unhappy anniversary
It’s a holiday weekend, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like disaster waiting to happen. It’s hurricane season, and New Orleans residents are evacuating as Category 4 “Gustav” bears unswervingly toward them. Emergency services in North Texas are in 24 hour operating mode. Thirty thousand individually packaged meals are stacked in readiness, shelters have been put in order, and the first 4,000 of what may be 45,000 refugees begin arriving today. I don’t envy those people running before the storm. I surely don’t wish them to come to harm or to lose their homes, but I have to wonder if it’s “right” for adjoining communities to have to foot the bill for the folks who choose to live in a town that may be inundated by the Gulf of Mexico in any given year.
It was three years ago today that I posted excepts from Tim Henderson’s circa 1981 song, Atchafalaya, and I will post the lyrics here again today as both tribute to the victims and survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and to posit the idea that maybe New Orleans shouldn’t be a major population center.
(”Atchafalaya” refers to the Mississippi River and the damage done by flooding to the areas surrounding New Orleans.)
Oh, Atchafalaya, she’ll be comin’ on down
Ain’t no way to stop her, ain’t no high ground!
There’s a swamp and a bayou ever’where around
And a couple small Cajun towns.
Up a billion-dollar alley north of New Orleans
The Mississippi don’t come away clean.
She’s poison.
Big concrete dam up around the bayou
Hold back the water; keep the flood plains dry
(For the rich ones.)
Lord, the Corps of Engineers try to do good things.
Hell, tell it to the Cajuns when it floods next spring.
Cause the Corps ain’t God and they can’t turn the flow.
The Lord made the Mississippi long time ago;
He’s still working.
Made a livin’ off the river in the old folks’ time
And they don’t no more, and you ask’em why,
They say, “Look child,”
(Take a look around you, boy.)
Lord, last year’s wet is this year’s dry,
And the river ain’t a living; it’s a way to die.
Atchafalaya, she won’t rise slow,
Volunteers to the Levee,
Fool, you better not go!
Pack up and run with what you can save
Cause the river’ll be aboilng on your grandpa’s grave tomorrow.
The river’ll be boiling with snakes tomorrow
Well, one of these days, and it won’t be long
When the winter is wet and the spring floods strong,
Mississippi gonna flow where she never has been.
‘Bout a hundred miles away from New Orleans;
- she’ll be a ghost town.
danza »
