Travels With Stu

After arriving at 1AM the night before and then spending the next 30 minutes talking with my two friends and former roomates from Kenyon we finally all passed out before our day of work that began the next morning at 7AM. When I’m on vacation I like to try to not do a few simple things…1. Participate in minimal amount of physical labor other than a daily run, which I have stopped doing…argh…and 2. Never wake up before 9AM. Since I was more interested in the free lodging and seeing my college friends and being surrounded by 20 people close to me in age I decided that the work couldn’t be that bad, and hell, maybe it’d be kinda fun. And anyways, I needed a breather after St. Louis and physical labor seemed to be a good outlet.

I woke up the first morning with more spring then, well, I was just excited for a new challenge. I was prancing around the kitchen making breakfast, while everyone around me acted like the living dead. I totally understood why I was the only one with an exorbitant amount of energy at 7AM but I thought that I might as well feed off the energy and see how the day at work went.

The fact that I had my car in town was big news. That meant that instead of cramming 12 people into one car we could divide 12 people into two cars, which meant that I got 8 and the other car got 4. We drove towards downtown for a few minutes before reaching this large shed - I believe it was called “The Factory” - where two large white trucks lived as well as all the equipment needed to rebuild houses. Everyone unloaded out of my car through windows, trunks, open doors and even the sunroof. I entered the building with Ira after being told the night before that I was going to be working with Ira while I was in New Orleans.

After helping load the truck - “Gimpy” - with tools and equipment we were on our way to our site. The drive was only a few minutes, 6 at the max, as we entered a lower class neighborhood that looked as if the shit had been kicked out of it by 6 Katrinas instead of one. I actually wasn’t sure how much this neighborhood had changed after the hurricane as I assumed that it had always been kind of a dump. However, I kept most of these thoughts to myself before helping unload the equipment at the site and asking my roommate what I should do now that we had arrived.

I was told to just wait and help unload the truck. After unloading I was instructed to help attach long strips of gray “paper” to the corners of the rooms with the help of this really strong gray gooey adhesive. This took up about an hour before I was assigned a new task. Over the course of two days at the same house I had around 15 different tasks. I was always unloading/loading the truck at the beginning and end of the days and always cleaning the tools. Sometimes I helped place the “gook” on the walls or ceilings, while other times I helped with measurements for the window paneling, or actually covered a floor with paper so we wouldn’t destroy anything. Once I was given an electric screw driver and I almost lost a finger, but more importantly to the team, destroyed a nail bit and was told to no longer mess with the electric drill.

Everyone got really dirty and the days were miserably hot and humid. I think I drank around 10 bottles of water everyday, and took a few 5-10 minute breaks to gather energy after working in the sun. I was impressed how mostly everyone in the group had been working on these projects for over a month in this weather, and thought that for having no prior building experience the house was being built really well, but then again, I also don’t know a damn thing about construction. Basically, the house didn’t seem to collapse, and seemed to be coming together at a relatively quick pace.

In the neighborhood, actually across the street, there was this large white trailer in someone’s yard. I learned that these large white trailers were issued by the government to provide shelter for those who lost their house during the hurricane and decided to stay in their neighborhood. I never got to enter any of these white boxes, which they essentially were, but I can’t imagine any of them providing many amenities, and probably no luxuries. New Orleans seemed dismal, and the neighborhood we were working in looked as if it hadn’t changed in decades, and the storm was it’s last straw.

I didn’t clearly understand how, nor who, decided what was going on in New Orleans. To me it just seemed as if a group of young adults came down to New Orleans to help rebuild a house. There were hundreds, if not thousands, surrounding this one home, but for some reason, this house was selected. Perhaps the majority of the communities population migrated after the hurricane and these houses were ignored,while those who decided to stay were placed higher on the list. This seems to me to be the most logical outlook on which houses were chosen to rebuild.

After a long day of work, I was kind of tired and definitely lacked the enthusiasm I had earlier in the day. We worked from 8-4PM and it was all manual labor, and this makes you tired in 100 degree heat and lots of humidity. I was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I had made at home, and sucking down waters in my free time, but I was tired after my first day, and after returning to “The Warehouse” after work and coming back home I was ready to chill.

Joe, Ira and I ended up heading downtown and walked along Bourbon Street where the lights were glitzier than any other place I had seen in New Orleans, but all the shops seemed to sell tourist tricks, and other really lousy things, as we tried to find a bar for the evening. After walking around for an hour or so we all agreed that it was time to head back home for a good night’s rest especially since none of us got much sleep the night before.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 1:08 am and is filed under Summer 2007 Road Trip, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.