Hitchhiking From Squalor to Anywhere Else

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 2 -- The woman and child walked toward the interstate exit ramp. She held his hand and he held a box of Scooby-Doo cereal. "Granny," he said, "where are we going?"

Adrienne Picou didn't know the answer. The noon sun beat down on the ghostly and littered streets of New Orleans on Friday, as she tried to think. Houston is over there and Baton Rouge is up there. She and the boy would hitchhike. In a way they were twice homeless: first from the floods and then from the dire conditions of the city Convention Center, which they endured for three days along with thousands of people until Picou had enough.

An hour earlier, she had walked out of the mammoth and filthy shelter with $7 in her purse, three bottles of water and a 6-year-old grandson. "Let's sit down a minute, buddy," said Picou, 46, breathing heavily. They found shade beneath the freeway's scaffolding. Picou was wearing the same skirt and blouse she wore wading through waist-high water four days before.

"Please pardon our smell," she said. Eddie, a first-grader when there was such a thing as a school to go to, was wearing a red Spider-Man T-shirt. Near the collar, his grandmother had written in ballpoint pen, "Eddie Picou, DOB 10/9/98." "I put that on so they could at least identify who he was," Picou said, and she began to weep.

Friday was another day of false hope for tens of thousands of New Orleans residents waiting for relief from the outside world. Some, like Picou, decided to choose one hell over another by trying their own luck at getting out of New Orleans.

Choppers filled the sky overhead, and smoke billowed from a nearby fire. The only vehicles on the empty roads were carrying soldiers in camouflage. A soldier with a shotgun stood guard as a milk truck was unloaded. Even climbing up to the open interstate to wait for a passing car was impossible because of police barricades.

Picou kept walking. Every block or so there were encampments of people waiting for a way out of town. Picou passed one contingent of 14 people trying to get to Texas. They, too, had given up hope on the buses that were supposed to rescue them and waited for a relative from Texas. The dazed group was gathered beneath the freeway's pilings. Picou made her move.

"There's not too many of us," she said, holding Eddie's hand. "Just me and him."

Sorry, already full, she was told.

Life here right now is a mixture of cut-throat survivalism and inexplicable kindness. As Picou and Eddie walked away, a man with a shopping cart full of orange juice rolled up and offered a gallon. "Drink it," he said. Looted or not, it was sweet and delicious.

Picou and Eddy backtracked to Annunciation Street. Picou, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stared warily at the looming Convention Center, a quarter-mile away. She could not go back. Inside, there was darkness, filth and debilitating rumors that help was on the way. The buses were always on the way.

"They told us, 'push back all the chairs and the buses will be here,' or, 'everyone get in line and the buses will be here,' " Picou said. "They never came. We were like animals. Some buses came, but they were for the Hilton evacuees."