I didn't want to hang tight to the French Quarter and its tourist crowds. It was, of course, a positive advancement to have conventions, weddings and spring breakers returning to the city but these people tended to spend their time in this one location and I needed to get out. I carried a small notebook and wrote of the images I saw:
• A roster of names attached to the outer wall of an Episcopal church. Murder victims. The list specified: SHOT, STABBED, BEATEN.
• On the cement stoop of an apartment building a skinny pock-faced young woman with straggly red hair nodded, eyes shut, as if her veins had recently been fed. Standing over her, a skinny black man punched at intercom buttons. He held a leash attached to a small, caramel-colored puppy so desperate, maybe for food and water, that when it struggled to climb the top step, it crumpled in a heap.
• Middle-class neighborhoods where children rode bikes, parents went to work and lawns were mowed on Saturday afternoons were now filled with empty houses that had been waiting three and a half years and counting for insurance companies to pay up. In 2005, when Katrina and Rita swept through, these same companies raked in record-setting profits of $48 billion; in 2006, $68 billion.
• In the Ninth Ward an utter wreck of a house sat high on cement blocks, the result of initial work done by a contractor. The house was owned by a man who gave everything he had to the contractor. Said contractor left the project and disappeared with the money.
• Junked FEMA trailers filled with formaldehyde, a colorless gas known to cause burning eyes, wheezing, nosebleeds, and cancer.
• Many people in New Orleans will tell you the Katrina flooding was not a "natural disaster," but the failed work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Levee walls had been planted 17 feet deep when they should have been 72 feet deep. The walls collapsed like dominoes and the water came in. In some places it took four minutes to rise from ground to roof level. The number of bodies found was tabulated close to two thousand — but not all the bodies had been found.
• After weeks of draining, the houses were filled with rats and snakes. And then the mold. If you wanted to buy a house in Lakeview, or New Orleans East, or Gentilly, you had to be prepared to wear a Hazmat suit.
• Governor Bobby Jindal had decided to relocate adolescent mental health facilities to a new location forty miles away, across Lake Pontchartrain. Most of the patients' parents didn't have cars to visit their children and there was no public transportation to the facilities. The Governor saved the State of Louisiana $9 million in the move.
The other side of lovely.
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