The water came from three directions.

As Hurricane Katrina brought in massive quantities of water up from the Gulf of Mexico, a thirty-foot wave crashed over the levee from Lake Borgne in the north.

From the southeast a surge came up from the Gulf along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. This artificial waterway was built presumably to relieve the river of too much boat traffic and offer an alternative route Prohibitively expensive and relatively pointless except for the politicians and contractors who profited from its creation, as only one or two ships used it each day, I've never heard of a project so unpopular.

Every resident I talked to hated it. Construction of the waterway tore up miles of marshlands which had served as a buffer between the massive, turbulent Gulf and the fragile houses and towns just inland, and allowed the hurricane to carry the water straight in.

The water which flowed up from the Gulf across marshlands and along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet caused a surge, rather than a visible wave, raising the water level in the parish at a rate of several feet per hour, for several hours.

The third assault came from the west. Water from the canal which crashed through the levee into New Orleans’ lower ninth ward continued east into St. Bernard.

The water from these three sources swirled around and covered St. Bernard Parish fifteen to twenty feet deep. Although most residents ha wisely evacuated the area, some, accustomed to warnings which hadn't turned out as bad as predicted, did not leave. A family who ate regularly at our kitchen told me they stayed and miraculously survived. The local paper lists 150 parish residents who died in the storm, but no-one believes the number is that low. Surely there are still dead bodies yet to be found, and some which will never be found.

The Murphy Oil refinery spilled 819,000 gallons of oil in Chalmette, the big town in the middle of the parish. After a week or two the water receded, leaving the number of inhabitable residences at zero. It was the first county or parish in United States history to lose one hundred percent of its housing to natural disaster.

A number of times during my stay I stood at the edge of our camp and looked out at the open field and the road to the east, the landscape completely flat in every direction, and tried to imagine it all covered with twenty feet of water. I would look up and estimate a distance of twenty feet, imagine water up to there, and imagine that depth in every direction, for miles. I could never do it, never make it seem real.

Emergency Communities

In the late 1960s and early 70s, two groups—back-to-nature hippies, and Viet Nam veterans—each perhaps for their own reasons, began camping in substantial numbers in national forests. Discovering an affinity for one another, the groups joined together and formed the Rainbow Family of Living Light—named after a Hopi prophecy, made decisions by council according to Native American tradition, and began organizing annual gatherings. Among other things, they formed kitchens in the woods and cooked communally, serving anyone who showed up for meals. These gatherings have continued to occur from the early 1970s until today.

Around September or October of last year, in the wake of Katrina, a volunteer relief effort involving some Rainbow Family members began to spontaneously coalesce in the town of Waveland, Mississippi. Putting the word out to other members, they ended up serendipitously forming a Rainbow kitchen—a communally run kitchen which serves free of charge. Lack of electricity and other amenities were not a big problem to people accustomed to cooking in the woods.

The camp grew. A small number of volunteers from Madison, Wisconsin and Ann Arbor Michigan returned home to report back to their communities, from which came more volunteers. In late December they formed a non-profit group called Emergency Communities (EC), and relocated to Louisiana, where they set up a new kitchen in the town of Arabi, in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans.

When I arrived a month later, in late January, the new camp, called the Made With Love Cafe, was serving about 1200 meals a day. That number would increase steadily, to about 1700 meals per day during my stay. EC had made a deal with a local property owner, and had set up in a parking lot behind what had once been an off-track race horse gambling parlor and game room until it, like nearly every other business in the parish, had been destroyed in the flood.

Tents were set up on the lot, including a kitchen tent, and a huge geodesic dome for serving, a large tent for distributing donated goods to residents, a tool tent, a food storage tent, a dormitory tent, and an alternative medical tent. There were also three generator-powered refrigeration trucks. Most of the seventy volunteers lived in their own tents, set up in a dirt field behind the lot, and propped up on pallets to keep them up off of the toxic soil.

Volunteers generally worked full days, cooking, serving, cleaning tables, washing dishes, running the distribution center, maintaining facilities, driving to pick up donations, meeting with local political leaders, and raising funds. Breakfasts were usually: eggs, bacon or ham, grits, and fruit salad. Lunches and dinners typically included several entrees and several sides of vegetables. All meals were served free of charge, to residents, contractors and volunteers, no identification necessary. Meals were cooked entirely by volunteers, and most ingredients were donated. A local guy sometimes drove up the bayou to shoot an alligator or a wild boar and bring it back to the kitchen for supper.

The geodesic dome (known by locals as “the hippie tent”) in which meals were served seated about 400 people and served not only as an eating place but as a sort of de facto community center as well.

The Lower Ninth

A few miles west, across the line into New Orleans, lies the lower ninth ward. Low-lying land alongside a big canal, one not need be an expert in weather or physics to understand the neighborhood’s vulnerability to flooding.

When the canal rose to its enormous height and the levee broke, the water crashed down into the neighborhood in a huge, violent rush. When I viewed the neighborhood in March, six months after the flood, trees and some houses near the levee break were still slanted backwards away from the canal, preserving semi-permanently the motion of that awful moment. Many of the brick houses still stand, but, within the first few blocks anyway, the windows must have broken and the houses must have flooded instantly, and any of the unfortunate remaining people must have been killed within seconds.

If the details stories about the water are awful, details about race are awful as well. Blacks fleeing the flooded lower ninth who headed east, crossing the border from Orleans Parish into St. Bernard Parish are said to have been shot at by St. Bernard police. There are stories of Ku Klux Klan members and other whites riding motorboats into black areas of the city shooting people.

After spending two and a half months in the area, I’m sorry to say, these stories sound entirely plausible The flood is impossible to write about without discussing racism, which serves as a backdrop for everything which happens there. Here are some anecdotes:

A white man I became friendly with who visited our camp regularly gave me a ride to his place in the city one night, let me stay over, and even gave me a little tour of the city the next day. In fact, it was in his car during the ride back that I got my first view of the horrible destruction of the lower ninth ward.

One day I happened to make a comment about racial disparity in the effects from Katrina, based on things I’d been reading in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He made an evasive comment, sounded strangely non-committal in a way which made me uncomfortable. I mentioned the subject a bit more clearly, and he again was evasive.

I decided to put it to him directly: “You don’t think a higher percentage of blacks than whites were hurt by the flood?” He looked away for a second, then looked back at me and said, “All in all, I’m happy with the way things turned out.”

A guy from a small town up the bayou drifted into our camp and told of climbing up to the roof to escape the flood waters. He grabbed his wife's hand as the waters pulled her, but was not able to hold on, and she was carried away and drowned. Alone on the roof for two days, a FEMA guy came by on a boat. When he asked to be saved, the FEMA employee, according to him, said, “We can't help you, we have to go help the niggers in the lower ninth.” He stayed on the roof another five days before finally being rescued.

Just how much of the story is true and whether the FEMA worker actually said that I'll never know. But the notion that blacks in the lower ninth received preferential treatment, extra attention and money was a common theme among whites struggling from the flood. What do you say to such people? Is it worth trying to use reason, logical arguments at that point? In order to set up a communally run kitchen in which half of its members were rainbow family hippies, in a parish which not long ago voted for ex-Klansman David Duke in his run for statewide office, Emergency Communities planners decided to take a low-key approach to political issues. They would walk on egg shells in order to be able to stay and do their good work.

A small group of us became unhappy with this approach, which we saw as overly timid. Don’t we have a responsibility to confront the racism in our midst? Isn’t our silence akin to condoning it? EC's defense was: We can set an example through selflessness and sharing. We’re not here to lecture people about racism, we’re here to feed them. Through this loving act, we might soften residents and open them to new ways of living and thinking.

Breaking down their prejudices against hippies, northerners, other ethnic minorities, and an open homosexual and a trans-gender among us can work toward breaking down other prejudices as well. We can sneak up on hatred and catch it on its blind side.

In the chess game of politics, this is what would be considered a “weak move.” But what of the fluid world of human minds and hearts, in a culture foreign to us, dazed people who've lost everything, the past washed away and the future an open question?