A day in life of survivors
In the quiet of early morning, she sits alone surrounded by bare walls and donated furniture, reminders that the world she once cherished is gone. But her day begins with a prayer — for what remains. “Thank you, Lord ... for watching over me, my daughter, my mother, my sister during the night and keeping us safe,” she says softly. Gaynell Bogan is grateful her family is together, and yet she desperately misses her home and her job, both washed away by Hurricane Katrina. On this morning in Austin, Texas, Bogan pines for the comforts of her old life in New Orleans as she gears up for chores in her new one — cooking, bathing and tending to her 75-year-old invalid mother and mentally disabled sister. In Bay St. Louis, Miss., Pastor Edward Murphy begins the same day tapping his right foot impatiently, sitting at his computer in the basement of the battered, red-brick Shoreline Baptist Church. The sun is barely up, but he’s already annoyed that new city building codes could add thousands of dollars to church redesign plans. “If the government will just get out of our way, the churches will get the people back into their houses,” Murphy grumbles. Then relaxing, he confesses with a sigh: “I just hate to spend money.” In Chalmette, La., Jimmy Bartholomae, a longtime sheriff’s deputy, ushers in this workday with a glass of sweet tea and some good-natured complaints about trailers. He’s sick of them. No wonder. He works in one cramped trailer, he lives in another with his wife and their five children. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the two straight; most times, it’s nearly impossible to find a moment’s peace. One year after Katrina thundered across the Gulf Coast and into the history books, survivors of the nation’s costliest natural disaster are struggling to put their waterlogged world back together. This is the story of one recent day on the long road back. It’s a day in which progress is measured in ordinary routines that seemed extraordinary after the storm: the crack of a bat at a Little League game, the wail of a New Orleans jazzman’s guitar, the blare of horns in a traffic jam. It’s a day in which frustrations are mirrored in small ways as well: a mayor’s worried face at blossoming ’for sale’ signs, a storm refugee’s persistent phone calls to scare up some cash so he isn’t homeless this night. It is, in short, a typical day. It’s 9 a.m. on July 26 and Bartholomae, sweet tea in hand, hops into his tan Explorer squad car to patrol St. Bernard Parish. He cruises through a once lush stretch of bayous and stately oaks now reduced to a littered landscape of muddy, lifeless silence. Only a few gas stations and bars, a pizza place and a small grocery have reopened. The Bartholomae family’s favorite standbys — Blockbuster and McDonald’s — are long gone. Only about 20,000 of 70,000 people have returned to the parish southeast of New Orleans, where 129 people died and all but a handful of 27,000 buildings flooded. Some places still don’t have streetlights. “At night, anything that moves is fair game,” says Bartholomae, a captain and 22-year veteran. “We’re still technically under a curfew. But if you’re driving around at night, we’re going to check you just to see what you’re doing and why you’re out.” Bartholomae pulls up to his old house that was submerged for weeks in a 14-foot brew of oil and water. He’s still not sure why he received a $1,000 electric bill for the empty place. Bartholomae had just taken a second mortgage to renovate the house before Katrina and had it appraised at $165,000. Now, after gutting it and driving out the alligator that had been living there, he hopes to sell the home. His best offer so far: $5,000. As the sheriff’s captain returns to his trailer office, Murphy, the minister in Bay St. Louis, drives down the coast. |
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But as the minister reaches the beachfront downtown, only concrete slabs or square plots of dirt remain where restaurants and souvenir shops once thrived. “We’re in a real Catch-22,” he says. “The people aren’t coming back until the businesses reopen, and the businesses won’t reopen until the people come back.” Murphy arrives at an area where 10 church volunteers from Knoxville, Tenn., are unloading shovels, wheelbarrows, weed-eaters and face masks. They swat at mosquitoes as dragonflies buzz overhead. They’re preparing for a “mudout” — the dirty, grueling job of digging out muck and grime from flood-wracked homes. Today’s assignment: a sagging two-story frame house with mud coating the driveway. “Smells like death,” volunteer Kelly Raines says through her face mask. “I work in a hospital. I know the smell.” Chris Smith, another volunteer, crawls up a ladder into a second-floor window. Inside there’s a mildewed couch, a water-filled deep freezer, chimes made of seashells encrusted in dirt. He knocks out windowpanes, clearing a path so he can toss out the junk. The minister watches, then tells one worker: “Give it a shot this morning. If it’s too much, come and let us know.” It’s coffee-break time at Fair Grinds, a New Orleans haunt that isn’t open, but isn’t really closed, either. Robert Thompson hobbles around the patio — his right knee is bandaged from repeated bending and climbing during the months of repairs that he and his wife, Elizabeth, have been making at their half-rebuilt coffeehouse. The cafe sits in a picturesque neighborhood of pink, mauve and green Italianate mansions, Creole cottages and shotgun homes. Regulars often bring and brew their own coffee outside — free of charge. On this sunny Wednesday, they’re joined by folks who’ve just attended an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting upstairs. Coffee isn’t the lure. Camaraderie is. The patio with green macaws flitting above has become an oasis for artists and philosophers, dog lovers and dreamers, and anyone else with an opinion on matters big or small. Today’s discussion ranges from democracy to the intelligence of Shih Tzu dogs (one weighs in with a yelp). Thompson, who studied philosophy long ago, moves from one conversation to another. An electrician offers to look at a circuit that will run a refrigerator and coffee grinder. “Some days I go home and say, ’I got a light switch plate on the wall,’ and feel like I got something done ...,” Thompson says. “It’s small victories — that’s really the sustaining thing at this point.” Across town on Crowder Boulevard, Allen Smith is well into another long day. He sometimes feels his work in New Orleans will never be over. Smith migrated from Ohio after Katrina to join one of the busiest debris-hauling crews in the city. Right now, the team is working on a 10-foot mountain — much of it from a flooded Family Dollar store and a beauty salon. The hired hands are sweltering in white moon suits, masks, reflective orange vests and hard hats. They’re called “IWIs,” short for Ineligible Waste Inspectors. They look for appliances and hazardous materials that need to go to separate landfills. Bobcat loaders scoop debris from the mound, then drop the piles in front of the workers. At one point, Smith, holed up in the truck cabin with his Marlboros and a Tami Hoag thriller, jumps down to poke at a metal scrap so it doesn’t hang over the side of the truck. It’s a safety precaution. It’s lunchtime and Billy Skellie, mayor of Long Beach, Miss., is returning from Biloxi, where he and others just met with the governor’s disaster representative. “We need money,” he gently reminded the governor’s man after the meeting. Skellie has plenty to worry about, everything from finances in a city that has already borrowed $3 million for recovery to fears that dying pine trees on Long Beach streets could tumble over and start a fire. Heading home in his candy-apple red Explorer, Skellie passes “for sale” signs and tattered American flags whipped by the gulf breeze. But he also sees people up on ladders, painting, repairing their homes — starting over. As night approaches, the soothing sounds of music fill the air. In Bay St. Louis, about 100 worshippers gather on folding metal chairs, surrounded by the unfinished walls of Shoreline Baptist. Pastor Murphy leads the prayers. “I want peppy songs tonight,” he proclaims, an open Bible in his hand. A woman at the upright piano obliges. “I’ll fly away,” the parishioners sing, their voices soaring. “O Glory, I’ll fly away.” In New Orleans, at the Fair Grinds coffeehouse, the Thompsons listen to a guitarist friend softly strum a Stephen Foster tune he had played for them just after Katrina. “Hard times, come again no more,” he sings. Robert tears up. At a brightly lit ballfield in a neighborhood of dark houses, Dr. Peter DeBlieux serves as catcher and batting coach as he cheers on his 6-year-old son, Zachary, in the Little League playoffs. Zachary’s Gray Gurus trounce the Gators, 22-12. At his crowded trailer in St. Bernard Parish, Jimmy Bartholomae tries to nap before his midnight to 6 a.m. second job as a security guard. It’s not easy. His kids have friends over, televisions blare and there’s no end in sight to the chaos. “People think it’s over. ‘Get over it.’ Yeah, I’ll get over it,” he says. “You come live in my shoes for a week ... then you can tell me what to do. ... Until you feel it, smell it and see it for life — real life — live and in person, you ain’t got a clue what I go through.” Some 300 miles away, Darrell London is alone. The friend who promised to deliver $40 never showed. London decides he won’t sleep but will hang around until 5 a.m. when he can catch the first bus downtown to collect $200 from a charity. |
