My Daughter, Neice and Nephew Crabbing off of the Wharf at our Camp 1998.
Where has the plane
gone? Why can it not be found?
I hear this question
over and over each day by those
seeking honest answers as well as those trying
to make
up news as they go along. The missing
Malaysian airplane
loaded with nearly 300 lives has prompted this recurring
question by people all over the world. The unknowing has
fueled theories of
conspiracy, speculation of overt government
aggression, and even supernatural
intervention. People are
puzzled by the disappearance, but they are frightened because
the plane seems to have vanished without a trace.
My heart goes out
to the passengers and their families. I
applaud the efforts made to locate
evidence of the crash.
I find myself
asking why we think we should be able to locate
debris amidst the vast ocean it
is likely to be submerged in?
I go back to the memories
made in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina.
Whole cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and
communities on the
North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain in
Louisiana were swallowed up by the tidal surge. The waters
rushed in. When they retreated, only foundations were left.
Not a splinter of wood, not a doorknob, a dish, a car, a
bathtub… nothing. For miles and
miles there was only
vast devastation with no debris or evidence of the lives
built before.
For generations,
my family had “a camp” on a bayou
outside of the Violet Canal, in St. Bernard
Parish. With
far less than the luxuries
of home, the scantily clad
structure housed our family during the summers of my
youth. This tradition began with my
great grandfather,
a Sicilian immigrant and commercial fisherman. My
grandfather and father alike, passed on
the love of the
Louisiana waterways to our family. “The camp” was our
family retreat. Unreachable by land or car, our boats
delivered
us to our niche outside of civilization on a weekly
basis. I passed a love for the place on to my
daughter as
did my brother to his sons and so on. All of the children
of our family have strong memories of hot days spent
catching crabs off of the wharf that linked
the camp to the
bayou it sat upon. Salt air mixed
with mosquitoes and ho
pink sunsets painted my memories and still yank at my
heart strings. As our family grew older,
our trips to the
camp grew less frequent.
I have pictures and always knew
I could return if the urge grew to large
to ignore. And then
came Katrina.
She took it all.
Not just our camp, but everyone’s. All
dwellings
and semblances of civilization. She took vast acreage of marsh
and
spit it back out leaving churned- up lifeless mud in her path.
Nothing was left. No walls, no roof, no wharf or pilings nothing
Where did it all go?
Where did all of
the homes go? Their contents and
appliances.
The clothes and dishes and
mattresses. The photo albums and
jewelry
boxes, the kitchen tables and yard furniture.
Gone. No
trace. 20 square miles of civilization washed away
into the open
Gulf of Mexico. Yet still
lost. Never recovered..
And yet we do not
understand the loss of one plane in an ocean.
~ YMD
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