NEW ORLEANS -- A summery white dress hangs in a second-story room, framed by green shutters on an open window of an empty house, as if someone had planned to wear it, as if someone soon will return to restart a life suspended. Or perhaps not. We may never know. The receding floodwaters along this street in Mid-City also revealed two bodies, face down, arms outstretched, at rest on a park-like median where the grass drowned and then turned to straw in the harsh sun.
Across town in the Lower Ninth Ward, as evidence of Mother Nature's macabre handiwork, four small, crushed houses list against one another, accordion-style, propelled off their foundations by the surge of floodwaters from a levee breach nearby. Dried mud coats everything, evoking comparisons to nuclear fallout. Boats and cars smashed through collapsed homes. Roofs lie about, attached to nothing or broken to bits, as if thrown. Virtually no abode appears habitable here, where the poorest of the city's poor once lived; here where the stench from putrid muck on the streets triggers the gag reflex, the donning of a face mask.
Down in the Fontainebleau area, where watermarks six feet high are visible on some homes, signs of life slowly are returning with the trickle of residents who've gotten in to assess the status of the stuff of their suspended lives.
Neil Peyroux, a decorator who, like many people here, boasts of an ancestral line to the city's 18th-century French, narrates a rapid-fire tour of his ruined Octavia Street home.
"It's so freaky, like everything just floated. . . . I'm going to spray it all down with Clorox. . . . Look at my marble countertops. They were sooo pretty. . . . Water knocked the fridge over. . . . I spent $13,000 this year on my back yard. It was absolutely beautiful. . . . Now it's pretty much a disaster," he says of the house. "But it's a fixable disaster. . . . My whole central-air system will have to be replaced . . . my beautiful new mahogany door I just put in two weeks ago. "
The acute crisis is passing, the last of those stranded are on dry ground, at least those who could be found. But the feeling for many here is of a city in suspension. Residents will return, yes, as the city has announced it will begin allowing them back, in stages, starting Monday. They will clean up, rebuild. Commerce will restart. Lives will resume and perhaps the Big Easy flavor of life here will return -- at least that is what city officials and some residents say.
But in this interregnum, when the city's fate hangs between the past and future, New Orleans is on the brink, trying to shift from devastation to recovery, from trauma to hope.
On Dumaine Street in the French Quarter, Thomas Wolfe, owner of the famed Wolfe's of New Orleans, takes a break from cleaning up at another of his three restaurants, called Peristyle. He lost his stocks of prosciutto and pancetta, his artisan cheeses, not to mention the desserts created by his pastry chef and the meringues that inexplicably exploded in the searing heat. All that is replaceable, once supplies begin flowing to the city again. What he's got his eye on, even more, is the return of the city's spirit.
"The new New Orleans: I think it'll be a boomtown. I'm hoping it'll be a boomtown," he says, sweat dripping down his face in his kitchen turned sauna. "It's just the spirit, just the heart that we have in New Orleans."
Katrina and its floods destroyed much, he says, but "it's hard to shake a culture apart. It's hard to destroy a culture."
And yet, huge portions of the city's population -- especially its poorest -- are gone, among them huge numbers of African Americans whose ancestry gave this city much of its vibe (such as the drummers who congregated in Congo Square near the Quarter), the Mardi Gras revelry, the New Orleans cuisine, music and politics. The life of that part of the city's culture is suspended indeed, dispersed for now to Baton Rouge, Houston and points beyond, though the federal government's pledge of financial assistance for evacuees could prompt a return of those who lost much but want their New Orleans back.
Many here have their minds on those funds, on the new opportunities such an infusion would bring.
