core of the city and the populace, closest to, and starting at, the Lower 9th Ward, Arabi, Chalmette, Mereaux, Violet, and all of lower St. Bernard Parish, and Plaquemines Parish. Nearly all suburban and rural, mostly blue collar, a good portion of the lower end of St. Bernard exists outside the levee system. So they’re already vulnerable to water rising from the south and east. No one on the lower side of the canal, the Industrial Canal, needs any water comin’ at ‘em from the canal, north and west, opposite the lower end, the end that extends out into, and dangles precariously on, our wetlands, not the Lower 9, not St. Bernard, not Plaquemines.Don’t misunderstand me. No one on either end of town, no one in any town, no one in any parish, on any coastline, anywhere, needs to be flooded out. The people immediately adjacent to the Industrial Canal on the upper side are just as vulnerable as those in the lower 9. This city is interlaced with bodies of water and waterways, so many routes for the water to penetrate and swamp and claim, so many routes to backflow IN to the region, pushed by the force of the wind and the storm itself. From there the old “fickle finger of fate,” as Dan Rowan and Dick Martin used to say, goes to work, and sometimes levees fail.