The miracle of pallets

<b><i>Editor's note:</b> Valisa Higman is a Vail resident who helped form a new nonprofit to feed victims of Hurricane Katrina.</i>



NEW ORLEANS - Have you ever taken something apart to see how it was made?

I tear tarps from floors and expose plywood nailed to pallets. In fact, our entire camp was built on pallets - floors, walkways, walls.

Everything you buy at a grocery store was once resting on a pallet. There are companies that do nothing but ship pallets, repair pallets, buy pallets. In my dreams I whisper, "Pallets, what will we do with all these pallets?"

As volunteers tear down their tent platforms, and storage tents empty, pallet towers begin to grow in the parking lot. If we separate blue pallets from the regular ones, we can sell them back to the company, and these ones are so broken we should burn them. Another volunteer looks at me and says, "You aren't allowed to say 'pallet' any more."

I have new admiration for these simple wooden squares that have proven so versatile in the creation of our community. I remember meeting a St. Bernard councilman in the early days of our cafe. He sat across from me, illuminated by candle light. He told me about the flood.

Caught in the swirling waters, he and his companion were able to grab hold of the eaves of a house, but he was heavy and weak from swimming, and as his friend scrambled to the roof top, he was unable to follow.

Growing weaker, the water continued to rise around him. At the last moment, a lucky pallet washed by him, and he was able to push it up against the building and use it as a ladder to hoist himself up alongside his friend. Saved by a pallet - they are most definitely a noble invention.

No more scrambled eggs

We humans aren't the only creatures that have come to love the pallets. As we pull them up from grass and mud, we scare up families of rats and the community's dogs spend their nights chasing them among the tents.

With fewer and fewer structures to hide beneath, the rats have moved into our porches, our vehicles, and occasionally our tents. Exhausted at night I collapse in my tent, but still I find it hard to sleep. Rodents scurry across my deck, and rustle in the grass.

I feel sweat beading on by back as I burry my head in the pillow and try to escape my revulsion. They are just rats. They care nothing for me, and I care nothing for them. In the morning I pull myself from bed, still tired.

Our days are long, and hard. Our kitchen has closed, so we wait for food from the new kitchen in Violet, about 15 minutes away. I want coffee. I am tired of scrambled eggs. We work in the sun as temperatures rise above a 100 degrees. We wield crowbars and hammers, tearing at nails and ripping up boards.

We salvage what we can, shipping plywood out to our new kitchens and to other relief agencies. We roll tarps and fold tents, making piles, piles and more piles. It's an unruly mess and I find myself grinding my teeth.

The forklift is broken; first its wheel fell off, and now its fuel pump needs to be replaced. We load the trucks by hand. We don't have a driver, and the truck sits on the lot as the piles grow bigger around it. We make smaller runs with our two rented trucks.

For a long time we see little progress, and then one morning I look around and realize we are almost done. Our crew has dwindled to about 20 volunteers. Tempers are short, and the sun still beats down, but the end is in sight.

Next time

Six months' accumulation of odds and ends, donated, dropped off, given as gifts ... we have managed to accumulate an odd assortment of stuff. Where do we send it all?

As the Made with Love Café and Grill disappears into the concrete slab it grew from, Emergency Communities opens and begins serving from two new kitchens. In Plaquemines Parish , a small group of volunteers are starting a streamlined, highly mobile kitchen that could be evacuated quickly in the case of a summer hurricane.

In Violet, St. Bernard Parish, we have partnered with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and AmeriCorps to run an indoor kitchen serving large groups of volunteers as well as residents.

We visit for breakfast, and our vehicle is stopped at the gate by a uniformed guard. Yes, this will be a different sort of kitchen. We flash a peace sign, indicating that we are part of the Emergency Communities crew, and the guard, a large black man with his hat pulled low on his forehead, returns the sign and waves us through. OK, so we have retained a little of our free-spirited charm.

There are also three community centers that have been organized by volunteers from Made with Love. Each has its own focus: tool sharing, legal advice, community organizing, youth activities.

And a local woman has decided to open a thrift store in her home to benefit our organization. She hauls all the extra donated clothing and supplies from our lot.

We call other grassroots relief organizations such as Common Ground, Spaz Kitchen, Hope, and Bayou Liberty asking them to swing by. We pack their vehicles with grape jam, chairs, plywood, tarps, all the extra little things they think they could use. Some things we ship to storage inland in case our new kitchens need to be evacuated: first aid kits, canned food... pallets.

This entire kitchen was built on pallets scavenged from across the coast. With new resources, connections and knowledge, I can only imagine what we'll accomplish next time.



Vail, Colorado