Strangers In Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Author:Arlie Russell Hochschild [Hochschild, Arlie Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2016-06-15T20:03:03+00:00

13

The Rebel : A Team Loyalist

with a New Cause

Handmade signs bob and lurch above the heads of the sparse crowd: “Clean

Water for Baton Rouge,” “Friends of Lake Peigneur,” “Clean Water for Clean

Seafood,” “Oil Companies: Fix What You Broke.” A rotund musician dressed

in loose purple pants, a striped shirt, and a white fedora sits with his wash-

board, waiting to start his three-person Cajun band. A protestor walks about

dressed as a large brown pelican. Organizers had tried to rouse interest, but

in a city of 230,000, on this sunny Saturday, only about 150 have shown up.

It was at this rally on the front steps of the state house in Baton Rouge

that I’d first met Mike Schaff. He was dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt

with “Bayou Corne Sinkhole” printed on the front. With a protective arm,

he had brought forward a v ictim to the microphone to speak before the

gathering, but it was he who spoke with tears in his voice. “Five hundred

and eighty-two days this woman has been out of her home,” he told the

crowd, and there were over “three hundred victims just like her.” Since the

disaster, Mike had been transformed into an activist. He didn’t want oth-

ers to go through the same ordeal. How, I wondered, did his new activism

alter his feelings about the market-loving, government-hating Tea Party he

so strongly embraced?

Mike had described himself as a “water baby. When I was about three,

back when we lived on the Armelise Plantation, my daddy used to take me

193

strangers in their own land

with him crawfishing. He’s set the traps in a nearby swamp. Then he’d put

me in a plastic tub and pull it along in the water as he waded through the

water, emptying the traps. I l oved it.” Now as a s ixty-four-year-old man,

Mike had a modest home facing a canal issuing onto this glorious bayou that

was the paradise he had yearned to retire to—a home on the water. Sitting

alone at the kitchen table of his empty house a year and a half after the di-

saster, and some time after the rally, with cardboard boxes packed, the crack

in his living room floor a reminder of recent earthquakes, a gas monitor in

his garage, and a wary eye on feral cats, Mike had begun to write letters

concerning key bills to members of the Louisiana legislature:

April 24, 2014

Friends, Supporters, and Distinguished Senators,

My name is Mike Schaff. . . . My desire was to live the rest of my

days here and in my last will and testament to be able to turn over this

precious jewel to my survivors. . . . Instead . . . the only legacy that I

will be able to pass on are the countless tears that have been shed,

the disrespect that we have been shown by both Texas Brine and our

state officials themselves, and the cruel reality that despite hopes of

a short-lived incident, the fact is that this tragedy can never truly be

remedied . . .

Mike Schaff, Resident of Paradise

Stolen, Bayou Corne, Louisiana

He was speaking for Senate Bill 209, which would require companies

to give victims the replacement value of lost homes within 180 days of an

accident.

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