The New Orleans Criminal Courthouse is an imposing four-story stone building that was erected in 1929. The jury lounge is on the first floor, along with court storage, and a parking garage used by the judges and lawyers. The lounge consists of two windowless rooms, where potential jurors sit for hours at a time, waiting to be called upstairs for a trial. The first, and larger of the two rooms, has a couple of TV’s that broadcast the World Cup coverage from South Africa. I sit towards the back of the 2nd smaller room, across the hall and void of televisions. The glass door at the front of the room says “Quiet Room”.
Jury duty requires me to be here every Monday and Wednesday for the month of June, which seems sort of extreme to me, but I try not to dwell on it. When I ponder the jury selection process here in the Big Easy, I get aggravated. The line of thought undoubtedly leads me to skeptical questions and hypotheses regarding the incompetence of the NOPD, the ineptitude and unconscionable levels of bureaucracy that plague local government, the apathy and subdued nature of the natives. I often catch myself wrinkling my brow or subconsciously snarling into the open novel in my lap. Folks seated around me pick up on that type of thing. Pent up tension and aggression are easy identifiers of a northerner. People in New Orleans don’t carry all that stress around with them.
Through the wall to my rear I can hear the comings and goings of the loading dock and court storage areas. I remember after Katrina when it came to light that all of the city’s active criminal evidence had been stored, and subsequently flooded and destroyed, in this subterranean wing of the building. Over 3,000 pieces of evidence were lost forever, along with the majority of the court’s records. I wonder how many people were found not guilty due to flooded evidence in the months following Katrina? I imagine sitting in the quiet room as the floodwater rises around me, carrying reams of paperwork and little baggies of cocaine and heroine and handguns.
A couple days prior, I had run into a friend at the grocery store. When I told her I had a month of jury duty she smiled knowingly and told me to think of it as a right of passage. She assured me that if I approached the experience from a point of sociological and scientific observation, it would become quite fascinating. With that perspective in mind I began eavesdropping on a group of middle-aged men and women conversing a couple rows in front of me. They all look like normal working folk with husbands, wives and children at home. One of them wears an EMT uniform. Their conversation runs the gamut of family life, stories of childrearing, amusing workplace anecdotes, and the state of the neighborhood. At some point rhetoric veers towards the oil leak gushing 90 miles to the south and my attention magnifies.
All of the conversation’s participants have a unique and personal relationship with the water and marshlands directly threatened by the disaster. All have grown up in the New Orleans and have eaten the seafood yielded by the bayou their entire lives. Two of the men have been fishing the lakes and bayous of Southeastern Louisiana every free weekend for the last 40 years. They regale the group with “big fish” tall tales of their youth, when the wetlands were vast, abundant, and uninterrupted. The dialog goes from nostalgic to sobering as they take account of the biological regression of these wetlands over the course of their lifetimes. Canals were dredged to build pipelines and quicker shipping routes. Industrial ports and refineries were erected outside the city, followed by the subdivisions slowly carving bigger and bigger chunks out of the wetlands. These men understand what has already been lost and what will potentially be lost if oil penetrates the existing wetlands.
One of the women in the group speaks of her father, a former shrimp-man, who was eventually forced off his boat and onto a rig due to several economic factors. According to her factory farmed shrimp from China had made it impossible for wild Louisiana shrimp to fetch a competitive price with national distributors. Federal and state regulations were progressively making it more difficult for the small boat fisherman to compete with bigger out-of-state operations, whom were given license to strip many of the shrimping beds bare without regard for future generations of shrimpers. Always changing health and food regulations required small-boat fisherman to make expensive equipment upgrades, which put many boats out of business. When you’re an uneducated out-of-work fisherman with a family to support in South Louisiana, where do you turn? You take a job on one of the rigs or in one of the refineries or on one of the ports that service the rigs.
All involved in the conversation seem to agree on two things:
1. Anyone knowing anything about shrimp would never be caught eating shrimp from China.
2. Life without the oil industry in south Louisiana is unimaginable.
From there the conversation turned to the importance of the wetlands in terms of hurricane protection. In the years following Katrina most folks living in New Orleans have become aware of the important role the wetlands play in hurricane protection. While all conversers seem well educated on the case for coastal restoration, and likewise all seem to agree that there is a direct relationship between the growth of the oil industry and the regression of the wetlands, no one suggests that it is perhaps time for the people of Louisiana to seek other forms of industry and enterprise. They’re just not ready to call it quits with oil. Can you blame them? People have to eat and pay the mortgage. Such is the plight of southeastern Louisiana.
