I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS: By Tim Cuff

Following the failure of New Orleans’s levee walls and the flooding of the city after Hurricane Katrina, many Americans, as they watched video of evacuations of the city, heard, many for the first time, the song, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” It is a song first made famous by Louis Armstrong. For some reason, although I am not “from” there, I do miss New Orleans. As they like to say, I have people there. My mother was born in New Orleans in 1926. My grandfather and my uncles, for much of their working lives, were employed by the Sewerage and Water Board (the government office responsible for maintaining the levees and the pumping stations which kept New Orleans from flooding). My grandmother lived there until the post-Katrina flooding “exiled” her to Dallas, Texas. I first visited in 1966 and have been a visitor many times.

As I write this your “mission trip” has not yet started. Some of you have been to New Orleans before and have a connection with that place. I am particularly writing this for folks who have never been there so that as you travel you will know of someone who, although not “from” there, is “of” New Orleans. With some of my people there, the tragedy, which was the flooding after Katrina, takes on a different feel. My grandmother’s house, a place in which I had slept, a place to which I brought my college friends, and a place in which my children experienced the unique love of their great-grandmother, was flooded nearly to its roof. Last December (2006), my brothers and sisters returned to New Orleans to help bury my grandmother, who died in Dallas a few months earlier. We visited her old house. Out front sat a FEMA trailer. The house was “see-through.” All the interior walls had been ripped out. Inside the outer walls, only the studs remained. We looked in the windows and out the back of the house. Trees that had shaded my daughters, Laura and Margaret, while they played in the yard were gone. The street was empty. More than a year after the flooding, chain saws still whirred and their clatter was the most noticeable sound in the neighborhood. When we buried my grandmother, the service was at St. Dominic’s, just a few blocks from the flooded house. It was the church my grandparents had attended for decades. We sat in folding chairs. There were no pews. They were lost in the flooding and there was a ring of water stain 7 feet high around the entire church, including on the huge brass doors through which we entered.

During that trip, we also visited the pumping station where my grandfather had worked. My grandfather was a supervisor for the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans. He and my grandmother lived in a house owned by the Board and adjacent to a pumping station on the Orleans Street Canal (although that house was demolished several years before Katrina and the flood). It was startling to see the building that housed those giant pumps, pumps that took water out of the city, and sent it “safely” into Lake Pontchartrain. When the levees broke, the pumps were useless. The machines my grandfather tended so many years before (he died in the early 1970s) could not protect anything then. We walked along the levee and thought about the levees that couldn’t stand the pressure. We looked at the railroad track that ran along the back of the property on which my grandfather’s house sat. [Ever try to sleep in a house less than 50 feet from an operating train?] The railroad track was elevated several feet above the top of the levee…..The railroad was built to operate even if the levees failed. The houses of most residents of New Orleans were not.

As you head to New Orleans, please know that I will be with you. For whatever reason, and I must admit that I don’t really know why: maybe because my mother (who died when I was eleven) was born there; maybe because I celebrated my twelfth birthday there with fifty pounds of boiled shrimp and crayfish; maybe because my grandparents, aunts, and uncles still live there; maybe because I took my wife and children there to see where my mother grew up and to visit their great grandmother; regardless, I miss New Orleans. If you’ve not been there before, I hope you can understand the place. It is not just Bourbon Street, the fancy downtown hotels, and beautiful southern mansions. It is a port town. Grain from the Midwest flows out, manufactured goods from around the world flow in. It is also an industrial city. It is full of some rough men, some rough women. For many, life there has always been difficult, not just since Katrina. Racial tensions still exist. Poverty is not uncommon.

If time permits, visit my grandmother’s old house. It is nothing special. It was just an old woman’s home. But if you want some personal connection with New Orleans, visit the house. It is at 5844 Argonne Blvd in the Lakeview neighborhood (about 5 blocks east of Canal Blvd, just west of City Park and the Orleans Canal, just north of I-610). Visit the pumping station where my grandfather used to tend operations (same neighborhood, two more blocks east of Argonne, and just south of I-610, you’ll need to get onto Orleans Avenue ). Think about how the pumps kept the city safe until the levees broke. Look at my grandmother’s old house and the other houses around it. Look how high the water in the canal is above the land and the houses around it. Look at the train tracks just behind the pumping station. Look where the tracks are in relation to the water in the canal. Imagine what it would have been like on August 29, 2005 to see the waters rising to the roof when the water from the canals broke loose. Imagine and pray.

It might be hard to imagine. It might be hard to believe that anyone would want to live here, living “under the water.” But remember my grandmother. Flooded out of New Orleans at age 98, she was taken to a beautiful place in Dallas, Texas. On her death bed, nearly a year later, she asked to go back home, back home to New Orleans. I don’t understand it fully. But I don’t understand a lot. I don’t understand the town’s motto. You know it: laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll). I think that when you live in a city that is below sea level, a city always one storm away from disaster, it affects your thinking. You may be rich, you may be poor; you may be white, you may be black, you may be Cajun; but always being just one big storm away from disaster reminds you of the fragility and the precious nature of life. It reminds you that life is short, it reminds you to celebrate your existence, it reminds you to dance with the ones God gave you, laissez les bons temps rouler. As you head to New Orleans, please know that I will be with you. As you work there, remember to dance with the ones God gave you, laissez les bons temps rouler. I miss New Orleans….and in three weeks so will you.