Outside the fence - 4/25/08

Demolition. I sit, in my "mobile office", just outside the fence between two big 460s, watching Frankie* load the dump trucks almost lovingly with the bucket and the thumb, first dropping the tangles of rebar and concrete into the big empty trailers then reaching in with the butt end of the bucket to tamp down the rebar, finally catching and containing the errant metal strands with the thumb, the ones that poke up and would pierce the driver's tarp if not subdued. It's almost maternal the way a mother bird feeds a babe or even sexual, the way one lover tends to another, if I remember such distant things correctly. That first load hitting the empty bed reminds me to watch, as it shakes the truck's trailer, the ground and the car in which I sit, just outside the fence.

Then Otter* in the other machine, the one with the grapple, rips up the concrete foundation that once held these buildings, these bricks, these homes, stopping just short of removing the steps I surreptitiously photographed just yesterday. Their turn will come to be tossed in chunks onto a pile for loading later. His mechanical extension is as violent as Frankie's is gentle. I back the car away, out of caution.

Behind it all a local welder with his mask and sparks repairs the bucket's teeth on the last of the three biggest machines. The water cannon rumbles behind the bobcat, a mobile fountain to wet the streets our work has dirtied, streets that the firehoses will wash clean at the end of the day.

Truckers stop by to pick up their checks, the independents, crippled by the cost of fuel, eagerly. Clouds are building in the sky and the day has become gray, not a bad thing from my perspective, sitting in the car, running the air conditioning on idle. The wind picks up and blows the shirts of the men tending the grounds of the tidy Asia Baptist Church just on the other side of this street as a church employee stands on the front steps sipping a soft drink and folks wave as they pass. NOPD roars by, lights on, and an airplane pulls a fucsia "Hustler Club" banner across the gray sky as people gather just down the road to celebrate the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The only music I can hear is the roar of these machines and their payloads crashing into the trailer beds, the spew of firehoses fighting the dust high into the air and the rumble of the trucks as they carry away these homes, in smaller, more manageable pieces.

*The names have been changed to protect the operators.