Chapter Excerpts
Chapter 1
Rowed Home
Everything looked doomed, and somewhere along the way as we floated through Mid-City in our little boat I decided I wanted to return for good as soon as possible.
I fled my New Orleans home in a car speeding down the old River Road the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. I crept back to it two weeks later in a boat, drifting slowly through the ruined urban wilderness of brown floodwater and battered houses that had been my neighborhood.
We floated up to Canal Street on the wrong side of the frontier separating the empty, dry wards of the evacuated city from the empty, flooded ones. Military helicopters hammered away overhead, whole black flights of them in formation or individual machines flying low with crewmen framed in their open doors, scanning the wretched blocks below. Occasionally, a fan boat roared down the wide city boulevard. These are the type of shallow-draft watercraft built to carry hunters through Cajun swamplands, though now they were bearing armed posses. Their low decks were crammed with guys dressed in a full catalogue of law enforcement uniforms and toting M-16s or combat shotguns, wearing mirrored sunglasses and flak jackets strapped over sweat-soaked T-shirts. They streaked through flooded traffic intersections, skimming this way to dodge the dinosaur limbs of felled oak trees languishing in the water, cutting that way past a reef of car roofs and truck cabs lined up in their submerged parking spots.
The desperate rescue work of lifting people off rooftops and embarking them from their porches and balconies was over. The thousands of people trapped at the Superdome and convention center or stranded on the blistering highways were all gone, trucked out to other stadiums and churches and convention centers around the region. The fires that had clouded the skyline were mostly out. The thugs and looters who had rampaged across the city were gone or subdued, finally outgunned and hiding out or simply funneled into the desperate crowds of people pressed into buses and airliners and dispersed across the country.
About all that remained was the water, a vast city street grid of channels and canals lined with ruined homes and businesses and patrolled over by the helicopters and swamp boats. We watched a fan boat cruise by as we idled in the shadow of a flooded church, basically hiding until it passed. We were doing nothing wrong, but the mood over the city was tense. The boatloads of armed men radiated the don’t-fuck-with-us vibe even from a good distance away. The grip of order imposed on this suddenly wild, broken place seemed tenuous, something achieved with firepower and mass evacuations. There was no telling where anyone really stood. The deputies and the game wardens and the soldiers looked strange gunning down the flooded streets. But I knew I would look strange to them too, floating along in a small, commandeered craft with a skinny man and a nervous woman, the three of us slowly moving into a neighborhood from which people had been fighting with tears and frantic effort to escape just a few days prior.
The skinny man was Keith O’Brien, a news reporter and a close friend, and the nervous woman was a news photographer we had met an hour earlier. Our boat was a little flat-bottom skiff we found abandoned a few blocks away, where a ridge of land above the flood level had served as a grassy landing pad for helicopters for a while during the evacuation. We were in the Mid-City neighborhood in the heart of New Orleans and we were heading for my house.
We advanced at the most incrementally slow pace, moving a meter or so at a time as we negotiated tangles of branches and countless snares concealed under the brown water. The plodding pace allowed us to take in the surreal landscape with slack-jawed wonder - the pickup trucks with bathtub rings of grim leading laterally down their sides to the water line, the oak trees rising up from streets that now looked like long, straight swamp passes, the houses with boarded-up windows or kicked-in doors, the horrific sound dogs howling and moaning from unseen windows after two sweltering, abandoned weeks.
This was homecoming, a moment for which I had wished and schemed practically since the storm hit. The disaster was over and the recovery had yet to begin. The city’s odds and future were being determined elsewhere - in Washington, in Baton Rouge, in offices and conference rooms and wherever New Orleans people had found refuge to try to sort out their displaced lives. But New Orleans itself was under the pall of trauma. It was a flooded city without life, the skeleton crew of its population made up entirely of military people, media people and the few remaining residents hiding or negotiating to resist evacuation like cornered stowaways. Everything looked doomed, and somewhere along the way as we floated through Mid-City in our little boat I decided I wanted to return for good as soon as possible.
