http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/05/katrina/3357467
Sept. 17, 2005, 11:17PM
A LOVE STORY
Blown into each other's arms
2 New Orleans neighbors brought together by storm
By PAUL SALOPEK
Chicago Tribune
NEW ORLEANS - They could be seen for days, the Adam and Eve of this
city's impoverished 8th Ward district, paddling a broken motorboat
through their fallen Eden of tar-black floodwaters, downed power lines
and rotting houses ? two incongruously smiling figures, afloat under a
festering sun.
There was always something different about them. A charmed air of
leisure. They waved happily, not in distress, at the military convoys
and the frantic journalists roaring overhead on the jettylike highways
of this ruined metropolis. They looked like a couple on holiday. To
some, they seemed insane.
But in fact, Vanessa Magee and Roger Hart, former neighbors in one of
New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods, were enjoying a bizarre honeymoon
of sorts.
"It's awful to say, but I have Katrina to thank for my most precious
days," declared Magee, a gregarious 42-year-old with a weakness for
hugging perfect strangers. "If this hadn't happened, I wouldn't have
gotten to know Roger like I do."
"Truth is, we like it here now," agreed Hart, 54, who is more shy.
"Sure it's stinky. And yeah, we have no appliances or water. But we
talk. We take boat rides. We feed the birds, the pigeons, the dogs and
the rats. We connect."
Happiness amid tragedy
There are a million unbelievable stories oozing out of this eerie new
world called New Orleans, a bleak Wonderland where the familiar husks
of American civilization ? golden arches, car antennas, church
steeples ? already jut like ancient artifacts from a thickening pool
of toxic crud.
But as a counterpoint to Katrina's deepening legacy of tragedy, few
sagas can match the waterlogged love story of Hart and Magee, two of
the Crescent City's less privileged citizens, who were blown into each
other's arms by Katrina's 100-mph winds, and who have toiled together
to survive since.
And anyone encountering the friendly couple would have been struck by
one additional lesson about Katrina: While arguably the worst storm in
U.S. history may have stolen everything else from New Orleans, judging
by two of its citizens, it didn't get its soul.
Their story begins around 2 a.m. on Aug. 29, when Katrina rolled like
a war down the 8th Ward's Spain Street, a nondescript lane hemmed by
humble clapboard houses and old beaters that could never outrun the
storm.
Twenty-four hours later, the levees girding New Orleans from Lake
Pontchartrain had broken. Magee, who occupied an apartment below
Hart's, felt water rising around her bed. By the time she touched her
bedroom doorknob, it was up to her thighs. At Hart's urging, she fled
upstairs. And for the next nine surreal days, the couple lived
together in Hart's islandlike second-floor apartment.
Hart, a part-time stucco worker originally from Mobile, Ala., had
stockpiled food and 40 gallons of water. After the initial shock of
the catastrophe wore off, he set about wiring salvaged car batteries
to his old TV set. He liberated a beat-up old boat with an engine that
didn't work. Magee, for her part, marveled at the oily silence
smothering the once-vibrant metropolis of 1.3 million. "This
neighborhood ain't ever been so peaceful!"
And in the spirit of an earlier first couple, they began naming the
creatures they found, in this case a menagerie of starving cats and
dogs stranded on rooftops: They rescued newly dubbed Dirty Red and
Jughead, two excitable hound dogs, and Minu the dingy kitten.
Growing close
And so, growing close, Hart and Magee spent their days inside the
concrete swamp that is central New Orleans. The nights were
sweltering. But the meals of canned beans and spaghetti were warm,
heated on the rooftop by the Southern sun. And though the sprawling
city, under its layer of polluted black water, was weirdly bereft of
songbirds, Magee attracted pigeons with scraps of food. She also fed
stranded rats.
Ever enthusiastic, she described it almost as an idyll.
"I was a little depressed at first, but mostly I been happy," she
said. "We been everywhere in that boat."
Getting out
Then rescue crews in boats began stopping by in earnest. Finally, a
sassy team of volunteer Illinois Conservation Police officers showed
up at the half-submerged address of 2723 Spain St., and the sunbaked
Midwesterners spent half an hour persuading the couple to finally
leave. New Orleans was uninhabitable, they said. Hart and Magee had to
go.
The couple loaded Jughead, Dirty Red and two tattered bags not bigger
than purses into their old boat. Magee toted grubby and wide-eyed
little Minu in the crook of her arm.
Towed behind the police craft on a rope, Hart's vessel banged into
light poles and the sides of houses on the way back to the wider
world.
"They're takin' away my paradise," Hart said plaintively, ignoring all
the hubbub. He didn't say much else.
Meanwhile, on the concrete highway landing, state animal-control
agents gently took away the couple's dogs and cat for health reasons.
Magee cried, holding up her filthy shorts with her hands because Dirty
Red was using her belt as a leash.
And she cried hard again when told that the neighborhood might have to
be bulldozed.
"I'm gonna hate that," Magee said, her face contorted with agony. "It
hurts to leave. It's really hard startin' over somewhere else."
A 2 1/2 -ton Army truck drove them away only a little while later.
Wherever they end up, few will ever know the brave thing they
attempted in the vanished 8th Ward. Still, they have each other,
perhaps Katrina's only gift.
® 2005 Chicago Tribune
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
|
