Floods dismantled the city of New Orleans, forcing upon its half-million residents migrations to other places. The emigres for months or longer must live somewhere other than home.
And soon, all of them will start wondering about the place down the street where the lady filled brown paper sacks with boiled crawfish and handed them over with a wink. About the barbershop’s maroon vinyl seats where they sat for a cut every six weeks. About the barber.
Their culture, the very shape of the daily lives of New Orleanians, has vanished.
The catastrophe shocked, but it didn’t surprise. New Orleanians themselves have always known that a big hurricane could erase the city – it’s hard to forget when you look up and see boats.
But the constant threat of apocalyptic floods
didn’t persuade its famously rooted families to live somewhere more sensible. Life outside of New
Orleans, for many, wasn’t really much of a life.
It’s the same for people in other cities and small towns and rural hamlets around the country. The feelings toward their homes can be just as powerful.
Even when they are illogical.
Why would folks choose to live on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the storms come every year? In the middle of a drught-stricken forest that invites wildfires? In a metropolis where terrorists vow to strike again? Or in Tornado Alley?
Because those places are home. In some senses, geography is identity, an important inspiration for our dreams. We can’t let it go.
“When you are dug into a place and you know the streets and you know the parks and you know your neighborhood and you know your neighbors, you are not going to forsake that easily,” says Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan.
Place, he says, colors our psyches, and affection for it “is a powerful magnet. … We’re still wild in a lot of ways.”
Within the embrace of the Los Angeles basin dwells “enough of the terrors of the natural world to satisfy anyone’s ideas of places where one should not live,” says author D.J. Waldie. “Yet millions of us live here.”
Earthquakes. Flames. Floods. Drought. Crime. Volatile traffic. All of it besets Southern California. None of it matters enough to dislodge Waldie, 57, who has spent his entire life in Lakewood, on the southeast edge of Los Angeles.
“I can only say when I touch the soil, when I breathe the air – even though it may be smoggy – when I feel the light on my shoulders, it feels right, all of it feels right. It’s part of me and I’m part of it,” he says.
Scores of people move to Los Angeles and then get away as fast as they can, never to say a kind word about the City of Angels again.
But then there are the people who say, “Nope, I’m not going,” says Waldie. “They are on the freeway going 75 miles-per-
hour on a spring morning and the air is like chablis. Their favorite song is on the radio. The freeway is running smooth. And it’s exhilaration, the best roller-coaster ride they could ever be on.”
There’s nothing exhilarating about the vicious forest fires that threaten Bailey writer Ann Smeal’s house every summer. But fires or not, she isn’t budging.
“I’m planning to die here,” she says. “It’s beautiful. I love it. I love the community. There is just no other place I’d rather be.”
Like many others who routinely face natural-disaster danger, she doesn’t shrink from the reality of her situation: in a house 12 miles from the nearest major road, surrounded by a national forest.
“I made my kids look at CNN last night (during New Orleans flood coverage), to tell them, hey, this could be us, it could happen, our house could burn down, we could be refugees with nowhere to go,” she says.
Researchers haven’t spent much time examining the cultural aspect of disasters – what happens to people when a natural disaster destroys their way of life? – but there’s no question the effects are staggering.
“I do think attachment to place and some of these shared losses of symbols and places of meaning are really important. They have a lot of meaning for disaster victims,” says Fran Norris, a Dartmouth University professor who is one of the foremost researchers on the psychological effects of disasters. “It’s a total disruption of your way of life.”
“People who are uprooted, their whole lives have changed,” she says. “It’s not just a matter of a few property losses to cope with or some short-term stresses. It’s so very different.”
While friends, family and culture do go a long way toward defining place for many people, houses themselves are important too, says Winifred Gallagher, the author of the 1993 book “The Power of Place” and of a forthcoming book, “Housethinking.”
Your house, she says, “helps you remember who you are and how you live, so when you walk into your home at night, your home is telling you it’s time to have a glass of wine, to kick back, to garden.”
“Now imagine you don’t have that,” she says. “It’s profoundly disorienting.”
The people of New Orleans thrust into this forced sojourn now “have no physical environment supporting their identity.”
Gallagher, who lives in New York City, said after Sept. 11, 2001, people asked if the benefits of living in Manhattan are worth more than the risks, namely, “wearing a bulls-eye on us.”
Some people did flee the city after the terrorist attacks. But most stayed put.
“It’s a function of people saying, `I’m a New Orleanian, I’m a New Yorker, I’m part of that city,” she says.
Terrorism? Not likely. Hurricanes? Never. The only disaster confronting the munincipal object of Todd Runestad’s affections, Boulder, is encroaching Republicans, he says.
“Having the mountains looming over town like a wave, the natural world, it humbles the spirit and it instills you with a sense of adventure,” he says. “You get adventurous minds who come here.”
In Boulder, he says, “every restaurant has vegetarian options. You can’t get that everywhere else. The Boulder values were in us, but we cultivated them, and you get to a point and you say, ‘it’s just so perfect here.’ You go to other places and they don’t have it all. Boulder has it all under one roof.”
It’s the “Boulder bubble,” he calls it.
“I used to say the only time I’d go to Denver was to pick up people at the airport, and now I say take a bus,” he says. “I never get out of this town, and that’s fine by me. We found Shangri-La, so hey.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
