Chris Bickford

We knew there was going to be surf on Sunday.  Or at least we had high hopes.  It’s been a long winter, and the thought of a good sunny Sunday full of surf was like a beacon in our nor’easter-addled brains.   The question, as it always is around here, was, what is the wind going to do?  We could only wait and find out.

On Saturday the winds blew hard from the south all afternoon.  Crazy, gusty, warm wind, smelling of springtime.   I was at Bob Yinger’s house, playing guitar while Bob grilled, the crew played cornhole, and Bob’s girl Laine took care of their newborn, who had an eye infection.   Outside, we could feel gusts up to 50 mph or so, and burly stormclouds were passing low; but it was a nice warm wind and we were all enjoying that mid-April feeling that the season is finally here.  On the Weather Channel inside there were reports of major tornado destruction in Sanford, a couple hundred miles west, where my friend Paul Barringer grew up.  His mom still lives there, on their old farm.  We had been playing phone tag since it was my birthday the day before, so I tried to call him again. No answer.

A couple hours later, another tornado ripped though the Outer Banks.  The back end of the Wave Riding Vehicles factory was torn off, and dozens of foam blanks were scattered to the wind.   The corrugated aluminum wall blew over towards Highway 168, and the highway was closed due to debris.  The tornado moved northeast and cut a swath of destruction all the way to the beach.   Highway 12 north up to Duck was closed as well.  All in Saturday’s storm killed over 40 people, half of them in North Carolina.

In the wake of all this sadness and destruction, the surf was predicted to heat up, and people were monitoring both the bad news and the surf forecast on their smartphones.  Even though the storm was coming from the land side, the winds were blowing south-southeast, churning up the ocean; and the forecast was for the wind to switch to the southwest once the storm passed through, grooming the swell with a strong offshore wind, making for that delicious combination that creates some of the best surf on the Outer Banks.

On Sunday morning I got a call from Jeff Myers.  He was in Avon.   “It’s beautiful down here.  The wind’s light offshore, there’s hardly any current.  We checked up in Rodanthe but there was too much water moving.   Come on down, I’ll text you where we end up.”

While I was getting my gear together, my phone beeped.  “Avon Pier”.    I packed up the Cherokee and headed south on a glorious Outer Banks day.  Not a cloud in the sky, an earthy west wind bringing the smell of North Carolina spring across the sound, and that flip-flop feeling of knowing that you had absolutely no reason to do anything else but enjoy it all.  It was Sun-day.  And it belonged to all of us.

At Avon a crowd had descended on the pier, including a group of kids from the University of Maryland down on a road trip.  They lay in a pack on the beach like seals, sunning themselves in the unseasonable warmth.  Girls were wearing bikinis.   All hail girls in bikinis, the harbingers of summer.

The light was bright and not the best conditions for shooting, but there’s always something you can work with no matter what the light: sun dapples on the surface of the water, silhouettes against the sun.   It didn’t matter anyway, I was just happy to be out in the water, feeling the sun on my face, and the water slowly warming up, into the mid-fifties…

It’s been a long winter.

The surf was beautiful and clean, peaky A-frames, rights to the right and lefts to the left.  Little hollow barrels that occasionally closed out onto sections that the high-flyers were boosting off of all over the place…the Avon Pier Flying Circus.  I was getting whiplash just looking around–from all sides guys were getting shacked, hauling down screamers, spraying me in the face, and getting airborne.  And hardly any current.  Which for me means the difference between swimming my ass off all day just trying to hold a position (which is usually a losing battle for me) and being able to move around the break to get different perspectives.

Around lunchtime we all took a break, refueled, hung out in the parking lot.  Mickey McCarthy had been shooting from the pier and he showed us a few of us the shots he had gotten and I was jealous because he had so many.  You can shoot in the water all day long and not get one decent shot; shoot from land with a long lens and you can pretty much capture every ride, every move, with a pivot of the tripod and a fast motor drive.    I was feeling woefully inadequate with my three-frames-per-second 5D, knowing that I was missing many critical moments just because my camera doesn’t shoot fast enough.   But times are tough, and for all the new equipment I’d like to have right now I’d need about 20 grand.  So I’ll just stick to my old gear and count the good shots I got as treasures, all the more precious for being rare.

The sun was heating up; I took off my shirt and sat on the hood of the Cherokee for half an hour or so playing guitar until the boys came back and said they were moving to another location.  Sorry, can’t tell you where.   Even the crew from “town” were worried they were treading on local territory, even though most of them were friends with the Avon boys.

We stayed till the sun disappeared behind the dunes, reveling in the perfection of the day.  The surf got a little funky, but it was still good, and the light got god-like.  There’s something about the inside of a barrel being lit by the afternoon sun, the warm light being filtered through a thin lip of seawater, lighting up a rider.  Truly magical.

On the ride home, the moon came out, full and clear. making its own moon-dapples on the ocean.  The west wind kept blowing through the night, warm and thick with the smell of earth and pollen and new life coming back.  We stopped to check out a band at Goombays, a folk quartet of young kids from Nashville who all played several instruments, and an elfin 18-year-old female lead singer who wore elf boots and danced as she sang.  They sounded like a combination of Nickel Creek, Sixpence None the Richer, and Nirvana, if you can imagine something like that. For our little bumfuck town, it was great to hear something so fresh and original at a local joint. I left after their set and headed home, the moon high in the sky, my head full of salt, my body flooded with that deep sensation of exhaustion and satisfaction that comes from having a really good day in the water.

I can’t tell you how much I needed this Avon Sunday.   We all did.  Here’s to hoping you had a good one too.

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Rio pics coming soon, I promise; I’ve just beeen getting a lot of emails from crew wanting to see pictures.  If I didn’t get a good one of you, there’s always the next session.

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To view photos in gallery, click on thumnail and navigate forward and back buttons at the bottom of the page.  Please note that the first nine frames or so are repetitions of the photos inserted in the text, a quirk of my gallery plug-in.

A couple of months ago I was catching up with my old friend Shane over the phone.  It was the usual conversation between me and Shane–the latest news from our lives, musings about women, a little hippie philosophizing, talk of good books we’d read, comparisons how the surf has been in our respective corners of the world, musings about women, tales of adventure and money problems, more talk of women…you get the idea.  But this time Shane had some big news.  Some really big news.

“I got a place!”  he said.

See, for the past year and a half or more, Shane had been living in a tent up in the hills on a friend’s farm on Kauai, Hawaii.   He had a latrine; a sort of lean-to structure for eating and relaxing; and his truck, which he’d had shipped over from the mainland.   He spent his first year there picking up odd jobs, working for this contractor or that plumber, surfing, and getting involved with various island women in various island ways.   He hung out with shamans and yogis and Rastas and organic farmers, wrote poetry in soggy journals, and opened himself up heart and soul to a place he’d dreamt about living for years.  And all the while his home was a six-foot nylon tube pitched a few miles from the rainiest location in the United States.

But finally, after a couple of brief stabs at questionable cohabitation arrangements, Shane finally got himself an actual honest-to-goodness domicile, complete with running water, electricity, and ridiculous Hawaiian rent.   A little bungalow with a leaky roof, a block or so from the beach on the north shore, just a couple of miles from where the road ends and the trailhead to the Na Pali coast begins. “So now you can come out and visit,” he said.

“Yeah, okay, well, that probably won’t happen this year, but I’ll definitely try to make it out there, maybe next winter” was my somewhat non-committal reply.   Much as I’d have loved to go out to Kauai and have some Shane time, there were too many other travel destinations on my list.  I wanted to go back to New Orleans. I wanted to go back to Haiti.  I wanted to go to Ireland and start a long-term project on music, landscape, and legend.  And then there was my Carnival project to think about:  I still had to make it to Trinidad, Brazil, West Louisiana, Peru…and, more importantly, there were career considerations: trips to New York and DC I had to make to show my face to various industry folks and try to roust up a few good assignments.  And I needed to start putting more time into the nitty-gritty grunt work of image cataloging  and marketing.  I needed to re-do my website.  I needed to submit work to contests and journals.  I needed to find a publisher After the Storm. I needed to clean out my Jeep.  I needed to sell my house.  There was no way I could fit a trip to Hawaii into all of my off-season plans.

But Hawaii is a powerful vortex, as the hippies and shamans and yoginis will tell you, and it has mysterious ways of drawing you in to its orbit.  And so it came to pass that while working out the (ultimately unworkable) logistics for a one-day shoot in New York for my favorite travel editor, I entered into the vortex.  The telephone conversation went something like this:

Editor: So are you still planning on dropping by (to the magazine headquarters, in DC)?

Me: Well, I’m not sure, I just picked up this little thing in Virginia, so…

Editor: Well here’s what I’m thinking.  What’s your schedule like next month?

Me: Uh, pretty open at this point…

Editor: Well, one of our writers pitched a Hawaii piece and Keith wants to run with it.  It’s on the Big Island and the writer’s going to be out there in December.  So here’s what I need to figure out from you…

The rest of the conversation is highly confidential.  But the upshot is that not only did I land the assignment, but the travel coordinator found me a ticket that included a two-week “layover” on Kauai at no extra cost.

Verry, verry cherry.  I had scored a dream assignment and also got a chance to go visit my homeboy in his new home.  In paradise.  I started planning and visualizing what kind of gear I was going to need: short lenses, long lenses, polarizers, my water housing, swim fins, board shorts…the thought of swimming and surfing in warm water got me giddy with excitement.

In the meantime, however, came the sudden and tragic news of Andy Irons’ death.   Irons, a three-time world champion and Kauai native, died mysteriously in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas on November 2.  He had withdrawn from the World Tour due to illness and was trying to make it back to his home and family on Kauai.  The exact cause of his death remains unknown.

About a week before my arrival members of Andy’s family and the island community held a  memorial paddle-out for their hometown hero in Hanalei Bay.  Shane had paddled out, joining a cast of thousands who had come to celebrate the life of one of surfing’s greatest competitors.  Had I been able to move my flight up to pay my respects and witness firsthand such a beautiful tribute to one man’s life, I’d have done it in a heartbeat, but I had commitments.

However, there were plenty of reminders of Andy left on the island when I finally did arrive.  Everywhere, on the side of the road, on the walls of shops and houses, were makeshift signs, painted surfboards nailed to trees, with “We Love You Andy” or “Rest in Paradise”, or other heartfelt words handwritten on them.  They were, all of them, poignant testaments to the  ripples one life leaves behind once it has passed from the realm of the living.  I never met Andy, never photographed him, don’t know his family, never ran in that circle.  But I had the sense that he had made it home, finally, and the island welcomed him with open arms for his final homecoming.

As for my time on Kauai, and my reunion with my soul-brother Shane, well, it was fairly uneventful.  A lot of time spent catching up, relaxing, a lot of rain, a lot of listening to Pandora on my iPad, reading Keith Richards’ autobiography, hanging out at the coffeeshop, meeting his crazy beautiful friends, waiting for the rain to stop… a little bit of surfing, a Thanksgiving dinner, a circus, some fun photoshoots, a drunken night of dancing with the local girls at a local bar, and a healthy ration of Scotch, sinsemilla, and salmon burgers.   Oh, and a farewell bonfire on my last night where I met a local legend named Brando who’s probably rescued more people from hairy situations out on the Na Pali coast than anyone; and during which I sat for a couple hours photographing the fire at 1/500 of a second– at which speed, I swear, you can see ghosts, or gods, or leprechauns, or some kind of spirits in the flames.  In my altered state I envisioned a photo project, “Gods of the Fire” or some other pompous title.   Just pictures of flames, in which you can make out epic battles, complex choreographies, and other such fiery scenes reminiscent of Old Master paintings…In the harsh light of the editing machine, only one or two shots passed the muster; but I swear, if I keep at it, the gods will show themselves.  I just have to wait, for those imperceptible moments in time that only a device like a still camera can capture, when they step momentarily into the realm of the here-and-now.

My time on Kauai ended much too soon, but I was off to an even bigger adventure on the Big Island, so I had to make do with the certain knowledge that I would be back, though exactly when I wasn’t sure.  I’d been caught in the vortex, and don’t imagine it will release me from its grip anytime soon.  Regardless of all the other places I’ve got on my mind.

I barely made it on to the plane that took me away from Kauai; Shane and his friend Jamie were on “island time”, and we stopped at the organic market for a bite to eat, ran into some friends, made lengthy goodbyes, dropped Jamie off on the way to the airport.  So used to check-in people telling me to run if I want to make my flight, I was surprised at how unperturbed everyone was at the Lihue airport.  The check-in girl chatted with me about the Big Island, the security guy told me about his dad who was a photographer and had taken a very famous cover shot of the Mauna Loa volcano for Life Magazine…my flight was leaving in minutes, and still everyone seemed to have time to chat.

As I made my way to my assigned seat on the plane, a little long-time wish of mine came true.  That wish you make, as a guy, when you scan the plane and your eyes instantly settle on some beautiful girl and you think, please let that seat next to her be my seat assignment.  Never in all my years of flying has it actually happened, but this time it did.  She was a dark-haired beauty from Miami, who had moved to the North Shore of Oahu some years ago to pursue her passion for surf.   Clad in a black dress and heels, you wouldn’t have pegged her as a surfer; she was returning from a business trip.  But her deep tan and the muscles on her forearms gave it away: she had some kind of outdoor life she was hurrying to get back to.   And she was a photography enthusiast as well.   She showed me some underwater photos she had taken with a Lomo camera and a cheap water housing, and told me of her life on the North Shore, and I found myself wondering, is this just dumb luck or are there girls like this everywhere in Hawaii?    As luck would have it, of course, the flight from Lihue to Honolulu is about 20 minutes long, the shortest plane ride of my life.  We exchanged cards in the terminal, a quick hug, and she was gone.  Ah, the life of a traveler…

For details and photos from my time on the Big Island, you’ll have to wait until the magazine comes out.  But I’ll be going back there too.  There is a song that a young native teacher sang for me into my digital audio recorder about the northern beach of the Waipi’0 valley, where I spent a lot of time during the assignment and got some of my best photos: a song about a place where in the old days people could go to seek refuge and make amends for the ill deeds they had committed against others.   A song about a place of forgiveness and healing.  The song still haunts me.  Even though I don’t understand a word of it.

Below are a selection of moments and impressions from my stay on Kauai.  There’s so much more to tell about it all, but I’ll save it for a good pub conversation next time we meet.  And there are many more pictures, but I figure it’s best not to water it down with too much repetition of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

I don’t think anyone ever gets used to the beauty of Kauai; it’s simply too overpowering.  And the offbeat community that calls the island home–at least for now–well, as you can see, they are all pretty beautiful as well.

You have to make serious sacrifices to make Kauai your home; it is one of the most remote islands in the world, and it’s not exactly a mecca for career opportunities.  The people that live on Kauai are, by and large, there for the island.  For its beauty.  For its mana. For the community of funky, soul-searching, fire dancing, hula-hooping, water-sporting, organic-food-eating, skin-bearing, child-bearing, love-spreading FREAKS that make life on the island an adventure every day, even when it seems like nothing much is going on. They live on Kauai for the ability to be fully immersed in the power of earth, water, wind, and fire.  And if they question whatever life choices they’ve had to make to have the opportunity to live on the island, as they no doubt often do, it only takes a couple of glances around to confirm that, even so, their time on the island is precious, and there are few more beautiful places in the world to be.

Note: To navigate through the gallery below, use the forward and back buttons at the bottom of the page.  Apologies for repetitions and other glitches.  My tricked-out blog has numerous bugs and it takes me hours of work and dozens of revisions to get a post working correctly. This post will remain a work in progress until all of that gets sorted out.

Right now there are containers in the harbor at Port-au-Prince, laden with medical supplies, food, and other relief items, stalled in customs disputes between the government and the charitable organizations who have arranged for and funded their delivery.  The Haitian government, which immediately after January’s earthquake was eager to let these containers into the country to aid their people, now view these “imports” as a potential source of revenue.   So they are levying tariffs upon the containers, even though they hold badly needed supplies which are being donated to the Haitian people for free.  The tariffs are so high that some organizations are forced to leave the containers in customs rather than pay the tariffs, hoping to reach some kind of agreement with the Haitian government so that the items can clear customs and be distributed among the people.

Such is the somehow endless and insurmountable conundrum of the foreign-aid cycle:  impoverished populations, corrupt and bankrupt governments, and languishing relief create an atmosphere of eternal triage, where little progress is ever made in addressing the problems of poverty at their roots and building sustainable societies.  Though some work tirelessly for change, they are no match for the powers that rule the world and seek to preserve the status quo for their own benefit, while their spokespeople pay lip service to the concepts of “progress” and “equality”.   The scenario is further complicated by the after-effects of centuries of human history, and by the repercussions of conquest, colonialism, and imperialism which have driven human relations since the invention of property.   It’s a rock from under which we may never be able to crawl as a human society.

In Haiti and elsewhere, foreign corporations, NGO’s, and powerful governments such our own are vying for influence and opportunities in the brave new world of “disaster capitalism”, where devastated societies are rebuilt from the inside out according to capitalist models.  As Nation columnist Naomi Klein put it in her introductory essay on the phenomenon back in 2005, disaster capitalism “uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”  Wipe the slate clean of the byzantine ways of the old “failed state” and start fresh with spanking new factories, new uniforms, and planned communities.   A new spin on an old tale: exploit and profit from it, and justify it with some jive about God or Democracy or “progress”….  Unfortunately it never really works the way the wizards behind the curtain envision it to work.  It just causes more problems that eventually come back to bite us all in the ass, while in the short term a few people make a few bucks.

In its heyday as a tourist destination, during the time of my great-grandparents, Haiti was known as “The Pearl of the Antilles”.   It was a beautiful piece of island, with endless bays and coves, white sand beaches, crystal blue Caribbean water, and elegant colonial architecture.  While the 100-year-old black republic had never been wealthy, never stable, never free from the dark memories of its bloody revolution and its brutal slave past, it was still a beautiful if somewhat mysterious place.

400 years earlier, when Columbus discovered the island, it had been densely forested and home to the all-too-easily-conquered Taino Indians, who lived off its fertile seas and bountiful forests, wanting for nothing.   But the conquering Spanish, and the French who followed them, did not see the island of Saint-Domingue as a tropical paradise worthy of a Jimmy Buffett song and a beachfront bar thatched with banana leaves.   They were interested in only one thing: resources that could be turned into wealth to fuel empires.  And while Columbus’s journey failed to provide an abbreviated passage to the Spice Islands of the east, and failed on the second front to produce gold, the Europeans quickly discovered the island’s latent talent: a perfect growing environment for Europe’s greatest new addiction, sugar.  And so, to provide Marie Antoinette and the rest of the world with sweetener for their dumplings, profiterolles, tea and crumpets, the colonists and traders of Saint-Domingue shipped in thousands of slaves and cleared huge tracts of tropical forest to create one of the largest sugar-producing operations the world had ever seen.   The work was brutal and labor-intensive, and the slaves were literally worked to death through 16-hour days and 7-day work weeks, with little food, clothing or shelter provided for them.   Most slaves only lasted a few years before perishing, so there was a steady stream of new African labor to Haiti from the Kongo, the Senegalese coast, and from other African slave ports.

At the turn of the 19th century, after a long and bloody rebellion, the Haitians won their independence from France and became the first free Black republic in the new world, laying the seeds for black emancipation worldwide.   But, ever fearful of the negro, Europe and the United States conspired to keep Haiti an impoverished pariah state, a policy that has continued to this day.   A small elite of mixed-race aristocrats, who have held most of the power and wealth in the country, have shown little concern for their darker-skinned brethren, and have driven the country into the ground through shady deals with foreign investors and blatant corruption.  Compounding this, the few blacks who have risen to power in Haiti have squandered their privileges, established brutal dictatorships, or been driven out in a sad cycle of coup d’etats.

Our attitudes towards race and equality may or may not have progressed over the centuries; but in Haiti the damage of hundreds of years of oppression has been done, and, as the people know all too well, the strange complications of their history and the overwhelming extent of their condition have become culturally embedded in the national psyche, to the extent that suffering, survival, corruption, and despair constitute the baseline of the “normal” in Haitian culture.

Just thinking about the plight of Haiti is enough to drive one to despair.  To actually dream up a strategy to help the brave and struggling nation rise up from the rubble of its present condition and its historical legacy requires almost magical thinking.  And then, to implement that strategy, to lead the country forward into a new and brighter era, well, that will require a revolution the likes of which the world has never seen.  But the revolution has already begun.  It began two hundred years ago.  It is just taking a lot longer than anyone ever imagined.

The great shame in all of this is that underneath all the politics, poverty, and disaster porn, there is a beating heart full of magic and music in Haiti.  A heart full of fantastical artwork, mesmerizing Vodou ritual, soul-shaking rhythms, and joyful dancing.  And if the Haitian republic were only allowed to thrive, whether through acts of politics, aid, planning, or providence, we just might see an explosion of culture that could help revive our jaded world with a much-needed injection of heart, soul, and belief in magic.

Maybe that’s too much to ask for, and too much to expect.  But it’s not too much to dream, and to hope, and to pray.   It’s preferable in my mind at least to the alternative vision of Haiti, a planned community of sweatshops, workers wearing red t-shirts with company logos on them, churning out cheap goods for the world’s disposable consumer economy, and half the country still living in tents.   But though I can voice my opinion on the subject, it is not a battle for me to fight, nor is it one I understand enough to engage.  I just hope that those who do devote themselves to the Haitian cause do so for the right reasons, and that ultimately human dignity will prevail.

This is probably where I should throw in some inspirational quote from Ghandi or Mandela or Margaret Meade, but in the end I must plead a certain agnosticism and uncertainty about the world we live in.  I look at our own country and where we are heading and I think, what hope does Haiti have when the great “United” States is sinking into its own pit of despair, and partisan factions are tearing apart the fabric of democracy with endless bickering, mudslinging, and fearmongering?   The future seems a little bleak, for all of us.  But I suppose the lesson we can learn from Haiti, is just this: survive, and live to see your offspring survive.  All else can be sorted out in time.

It’s probably not the first time it’s been said, but it’s the first thing you need to know: Haiti will either steal or break your heart.  Or both.  If it steals your heart, you may find yourself trying to figure out ways to get back to find it again.  You’ll keep remembering moments of magic among the madness, beauty amidst the squalor, and smiles in spite of great sadness; and it will haunt your thoughts and dreams.   If it breaks your heart, you will either return home and try to forget about the whole thing, hoping that eventually you can go about your life like everything is still the same; or you will find yourself trying to figure out ways to get back, and hope that you can do something to assist in the healing, thereby healing your own heart.   If your heart is already broken, you have nothing to fear.  No one wants to steal a broken heart anyway, and you will be right at home in a nation full of broken hearts, broken promises, broken buildings, a broken government, and a broken economic system.

Don’t misunderstand me; not everything in Haiti is broken.  The resolve of the Haitian people to survive is strong.  The soul of Africa runs deep within its borders, and the heart of the world’s first free black republic still beats out rhythms that reach far back into the mists of human history, as the ancient vodou drums sing from the tent cities and rubble-strewn townships.  There is laughter and dancing amidst the painful memories and ubiquitous reminders of January’s tremblement de terre.   There is dignity, there is faith, and there is a getting on with things.   As Richard Morse, my host at the Hotel Oloffson and leader of the band RAM, often says, Haiti is a country of survivors, surviving.

And yet.   And yet.  The problems of Haiti are so deep, and corruption and poverty are so entrenched, that one wonders if things will ever turn around for the Haitian people.  My editor at the Times, who was in Haiti 15 years ago on assignment, muses that it seems almost impossible for a people who have been locked in survival mode for so long to think or plan for a better future when it’s all they can do to get through each day, every day.

Americans like to fix things.  We like to make things right; we like to show our magnanimity to the world.  So we provide “aid” to Haiti, and a lot of it.   We raise funds; we send missionaries, military units, food, and doctors; we set up camps.  We sacrifice ourselves, our money, and our time, in hopes of doing good for a place that needs a lot of help.  Some of it does indeed help, at least for a while.  Some of our “aid”, however, comes with strings attached that serve to further erode the brittle economy and vulnerable cultural/religious heritage that keeps the country alive.   Consider Bill Clinton’s dramatic restoration of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in the 90’s, with all the might of the US Military pointing its guns at the former militiamen of an earlier dark regime, who had attempted to re-take the country.   Clinton put the popular priest-president back in power, to the great joy of the Haitian people.  But Clinton had conditions: Haiti had to do away with all of its tariffs and trade restrictions and become a part of his pet project, the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Suddenly America was exporting US government-subsidized rice and other agricultural products to Haiti, at prices that dramatically undercut domestic produce.   Haitian peasant farmers, unable to compete with US agribusiness, fled their small plots in the provinces to seek work in Port-au-Prince.   And within years, as the provinces emptied out due to economic depression, a small stately city of some 700,000 became a sprawling slum of over 4 million, most of them jobless.

Things in Haiti seem to have gone from bad to worse, to a different kind of bad, to a different kind of worse, since, well, since the beginning.  This January’s earthquake gave the ultimate insult to injury, as if the terrible hurricane of 2007 was not bad enough; as if a nation ever struggling to lift itself out from under tyrannical regimes, civil wars and a brutal and bloody history didn’t have enough to deal with.   The country lies in rubble, large mounds of concrete lying over top of smaller bits of rocky soil which form the surface of a once-rich land which has been scraped dry of topsoil from three centuries of intensive sugar and rice farming.  And in the process, the country has fallen into a cycle of dependency, relying on foreign aid and money sent home from family members of the ever-growing Haitian diaspora which has taken up roots in New York, Miami, and Santo Domingo.

It’s an overwhelming situation.   But it’s not necessarily an impossible situation.   Change in Haiti will require huge vision, great leadership, honest and dedicated diplomacy, long-term dedication, and aid which focuses on developing Haitian independence and self-determination.   I spoke to a mission worker who was working on a number of projects to help Haitians gain control of their housing situations and learn to become better entrepreneurs.    When I cited the oft-used adage, “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime,” he added, “Yes, but you can also show a man how to own the pond.”

Positive change in Haiti will also require that those who help understand that Haiti has its own soul, its own culture, its own religion, and its own family values.   Not everything that works in America will work in Haiti, and the country will eventually come to resent any attempts to steal its soul in exchange for economic prosperity.

I asked Richard Morse if there was anyone running for president right now in Haiti who had a real vision for Haiti’s future.  He replied simply, “No, there’s nobody”.    Then I asked him if he had a vision for Haiti’s future.  “Sure, I have a vision.   It’s simple.   Rebuild the provinces.  Forget Port-au-Prince.  They’ll figure it out.”   Morse’s picture of a new Haiti imagines the peasant class repatriating their farmland, setting up strong community centers within the provinces where people learn to read and write, have access to the internet, and are free to practice their own cultural and family traditions.  He sees Haiti rebuilding strong rural communities in a 21st-century style.  “Give them back the sickle and the hoe, because that’s what they know how to use.  It’s a tradition they learned from their fathers, which they learned from their fathers, all the way back to the dawn of time.  Bring that back.”   Morse envisions these communities reconnecting with their African roots, and developing modern agricultural lives that are both attuned to the modern world and yet satisfying and sustainable for the people who live there.  “The only way you’re going to get people to stop leaving the country is to give them a reason to stay.”

Morse’s strategy runs in direct opposition to the Clinton Initiative, which basically involves giving money to the Haitian elite to build textile factories, which will create jobs for the lower class.  In other words, more third-world sweatshops, based on the “trickle down” theory of Industrial Capitalism 101.  For its efforts, the US will benefit from a new source of cheap foreign labor, and we will soon be wearing the Gap’s new “Made in Haiti” line, feeling we are doing something good for Haiti.   Clinton’s Initiative, whether well-intended or not, is a typically American response to the problems of a foreign country: make them more like us.   It boggles the mind to think that after more than two centuries of such Manifest Destiny diplomacy, US politicians still don’t see the arrogance, ineffectiveness, and ultimate detriment of such policies.  Of course, it is in our own best self-interest–at least in the short term–to ignore the pitfalls of such policy.   Imperial powers have always relied on cheaper goods and labor from foreign lands to fuel their prosperity.

But then again, who knows?  There are a lot of people in Haiti who want to work.  A LOT of people.  I’m sure that if given the choice they’d gladly take a job sewing jeans for Banana Republic.  Still, I prefer Morse’s vision.  I prefer the idea of a Haiti full of small, sustainable entrepreneurs, who control their own destiny and the means of production in their country.  But then, it’s not for me to decide.

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I didn’t go to Haiti to gawk at the rubble, or to further ponder the issues of Haiti’s current predicament and future prospects.  That’s just a necessary by-product of being slapped in the face with the reality of the situation.  I found myself in Haiti by way of a conversation I had in a Dominican bar in Manhattan with Ned Sublette, a writer and musician whose work on the African diaspora in the Americas fuses music, culture, politics, history, race, and religion into tomes that are thoughtful, authoritative, and provocative.  His book Cuba and its Music is probably one of the most ambitious and thorough (not to mention fascinating) works on a country’s musical history; and his book The World That Made New Orleans. published two years ago, is already required reading for history students at Tulane and other schools with New Orleans curricula.   I had approached Ned some months earlier via email about collaborating on a magazine article on a particular indigenous New Orleans tradition.  He was interested enough to write back, and our conversation went from there.

The a/c in the Dominican Bar, appropriately, was broken, and so in the muggy June air we sat in the back and riffed on everything from Cuban Santeria to Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans to American foreign policy. Ned showed me incredible photos he had taken of Cuban music and ritual, and better-resolution version of photos I had seen in his book The Year Before the Flood. At some point I mentioned Haiti, I’m not sure how or why; the only thing I can remember, three or four Coronas into the conversation, was that before I was able to finish the sentence, Ned’s eyes got real wide and he interjected, “I want to go to Haiti.  This summer!”

And so we began to hatch a plan.  Ned’s publisher was interested in doing a book on his writings about Haiti, and we figured we could pitch an article to a magazine and in so doing cobble together the funds for a short trip to Haiti, to explore the role of Vodou and music in the psychological survival of post-earthquake Haiti.  We made some strong pitches, but nobody seemed interested in our angle.  And then Wyclef Jean announced his intention to run for president of Haiti, and we knew we had lost our moment in the news cycle.  Ned’s publisher got cold feet, and he got busy with other things.  Haiti would have to wait.

Then I got a call from Lee Wilson, whom I had photographed in Louisiana as part of a Times profile written by Campbell Robertson.  Lee works for a disaster relief contract0r called DRC, and he spent the summer in South Louisiana supervising vacuum barges in the cleanup effort in the Gulf.   Before the BP disaster unfolded, Lee had been in Haiti, cleaning the rubble out of the streets and picking up bodies.   We talked about Haiti on the way back from the barge.   He had clearly been profoundly affected by his time in Haiti, but he told me flat out that he didn’t intend on going back.  Four months was enough, he said; it was too much.   A month later he called me to tell me he was heading back to Haiti, and wanted to meet up for lunch if I was in there.  I told him that our plans had not come together for doing an article, but that I still wanted to go.  He offered to hook me up with some work documenting DRC’s efforts in Haiti, which would help cover some of my expenses.  He also offered to pick me up at the airport in an armored car, offered me a bed in the conference room of the Visa Lodge Hotel where he was staying, and basically told me that he could help me out with any logistics I needed help with if I wanted to make the trip. .   I’m past the point in my life when I pay much attention to “signs”, but at the same time it seemed like the stars were aligning, and it was an opportunity I should jump on.  I had the time, I had the money, I had the desire, and I had the support.   Why not?

_________________________

I was only in Haiti for a week.   Just long enough to be completely overwhlemed by it all, just long enough to glimpse moments of a secret Haiti, lying underneath the rubble and the intensity of human activity (”survivors surviving”) going on everywhere.  Long enough to meet a couple of rasin musicians playing guitar in a room at an arts center, rehearsing a cycling riff that sounded like something straight out of Mali.  Long enough to catch an impromptu drum-and-dance session inside a tent city that seemed to reach back centuries in time to ancient Kongo.   Long enough to have a vodouist read my fortune in a hotel room, in Kreyol.  I didn’t understand a word he said as he slapped down playing cards and chanted out something about me traveling a great distance for love.

I traveled on the bus with the band, 15 of us in a minibus with drums, guitars, and amplifiers, me stuck in the booster seat right next to the gearshift.  We traveled for an hour and a half to a beachfront resort and at no time was there a stretch of road without people walking, hanging out, buying and selling, going to church…The band played until 3 or 4 in the morning and we all crashed out in a conference room until 10 AM.   Later that day–Sunday–back at the Oloffson, lounging about the hotel pool, I heard the sound of a brass band and rushed outside the gates to witness hundreds of people dancing, drinking, and marching through the streets behind the band.  The scene was so much like a New Orleans Second Line parade it kind of blew my mind.  I asked someone in the crowd what was going on, and they said, “somebody died, you know, so this is the way we celebrate them.”  A Jazz Funeral, Haitian-style.

I saw much more, some of it from the backseat of a car, some of it alongside my guide and new friend Bendji, who walked me through the tent cities and took me on a municipal bus up to a church in Petionville.   He asked me for some change to give to the poor.   Here he was, my friend Bendji, without a dime to his name, living in a tent, asking me for some change so he could give alms to the poor at the church.

I’ll leave the rest for a second, and maybe a third, post.   There’s plenty more to write about.  I don’t know when I’ll be going back, but I hope it will be soon.  I can still hear the drums beating when I close my eyes.

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New Orleans, 2010: Ressurection from chris bickford on Vimeo.

Today (or yesterday, by the time I finish writing this) marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on to the shores of the American Gulf Coast.  What happened on that day, and on the days and weeks and months and years following, revealed a nasty underside to the American social and political landscape which many are still trying to ignore, and many are trying to address and change for the better.  The town of New Orleans, submerged underwater for weeks, was dealt a near-death blow, from which she is still recovering.  Thousands of people, mostly African-American, died in the aftermath; thousands of homes were destroyed, tens of thousands of the city’s residents were forced to leave, some never to return again.   Even today, despite slow but strong recovery and signs of positive change in the city, signs of post-trauma exist everywhere, from broken-up streets to boarded-up buildings to empty and overgrown lots.  And this is to say nothing of the deeper psychic wounds that still infect those who lived through the trauma, who lost loved ones, who every day must cope with their lives being changed forever by the perfect storm of nature’s fury and a nation’s hubris.

It is not customary to wish anything or anyone, a “happy” anniversary of a tragedy.   We don’t wish the bereaved a happy anniversary of their beloved’s death.   Nor do we celebrate the anniversaries of massacres or assassinations with “happy” well-wishes.   Generally we take these milestones as opportunities to pause and reflect, to remember those we have lost, to draw what lessons we can from the past, and to observe where we might be on our long road to recovery.   And if you pay attention to the news, you may have read an article or two doing just that, or you may have seen Anderson Cooper back in New Orleans yet again, taking stock of the situation in his “In the Wake of Katrina” reports.   Or you may have caught Spike Lee’s excellent documentary, “If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise.”   Tributes to to the fifth anniversary of the storm abound, and celebrations and ceremonies all along the Gulf Coast today attest to the magnitude to which the aftershocks of Katrina are still being felt.  And yet somehow, for a fairly indiscriminate consumer of news like myself, it really hasn’t seemed like enough.  Maybe folks are just tired of remembering.  Maybe they’re ready to move on.   If we spent all our time remembering all the old tragedies, our calendars would be bursting at the seams with sad anniversaries.

I was hoping to be in New Orleans on this day, just to be there to celebrate with the friends I’ve made during my time there, to watch the city take a bow and celebrate its resurrection from the deluge.  The anniversary came fittingly on a Sunday, the day of Second-line parades and Mardi Gras Indian practices, the historical day of Congo Square, the day when the churchbells ring and folks get together for barbecues and afternoon beers.  Business at home prevented me from doing so, but my thoughts have been with New Orleans all day, and all this previous week.  Still, I wanted to be there; because despite the long road ahead, despite the traumatic memories in the rear view mirror, I think New Orleans is happy today.   And knowing it’s never a town to waste a good excuse for a party, I have no doubt that it celebrated this day in style.  And I wish I could have been there, falling in with a second-line parade, hearing the brass bands churning out their ever-evolving riffs that evoke the sound and spirit of the Crescent City.

But I was not there for Katrina, and only know through the stories of others what horrors the city survived, and what challenges she has overcome over the last five years.  I only know that the New Orleans that I came to know and love this year is a city whose time is now.  It is a place alive with new energy and new ideas, simultaneously enjoying a rebirth of its old traditions and a re-envisioning of its future.  It is a place where racial barriers, while still evident, are blurring; a place where art and music are sprouting from old, once-neglected neighborhoods; a place where post-Katrina community organizations are bringing people together; where a growing network farmers’ markets is reinforcing the values of local sustainable agriculture and the culinary uniqueness of New Orleans food culture.   It is a place where young, idealistic volunteers who came to lend a hand in the reconstruction have fallen in love with the city and all its magic and mayhem,  have started new businesses, bought houses, taken jobs, and made New Orleans their home.   It is hands down the musical epicenter of America, and its place as such is being re-asserted by youngsters playing old-time jazz on the streets, swing dancers in porkpie hats doing the lindy hop, brass bands re-inventing their sound for the 21st century, and a whole cadre of new rock, blues. funk, hip-hop, bounce, and jazz musicians taking inspiration from the city’s rebirth to make a joyful noise.

So in true New Orleans style, with all honor and respect to those whose lives were lost and damaged by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I’d still like to wish the town a happy anniversary.  May there be dancing in your streets for many years to come, may the Carnival never stop, may le bon temps always roll, and may you continue to rebuild and grow in prosperity, community, creativity, and joy.  Oh yeah, and Who Dat!

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Please enjoy the following link, an unfinished, and until now unpublished multimedia look at New Orleans in 2010, through the eyes of an adoring stranger.

New Orleans, 2010: Ressurection from chris bickford on Vimeo.