Plaquemines Parish
An Average Day
In The Exciting Life Of
A Long-Term Volunteer
by Matthew Sheard
June 2006
I unzip Maria’s tent. Just enough to get my face inside.
"It’s time to get up. Almost six."
She moans.
I shuffle quietly through tent city to the cinderblock staircase that leads from the gymnasium platform to the grassy patch seperating our quarters from the main building. The sky is pink with the virgin light of morning. The dewey grass dampens my legs.
In the corner of the gutted YMCA in which we have set up our kitchen, I begin my first, and most important task of the day. I pour two gallons of bottled water into a pot and light it on a ground burner, dig out five bags of colombian and make cowboy coffee. I’ve decided in the few weeks I’ve spent living in Buras, Southern Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, among a community of a dozen volunteers and a few dozen residents, in a town being built literally from the ground up, that it is not law and order, or god and the devil that keeps civilization civilized. It’s coffee.
The sun is half-way up the horizon and it is hot. Angry hot. I sit in the entrance of the Y watching it evaporate the mist as the first residents start coming in for breakfast. They are mostly fisherman who have already been hard at work for several hours. By the time the sun has made it full into the sky, every volunteer is busy gutting, clearing and building.
I make a run up to Port Sulphor to buy Propane for the kitchen, diesel for the reefer and gas for the generators. It’s about twenty minutes each way.
Highway 23 rises to cross Doullut Canal just below the town of Empire, half-way between Port Sulphor and Site. It’s the highest point in Southern Plaquemines and on my way back I see the Mississippi River and the East-Bank of Plaquemines Parish clearly on my left. To the right, the Gulf of Mexico. And out in the Gulf, I see four thick lines that connect the water to the clouds above it. Lines that have not been there on any of my previous trips along 23.
As I approach the turn to Site I’m convinced that the columns are tornados. But they are not tilting and dancing around wildly like I would have expected. They are slowly waltzing around each other. They are about a mile off shore.
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