This last Saturday morning, Chris & Derrick and Mark & Tara and I trundled into Chris’s little Kia Sportage and drove to Austin to see the Rude Mechs’ production of MATCH PLAY.

The first part of the 7 hour drive went right through the footprint of Rita. It really is kind of stunning. Still. There is SO MUCH damage.

-Every few miles there would be an abandoned car on the side of the road. Little piles of debris, often clothing, scattered over the landscape.

-The Atchafalaya swamp stunk like I’ve never smelled it stink before.

-We pulled off to grab some breakfast in this little place west of Lafayette across the street from a mangled Dairy Queen, and a smashed gas station with an even more smashed mini-van still parked at the pump.

-It got really intense around Lake Charles where there were long lines of boats of every description shattered and sunken along the shore.

-A trailer park, picturesquely located in a forest, so that almost every trailer was cut neatly in half by a tree.

-Buildings that had been stepped on.

-Churches wrapped in tarps and plastic sheeting.

-A big open field dotted with massive piles of broken trees, burning. Some sort of mythic bonfire ceremony with no people.

-Everything would look fine and then there would be a building like a corpse with no windows and that look you see in footage from war zones. I think it’s called rubble.

-The most fascinating thing to me is what it did to signage. You know those huge billboard weeds on the side of interstates everywhere they don’t have the wherewithal to pass ordinances against them? The ones with the large diameter steel mast supporting a framework for two billboards at angles to each other so they look like a big piece of cheese cake on a toilet paper tube? These things are like candy to a hurricane. It is the most convincing evidence I’ve seen to support the idea of intelligent design. These things were “played with”. It was like you gave the same material to 150 different artists and they each did something with them. The most common theme was to just strip the printed sign itself off the backing leaving an emphatic blank on the landscape, strenuously encouraging us to not do anything in particular. There would be shreds of the sign, but just enough to convey the violence with which Rita had shouted “SHUT UP!” at the advertising.
Others were mangled beyond recognition. Some of them were clear references to Anselm Kiefer, some were Claus Oldenburg some were like deconstructions of Alexander Calders.
Another favorite of mine were the tall thin poles toped with the delicate frame of the McDonalds logo. Just a hint of color around the edges. Obviously a statement about the emptiness of fast food. What it lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in truth.

…all that plastic and other scary stuff that got blown away is out there somewhere…

On the way home on Sunday, it was dark by the time we got back into the Rita-zone, which was interesting. You would stare out at the darkness and wonder if there would normally be more lights out there. Then every once in awhile there would be a fully illuminated blank billboard. Or one of those elevated McDonald’s deals with little lines of naked light bulbs that were invisible by day. All very avant garde.

For the most part it looks better at night because rubble isn’t lit.

There were lots of trees blown down and broken limbs, but on the whole, nature deals better with this than the man-made stuff. Even in the most devastated areas, the grass was fine. Most of the bushes looked ok. We went by one stand of trees where you could tell which trees were dead because the dead ones had no bark. Rita blew the bark off of the trees. They looked funny and naked but I wanted to cry.

The thing that really gets me about all this is the way that you’ll drive by 7 wrecked billboards and then there’ll be one that’s pristine. A building with serious damage beside one with none. A town that’s normal and going about its business, just down the road from a ghost-town with no power or water or anything. There is no rhyme or reason to it. It is a clear evocation of something deeply real, and something that as humans we have trouble dealing with.

They’re letting people back into NO now (except for the ninth ward). One of my undergraduate students told me today about going into her house. The first floor is completely blackened with the gunk and the mold, and they had to wear masks to go into their own house. Up the stairs and everything is exactly the way they left it. Kacy’s own room was fine. Nothing out of place.

It’s this coexistence of devastation and normality that wrenches. It’s not fair. It never will be. There is no pattern. Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s easy to see and feel it in the aftermath of disaster, but it’s where we all live all the time. We are all in London during the blitz, and supersonic missiles are coming straight down at our heads. We won’t ever hear the one that hits us. This all causes a profound confusion about the nature of causality. It would be much easier to attribute which trailer park gets smeared and which boat survives to a will of some kind. Then at least the craziness can be traced back to a crazy personality of some sort, or vengeance, or benevolence. How can a life have meaning, if it can be taken away by something so devoid of it? If we say that we were “spared” when it misses us, then what are we when we are hit?

After the show (which was FANTABULOUS and liberating and cool and fun and [insert genuinely felt hyperbole]) Barney, some of the Rudes etc and I went to a Mexican place where the Margaritas had the burnt-orange color of the University of Texas football team. They tasted normal but they looked like Tabasco sauce. Our waitress told us that they were “victory margaritas.” Here’s the causality: Earlier that evening, the players of the UT football team managed, within the rules of collage football, to score more points (usually by transporting an inflated envelope of pig-skin over an arbitrary line) than their opponents. This caused food coloring to be put in our drinks… I don’t know. It doesn’t get much more random than that in my book.