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Nobody likes a dirty refrigerator full of rotting food — except for that endlessly hungry caste of Americans known as feature reporters.
Recently, post-Katrina reporters scavenging the wreckage of the Gulf Coast for fresh stories two months after the hurricane hit have flocked to a rotten one: specifically, the story of the region’s rancid refrigerators.
This morning, the St. Petersburg Times printed an article, “New Orleans’ cleanup and its stinky sentries,” that is typical of the little-known but blossoming fridge genre.
“Two months after Hurricane Katrina, row upon row of water-logged refrigerators, casualties of the storm, are lined up at the Gentilly landfill here on the eastern edge of the city,” reported the Times. “Dust-churning trucks deliver as many as 3,000 refrigerators and other damaged appliances to the site each day, plucking them from sidewalks, curbs and median strips all over Orleans Parish.”
“In less than three weeks, the 200-acre Gentilly site has processed nearly 60,000 items, including 3,776 freezers, 5,000 stoves, 15,000 washers and dryers and more than 3,000 dishwashers,” the Times added. “But it is the refrigerators — 28,734 as of the end of October — that dominate the yard.”
And it is the refrigerators that have dominated reporters’ imaginations as they sort through the trash heap left by Katrina. Everyone from the New York Times and CNN to the Kansas City Star and the New Orleans Times-Picayune has paused recently to stop and smell the fridges.
“I’ve never smelled anything worse in my life,” an unidentified man recently told NPR. “If anybody has ever smelled the worst smell in their life, probably 10 times worse.”
“[The refrigerators] stand in formation on a sun-struck white gravel pad, surrounded by a fog of flies and emitting a stench that lodges in the back of the throat and clings to the skin,” noted today’s story in the St. Petersburg Times.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever smelled anything quite like this,” one worker at a fridge-infested landfill told CNN. “I’m not sure it’s a describable smell. You’d have to experience before you’d know what it is. It doesn’t smell like chicken.”
Elsewhere, Lee Hill Kavanaugh of the Kansas City Star reported on finding a discarded fridge with the note: “I went looting in New Orleans and all I got was this stinkin’ fridge.”
NPR’s Noah Adams, on the other hand, found a fridge with a note reading “Welcome home, New Orleans. Caution: Breath of Satan inside.”
The fascination with fridges signals the continued evolution of the post-hurricane features cycle — one that started with nostalgic first-person odes to a lost city, progressed to heart-warming stories about recaptured dolphins, moved on to mojo-trumpeting pieces about the return of the strippers, evolved into soothing stories about poolside gatherings, and now has apparently settled on the everyman challenge of disposing of rotten meat.
What does it all mean? “In New Orleans, abandoned refrigerators are ubiquitous icons of Hurricane Katrina,” noted a piece on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” “They appear at curbsides. White, harvest, gold, avocado: useless and potentially toxic. A thrown-out refrigerator is also a sign that another family has returned to the neighborhood.”
Arguably the dean of the fridge-and-landfill set is Chris Rose of the Times-Picayune. His column, “Uptown Refrigerator Wars,” is a seminal work within the genre.
“Poignant symbols of our city’s destruction and our government’s inertia — many are now painted with political slogans — the refrigerators of New Orleans are now the weapons of choice in the rapid deterioration of civility Uptown,” wrote Rose. “This kind of crap makes me hubcap-stealing angry.”
Rose has even been moved to try his hand at poetry, with “Rhymes of the times; A pointed little ditty for our fridge-filled city”:
On Refrigerator Planet, if you can’t bag or box or can it,
Just push it out your door onto the street.
On Refrigerator Planet, pick up the garbage, dammit!
‘Cause the whole place smells like fetid, rotten meat.
After perhaps over-sampling the vast riches of refrigerator prose, we’re left with the thought that this genre is a lot like another New Orleans export, Zydeco music — a little goes a long way.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.