Road Tripping in the Bayou

Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans and Places Beyond,

We've been on an odyssey around the state to cut trees wherever we were sent. Ike hit the Houston/Galveston area directly, but it was such a huge storm that all of the lower parishes of Louisiana were inundated by the tidal surge and the winds that brought it inland. As information seeped in, there were organizations and individuals far-and-wide that collected names of neighbors who needed help. Thousands of trees down on homes, across driveways, in the way of powerline repairs, and so forth. Ann and I took Valerie, a young volunteer who found us via the State's volunteer hotline, and we headed off to Lafayette with our gloves, water, gasoline, and chainsaws. We were dispatched by United Way Acadiana, and worked usually as a team of three at individual homes in the area. Boy, oh boy, is that area Mosquito Country these days. They were plentiful, big, and aggressive. All of that wet ground made for one big mosquito bog across the entire region.



At the end of the week, we were sent to the Houma/Raceland area to do the same tree removal work. Reggie joined us for these days, and we cleared a pretty big list of mostly older folks who didn't have the ability to do this work themselves.

I'll tell you, there's no American poverty like Deep South American poverty. We met some really nice folks out in the rural areas we have visited over the past couple of weeks, and we've been humbled by how little so many of those people have. Every stop along the way, though, people were welcoming, tripping over themselves to make sure we were fed and watered. On our first evening in Lafayette, we worked until dusk cutting trees out of Miss Edna's yard. Miss Edna is an 82-year old widow who had been gathering branches by herself, and I asked her to please let us do it. As the sun went down, we hadn't finished, and I knew she was waiting for us to leave so she could come back out and continue working. I told her that we needed to quit because it isn't very safe to operate a chain saw in the dusk hours, but that we weren't going to leave if she was going to come back out and drag branches herself. She laughed because she knew she'd been busted. We went home, and came back the next morning with a few AmeriCorps members to finish. She smiled at me when we arrived, and told me "I waited. I told you I would. I almost couldn't stand it, you kids working so hard while I didn't. But I waited, Baby."

I love it when women call me Baby.

On a job in Breaux Bridge, we jumped out of the truck and began unloading our saws. The woman we were helping saw Ann and I each grab our saws, and she was taken aback. Her words, exactly: "A lady with a chain saw?" I just smiled. Yep, that's a lady alright, but that lady is Ann. What a laugh we had later. People just don't know until they've worked with Ann.

Back to New Orleans for the rest of our third week here. More later.

My love to all,

David/Dad