Come Hell and High Water (page 4 of 6)

The Hot Zone

A group nearby called Veterans for Peace was planning a blitz into New Orleans. They had supplies they intended to distribute, come hell or high water. I wanted in. Their leader was a hyperkinetic chain smoker who told me to call him James Anonymous.

That morning he and a couple of young colleagues had loaded up his Honda Element with food and water, and had simply not stopped at the first police roadblock into New Orleans, despite much heated shouting and swearing on the part of the cops. Like that, they were in the forbidden city.

They spent the day doing reconnaissance, identifying areas of great need and making contacts to help avoid riots caused by desperate crowds too large for their food shipment.

I arranged to go with them the next day, and even scored supplies from Spirit of America to distribute with the vets.

With my rental car riding low, I followed James up to the first roadblock. To my relief, he did not blow through it and instead sweet-talked the Army guard into letting us in.

The city was abandoned. We could drive the wrong way up one-way streets, or even on the interstate. There was debris everywhere, and the smell of death. Nearly every storefront had been emptied. Interstate 10 and Veterans Boulevard had become boat ramps instead of highways, plunging steeply into the filthy water.

On Veterans Boulevard we met two cousins, Reggie and José Ford, young men who'd fled the hurricane and were returning to check on Reggie's apartment in the 9th Ward. Reggie is a painter of some local renown; José had been managing a brew pub until the storm hit. Reggie faced Katrina's aftermath stoically; José kept up his own spirits through humor. They agreed to act as our guides.

José jumped in my car, Reggie climbed into the Element, and we made our way to Tchoupitoulas Street, where the day before James Anonymous had found a small apartment complex ideal for our relief effort. It was a squalid brick building with a crumbling concrete court. Beneath the stairwell, a thin-haired heroin addict writhed in the throes of withdrawal. A man in combat fatigues introduced himself as Mr. Thomas Brown, preacher man. I carried a load of MREs and water into his apartment, which was crammed with odds and ends of the mad: a grotesque rubber clown mask plopped on some pressure-canned tomatoes, a tall stack of cheap spiral-bound calendars, piles and piles of magazines and cardboard boxes.

We moved on to Reggie's 9th Ward neighborhood, a depressing cluster of small boarded-up homes. The empty streets were littered with broken glass, shingles, and rotting garbage. There must have been dead bodies and animals in some of the homes, judging by the smell. A city bus sat at an odd angle in an intersection, commandeered and hastily abandoned.

Our passage to Reggie's stoop was blocked by a shallow canal of filthy water. Despite a makeshift bridge we threw together, we all fell in. Reggie, relieved that his house was intact, scooped up some of his valuables. Then we waded back across the moat to look for more people to help.

There was flooding on parts of a main road called Elysian Fields, so we drove along the median until trees blocked our way. A green minivan stood with its side door open; beside it, a man sat on two paint cans. He wore only a pair of shorts, and held in his hand a bloodied walking stick. Fresh blood covered his chest and forearms, and there were flecks of it on his forehead.

"Somebody just tried to kill me," he wheezed. He could barely speak. "I had to hit him with this stick."

He was sitting on the cans when a man tried to enter his car. He cracked the guy over the head with his stick, then punched him in the mouth. "These are his teeth marks on my hand," he said.

"How did you know he was trying to kill you?" I asked.

"He was trying to get into the van."

"Did he have a weapon?"

"No."

"Did he come at you?"

"No."

Ghost Town
We gave the rest of our food and water to holdouts and squatters on Bourbon Street. I then parted company with Reggie and José, and boarded a skiff with a local volunteer on a search mission. It got dark, and we turned around before we could locate a group of people reportedly stranded on a rooftop. We navigated by street signs inches above the putrid water, passing homes submerged to the eaves, and dogs stranded on car roofs, barking hoarsely to be spared. The first body we saw was hideously bloated and hooked to debris.

In darkness and silence, we returned to St. Tammany Parish.

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