Fruition

In the lower 9th Ward a school bus hides behind banana trees where a former colonel meets a nation of Natives. The Choctaw. Galvez. I just like the way this sounds together. I like the way the numbers seventeen seventy six roll off of my lips. I don’t know much about the Choctaw. And know nothing about Galvez or the troops he led.

I do know this morning. I know solar powered plates on the top of a truck that is a man’s home, and I know that I was paid to look around the place and see how he might bring life, how he might bring something to eat to a space that is what people call off grid. Not dialed into the city. Not forced to deal with Entergy or the Sewage and Water Board.

The man who stays in this spot lives for free with the permission of the man who left the bus and went on to live in a different spot. What people don’t always know when they enter the lower 9th Ward for the first time is that every spot where stands of goldenrod and giant ragweed show off for the neatly mowed lots there were once homes. There were once families.

The street of the colonel stretches for many miles, both north and south on each side of Canal. The Choctaw, not as far. 

Beyond this bus there exists curtains made of burlap sacks and a makeshift stove that runs on propane. I have to admire the work done by this young man who, if I remember correctly, left a degree in engineering unfinished. I want to support him. I want to help him to grow what does not need water, to make his way through the winter.

Maybe he does not know of the cold. Maybe he does not know of the kids who died inside a squat near the railroad tracks after using an old oil can to make the fire. I remember meeting a guy at that same spot years ago, a guy who had collected broken concrete and had some loquat trees just beginning to fruit. Trees called misbelieves by some. Japanese plum by others.

The man today had two loquat trees in pots, each about a foot tall. All around him, abandoned lots, some with crumbled concrete and the pink of morning glory winding through. Hackberry trees and mulberries and big old giant ragweed that some people know how to make medicine from.

I wonder what will happen to the lower 9, to all of that space, to the people who once lived there. I wonder what will become of the skinny lot where the school bus sits and how Chris McCanless felt before he became Alexander Supertramp.

I wonder how to live within these seeming dichotomies, totally separate from the system that sustains and yet sitting right in the middle of this.

On his hand were dots turned into a spiral, a sort of sacred geometry on his flesh or so it seemed to me. That was recent. Done by a machine, he said. But the lines that stretched around and to the center of his palm had been poked in Thailand. In Chiang Mai. 

“That’s what I imagine here,” he said. “A sort of food forest like you might see in Thailand.”

I told him we can’t grow rambutan or durian or jackfruit. I told him of the possibility of papaya and perhaps even longan, of the success I have had with guava. I told him how the more seeds and seedlings we plant, the better our chances of bringing all of what we desire to fruition.

That’s a sort of metaphor for this journey, isn’t it. I walk through and take and make a number of different attempts and am unsure which of these will bear fruit. Yet I continue.

I would like to help this man and the land upon which he sits to have a chance. But I wonder about all the land around this, the land between what he calls his and the land that I call mine.

I consider always how it will take all of us to find what might grow, what might be picked from the sidewalk. 

I woke late this morning. Heavy on my heart during meditation was this: if the choice was starvation or finding food right outside our door many of us would look at the world different. Perhaps the issue now is the illusion of expediency and choice, the fact that so many people believe that what they are eating is food. It’s like putting grape juice in a car and wondering why it won’t run.