Aytan Luck is something of a legendary figure in Milwaukee bike culture.
These days, he rides a yellow Eddy Merckx, a fine bike shop bike, but back in
2005, when Katrina hit New Orleans, his only means of conveyance was a tan Kent
two-wheeler. “A department store bicycle,” Luck says with an ironic half-smile.
Luck was in Georgia then, protesting at the School of the Americas, which
detractors say trains Latin American terror squads. But a new cause was calling
to him. “I decided to ride on to New Orleans by way of Florida and the Gulf
Coast,” Luck says offhandedly, as though it was routine business peddling a
department store bicycle some 600 miles across the hellish damage of
hurricane-battered Mississippi, then into the last circle of Katrina hell, the
Ninth Ward of New Orleans. And after 10 days of grinding, sweating and
determination, Aytan and his bike weren’t particularly welcome in New Orleans,
but that was just another challenge to surmount.
Michael Brown of FEMA had issued a directive that “self-dispatched
volunteers” should stay home and write a check to relief agencies. But they came
to New Orleans anyway. Being self-dispatched is, after all, a long-standing
American tradition. Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, Jack London, Carl Sandburg,
Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, Jack Kerouac, the cowboy riders of the plains and
the Great American Hobo – all self-dispatched, all in one way or another
volunteers.
And New Orleans has always been a place to go to. It was home away from home
for pirate Jean Lafitte and honeymoon heaven for Scarlett O’Hara. Before
Katrina, 10 million tourists a year visited the town – 20 times its population.
Then, with the three-ring circus of official incompetence after the storm, it
became a destination for idealistic volunteers like Luck.
There were many twentysomethings with Wisconsin roots who came to help. Jenny
Hauf, a former University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student, currently a farmhand
and contra dancer in Virginia, also arrived from Georgia via bicycle, traveling
at times with Luck. Cassandra Orr, a Burlington native who’s been a volunteer in
West Virginia and New Mexico, came soon after Katrina hit. Milwaukee activists
estimate that at least 40 young adults from this area volunteered in New
Orleans.
One thing’s for certain: No one will track them all down for a group picture.
These are traveling kids. Milwaukee may be home base, but they’re on the move in
every direction, coming in and out of town by thumb, auto, freight train, foot
or bicycle. They may be the most mobile American generation since the Great
Depression, when a quarter-million young people took to the roads and rails.
And they seem to be a Can Do generation of youth who are volunteering for
many causes. A 2004 study by UCLA’s Higher Educational Research Institute found
that 83 percent of America’s college freshmen had done volunteer work in their
senior year of high school. Have Good Works become part of the general American
curriculum? Perhaps, but good is sometimes hard to accomplish, as Luck and his
cohorts would find in New Orleans.
Aytan Luck is small, dark, and compact. The old saying I’m small, but I’m
wound tight applies to him. He’s an activist with a contained restlessness
that’s apparent in every look and gesture. “I was raised Jewish, but I hold in
high regard the idea of helping the poor that’s so central to the Christian
tradition,” he says. At Shorewood High School, he volunteered to cook for the
“Food Not Bombs” group that helped feed the hungry.
“Any leftovers we had at Food Not Bombs we would take to Casa Maria House [a
Catholic Worker house of hospitality on North 21st Street],” says Luck. “I was
impressed by their work for the poor, so in 2002, I moved in. It made sense to
be part of a community, to live and work in the same place. I’d cook, clean,
help people in the neighborhood move, pick up donations, help people fill out
forms like emergency housing applications.” He was then barely 21.
Luck lived at Casa Maria for two years but also traveled to Miami to protest
free trade’s impact on developing nations. He became a storied hopper of freight
trains, and he demonstrated against Victoria Secret’s use of old-growth timber
in the paper it used in catalogs. He convened with fellow activists in Madison
in August because so many useable goods were abandoned on curbsides when
students’ leases ran out. “Madison, around the campus, was filled with beds,
clothing and furniture, so we put it all in bike trailers and opened a Free
Store.”
But volunteering in post-Katrina New Orleans would be far more daunting, a
kind of dark fairy tale with Luck as the knight facing a series of
character-testing challenges – and with only a tan Kent bike to ride through the
dangers. The ride was 400 miles as the crow flies, but more than 600 via
northern Florida and the smaller roads and detours Luck took.
“I rode about 60 to 70 miles a day,” he recounts. “It was autumn, so the
daylight hours were shorter. It took about 10 days on the road. Things were
going along pretty smoothly, except for a broken spoke near Pascagoula,
Mississippi.”
Then, along the Mississippi coast, Luck began confronting the destruction and
resulting detours wrought by Katrina.
“I was on this big detour, getting lost, not even going in the direction I
wanted. Biloxi, Bay St. Louis, Waveland – the damage was worse in some of those
places than in New Orleans. One detour in Mississippi took me 20 miles out of my
way, through this dead-looking, gray swamp land. It was getting dark, there was
no place to camp, the road was full of bumper-to-bumper traffic creeping along
so there was hardly room to ride, and every time cars would come up alongside,
they’d honk and yell, like I was the one causing their slowdown.”
Bike culture is one of today’s truest counter-cultures. It sets itself
against the auto and the congestion, pollution and energy depletion it causes.
Luck has been active in those Critical Mass demonstrations where bicyclists mass
to slow down auto traffic and, inevitably, pester the police. He has traveled
the Midwest and East Coast with the Rutabaga Bike Circus, peddling from town to
town presenting environmental guerilla theater.
Luck is a skilled bike mechanic who supports himself at times by working at
bicycle shops. His knuckles often sport traces of bike grease. His forearms have
a tradesman’s sinew. He is at ease traveling the country on bicycle and finally
did arrive in New Orleans, though, ironically, with help from the driver of a
van.
“At Ocean Springs, I figured I’d take I-90 on west to New Orleans and rode up
to the bridge over to Biloxi. But there was no bridge. After wandering around
Mississippi trying to find an open route to New Orleans, I got a ride from a guy
in a white van who loaded my bike and took me all the way to downtown New
Orleans. He had two dogs named Ferdinand and Isabella.”
In New Orleans, Aytan was back on his bike again, exploring the piles of
wreckage, smelling a way of life suddenly smashed into garbage.
“It was desolate. Going up Canal Street, there were no lights at all.
Completely dark. I had a phone number and I called a biker I knew of and got set
up with a place to stay.”
Luck started work the next morning, volunteering at Plan B (a bike
shop just east of the French Quarter), sometimes assembling bikes out of the
parts of wrecks salvaged from the city’s muck and destruction. The bikes were
distributed to those who had no transportation at all, many of whom lost their
cars in the flood.
In the chaos after Katrina, residents were thrilled to get a bicycle.
“The bikes went like lightning,” Luck recalls. “And shipments of bikes came
in from Chicago, Rhode Island, West Virginia – over 1,500 bikes while I was
there.”
Luck also volunteered for the Common Ground Collective, one of those
grass-roots groups that arises when officialdom responds too slowly. As the
water receded in New Orleans, the flooded sections suggested the scenario of a
1950s sci-fi flick – Invasion of the Katrina Spores.
“There was mold all over, spores everywhere,” says Luck. “We had to gut
buildings, tearing out walls that were gray with mold, bleach the studs. The air
was full of spores.”
The volunteers wore protective suits and shoe covers but were covered in
spores and slime and toxic mold when they trooped back to the Common Ground
House, a converted church where the volunteers lived. “There were 60 people
there and no shower!” says Luck.
So the workers found residents who would let them use the shower. Some
volunteers had to quit because the mold made them sick.
Meanwhile, there was a culture clash because the volunteers mainly interacted
with each other. “The volunteers had more in common with each other than the
people they were there to help,” Luck says. “There was some animosity to the
outsider who was doing good work but not blending in. You have to step lightly
in a situation like that.”
Luck also learned to step lightly around New Orleans’ finest. Police
harassment of volunteers was documented by Common Ground’s Human Rights Watch.
The volunteers provoked some resentment by being active – maybe too active – in
demonstrations against the bulldozing of properties.
“Sometimes there were houses washed off their foundations and put down three
blocks away, in the middle of an intersection,” Luck recalls. “Those houses
weren’t going to be put back on their foundations, and they just blocked the
street.” Yet some volunteers protested their destruction, ostensibly to stop
opportunistic developers and land grabbers. Luck, however, thought the protests
were sometimes “automatic, institutionalized,” done more for the sake of the
protesting organizations than the people they were supposed to be helping.
But it wasn’t all mold and questioning motives. As it happens, Luck is a
sometime trombone player. And what better city on earth to play trombone than
New Orleans? “The Panorama Jazz Band needed a trombone player, so I played with
them,” Luck recalls. “I planned to stay for three weeks, but I ended up staying
three months.”
So he was a mold fighter by day and jazzman by night. But did this knight
errant’s tale end with the young man riding away having solved all of New
Orleans’ problems? Of course not. But that wasn’t really the point. Rather it
was, as Luck says, “Figuring out what to do and being sure you’re committing to
something worthwhile.”
And what is worthwhile? Our teachers and public leaders have told us that
liberty and justice for all is a fine goal, that we should feed the hungry and
be good stewards of the earth. But was anyone listening? Some, it seems, like
that quiet young fellow who left the Crescent City peddling with a purpose on a
yellow Eddie Merckx.
And the tan Kent department store bike? What became of that?
Luck smiles at the memory.
“Oh, I left that down in New Orleans. I imagine it’s still down there.”
Photographed by Peter DiAntoni
