The following was a letter to out friends written sometime after Mardi Gras in early Lent.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAFTERMATH\r\n\r\nDear Friends,\r\n\r\nThe discombobulation of our current circumstances has prevented our sooner communicating with all of you who\'ve offered kind sympathy and concern for our situation -and that of our City. In corpore, all of us are fine; the kids are even flourishing. Henry responds to stress by eating and so is more over weight than ever, while Joan responds with fasting and so hasn\'t looked this good in a couple of decades. In mensa, after half a year of classic \"post-traumatic stress disorder\" (PTSD) symptoms, Joan\'s own private Reign of Terror has subsided, in part due to pushing and pulling the proper pharmacological levers, and in part due to finally seeing the beginnings of restoration to our properties. Henry\'s refuge is to grasp the bull of reconstruction by the horns. The Swiss Chalet and Henry\'s old parental home on Calhoun Street each suffered property damage equal to approximately a third their antediluvian market value. Thus we are well shy of the dreaded 50% destruction level, at which point property owners must elevate their homes to qualify for bank loans and insurance. Every homeowner faces an uncertain gamble, for whether there shall ever again be buyers remains unknown, and everyone fears their insurance company will pull out of Louisiana. Repairs at Calhoun St. are now nearly finished and the property is available for rent, but -these days- there are no renters, at that level, interested in that neighborhood. Work on the Chalet is an erratic trajectory of fits and starts, interrupted by intermittent setbacks. Workmen don\'t show, material isn\'t available, no one returns phone calls. You have to be grateful for what help you can get. Our contractor, Jack Stewart, a friend from Middle school, seeks to assuage our despair by proclaiming that our job is going more smoothly than any of his others. The roof is near to being finished, a handsome slate and copper extravaganza built by Russian craftsmen over ten weeks, but repair of the interior has yet to begin. Our Y\'at carpenters, who haven\'t been seen since before Carnival, still need to complete rebuilding the inner side of the porch. But the requisite lumber still needs to arrive. They haven\'t gotten the check. They\'ve run out of slate and the boss of the roofing company, perhaps unsurprisingly, is on a honeymoon ski holiday in Switzerland. The quotidian crises that arises in these tasks occupy us both utterly and completely.\r\n\r\nThe storm has been for us as were wars for earlier generations. The Great War ended an Epoch; Viet Nam ended an Age of Innocence. Katrina ended the Old Era of Our History, the era in which we came of age and raised our families. Like all of us, we lost the city of our youth long before the wrath of nature tore apart the city here and now, but our home had had a physical continuity from the world of our youth to the world in which we raised our family. Our lives, our pleasures and our pains, had reached a stable ecological balance within an enduring urban environment -a vibrant culture that exhaled a joire de vivre that all who came under its spell came to accept as the norm -until unaware Fate plunged us into this cataclysm. We all cried out, \"We want Our Lives back!\" The World we relished, the City we celebrated, our own special corner, our retreat from the homogenized Global Culture, whose beauty was our romantic dream, where in pink clouds Proteus waved his trident under o\'er arching great oaks. \r\n\r\nWe who remain to rebuild our stricken city are the \"Sliver by the River.\" Again the physiognomy of The Mississippi has recreated our sobriquet, \"The Crescent City.\" No returned native enjoys venturing far from the higher lands following the bend of the River. Old New Orleans, its neighborhoods, its avenues, its oaks, is the new New Orleans; the new New Orleans of old, or at least a great part of it, originally dredged from the Lake, now lays deserted, a drowned ruin. The old grand avenue, St Charles, is once more the major artery of the Saved City, choked with traffic. But it will be a year before the streetcar runs; a bus named \"St. Charles\" now pollutes its diesel way, slowing impatient traffic. Magazine St, street of high commerce, is agog with busy tradesmen; Tchoupitoulas, hugging the port, is a parade of trucks. In this surviving fragment many houses are under reconstruction, but most are homes once more. Here lines are long at groceries and hardware stores, all restaurants fill by six, and the nightspots remain busy to the new \"late night hour,\" set by the now bygone curfew, of ten o\'clock. Former public Playgrounds have metamorphosed into FEMA trailer parks housing a population of young emergency workers, eager to indulge in the pleasures of café life and the music scene. Chefs heroically recreate menus from before the flood to packed tables nightly; our own special gastronomy never says die. Crawfish are expensive, but available, shrimp and crabs are as good as they\'ve been of late, but softshells are no longer found. Music clubs jive; the famous and the aspiring, young and old, offer to play for fund-raising benefits. Each new re-opening, merchant, service, or eatery, is a cause for rejoicing. From neutral grounds and telephone poles sprout a garden of cardboard signs: house demolition and house gutting, roofing and trash hauling, sheet-rockers and work-out gyms, electricians and morticians, plumbers and preachers, mediators and meditaters, pool cleaners and piano teachers. Lawyers who\'ll make your insurance company pay, and people who\'ll destroy all the mould on your property. The government communicates with the citizenry through placards painted on four by eight sheets of plywood, erected in public places, a technique on a technological par, if not level of permanence, with Hammurabi. Businesses announce their reopening with banners; all are \"hiring now\"- if only there were anyone to hire. So as trade returns, what commerce there is, is intense, but eighty percent of the city\'s businesses -if they were lucky enough not to be looted and burned- remain shut and boarded. All that are open close early, and nothing opens on Sunday.\r\n\r\nMoving away from the River, Freret St. marks the outer edge of those that survived more or less untouched; here begin endless acres of half-wrecked houses and intense reconstruction. This is the frontier, buzzing with uncertainty. Roofers, masons, and carpenters, everywhere working men, Latin, black, and white, Y\'at\'s and Rednecks, urban and rural, short hair and long. The streets are parked with pick-ups laden with material, Skill saws whine and hammers rat-a-tat-tat. Plaster dust fills the air. Like Lolita harlots, lusting potholes carved by the flood alert motorists with lips spray-painted neon pink. Slowly the edge of rebirth pushes towards the Lake. Beyond Willow a few houses remain as the flood left them, but everywhere the noise of rebuilding fills the air. Streets are lined with dikes of rubble, sheetrock, lathing, floors and roofing material. The sodden entrails of gutted homes; memories that built a family\'s history lie in the chaotic slag heaps of a bygone era. At night, lights mark out the few inhabited dwellings, two or three in each block, stretching into the dark. \r\n\r\nFrom here on, the sense of disaster is palpable; the silence of tragedy closes in from all sides. Traffic thins; street lighting is erratic. You can feel it in your muscles, the taste in your mouth, and the hair on the back of your neck. Moving lakewards, towards the center of the yawning saucer of New Orleans, by Claiborne Avenue, The Gulf Coast Highway, destruction spreads in every direction: Broadmoor, Tremé, Central City, Gentilly, New Orleans East, on and on, to the now celebrated Lakeview and infamous Lower Ninth Ward essentially all the way north to the Lake and east thru Mississippi half-way to Alabama. Redoubtable old U.S. 90, separating the surviving Sliver from the unrestrained Lake that delivered our doom, even now, six months later, has hardly a stop light working. A dark gulf of devastation stretches alarmingly beyond what even the most steeled wills expect.\r\n\r\nDetailed memories of the cataclysm emerge: Dead trees lie athwart cloven houses surrounded by the skeletons of black shrubbery. Rotting carcasses of what once were homes lie with their vital organs exposed to the sun, beds, dressers, and tables, clothing and cookware tumbling from gaping wounds where winds ripped walls from frames. The dank odor of mold and mildew emanates from blown out apertures in the walls of one-time homes. The decayed bodies of rusting vehicles lie contorted where grounded by the receding flood. Even here a few spots of reconstruction begin to spring our like harbinger weeds in a burnt over forest. But there is no commerce; streets are empty, traffic skittish, nervous where anarchy rules; an ominous feeling rushes you to finish your business and head back to the saved remnant. Here and there a few families living in FEMA trailers begin tentatively to rebuild; eventually many will follow, for there are blocks upon blocks of our architectural heritage - great stretches of the antediluvian city- that are homes that can be saved. But to appreciate the immensity of the task of that salvation one must sink through endless fathoms of darkened, deserted neighborhoods where the homes of attendant families await the fate of a sentence to be passed by bureaucrats a thousand miles away. Habitation here is a nervous gamble, brave words and reassurances sound like frightened whistling in the dark; there is no power, no water, no gas; nothing lights the way. \r\n\r\nAreas so stricken by the devastation that reconstruction seems an impossible dream have drawn the attention of the media, but though extensive, they are a far smaller portion of the city than the areas where reconstruction will, eventually, triumph, although there will likely be \"missing teeth\" in nearly every block. The media, in their absent wisdom, gaggle and gurgle about an anonymous \"they\" who will provide some \"Master Plan\" for renewal and reconstruction. But that\'s a Myth from the Land of Politicians. Whatever renewal, whatever rebuilding there will be, will be that which will happen as each individual homeowner takes up his or her private tasks, each deciding for whatever reasons, personal or practical, to rebuild or to fold, sell, and move away. Whether the net result of these separate motions shall inch the City further towards, or further away from, rebirth is an accident born of no premeditation; and it is a fool who says he knows which way it will go. \r\n\r\nNow, even more than a half year later, there is but a single story on the local news: the aftermath of the storm is everyone\'s story. We are living through events which history will not forget. Bodies are still being found within the city itself; two thousand remain missing. The elderly die at a faster rate; our contemporaries are losing their parents; dear friends lost both a month apart. Precarious couples respond by divorcing -both of our neighbors on each side, and each with two kids- families torn apart from stress and uncertainty. The effects of the storm have penetrated every aspect of human lives. The loss of life, the economic impacts, the social changes, the psychological traumas; all consequences are profound, some obvious, others more recondite: Helicopters now seem ominous. Formerly an eighteen-inch column of birdseed lasted but a day; now it lasts nearly a week. We no longer get junk mail, but we also don\'t get any magazines. Only first class mail, and nobody feels too secure that most of that is getting delivered. Our old, incompetent and corrupt School Board is essentially out of business, almost all functioning schools having been transformed into \"charter\" institutions, each effectively a free agent, with its own Board, determining its own destiny, receiving a per capita, from the State of Louisiana. New Orleans, of all places, is pioneering a new mode of \"public\" education: state subsidized semi-private schools. \r\n\r\nToday we awoke to a clamor outside our bedroom window: it was the asbestos police- they had located a single asbestos shingle in a large pile of slate fragments from our roofing job. \"We have to bag that!\" American tax dollars -through the bizarre filter of FEMA- then paid for half a dozen clowns in space suits to hose down and shovel into heavy duty plastic bags a large pile of fractured Brazilian slate -with one asbestos shingle-that my roofer had already agreed to pay to remove. More characters -right out of the opening scenes of ET- they blockaded the street- then appeared to Bobcat it into large dumpsters which were hauled away to some safe asbestos storage depot in a land inhabited by those presumably more ignorant than us.\r\n\r\nBut no storm induced reverberations have been done a more doubly ironic pirouette than the political consequence for who rules what\'s left: in antediluvian times all New Orleanians quite rationally believed that a city which was of two-thirds African American heritage would forever -in this day- have a local government that reflects that fact. Now, because the storm\'s effects differentiated between the poor and the less poor, the constants of the Great Racial Equation that drives New Orleans politics are thrown to the winds. The old order politician is like the Newtonian confronted with relativistic space-time. Nothing is the same, and so the political future of the City, poised on edge of its quadrennial mayoral election, is astonishingly unknown. Twenty-three candidates departed the starting line; only two will finish. Over a hundred and sixty candidates compete for a panoply of local offices. An awesome Sartrean freedom confronts this City, and though our culture cautions acerbic pessimism, there are some who do indeed dare to hope that renewal and rebirth will -when all accounts are reckoned- bring forth a better New Orleans.\r\n\r\nAnd so, although we are as preoccupied with the devastation of the last half-year as is everyone, our greater apprehension concerns the future. Katrina ended an Old, but did it begin a New Era of our history? The daily guessing game in which we all are engaged concerns the population\'s return. Today \"they say\" that about 40% are back, but the talking heads of the Uptown Intelligentsia dispute that figure in both directions. Even now the greater part of the city awaits in encircling exile, a cruel limbo, on the outcome of FEMA flood maps -now more than six months late for Louisiana- on which depend insurance assessments and Federal largesse. There can be no doubt that the spiritual drive to return to New Orleans overpowers many, but the practical realities contradict political pressures, and the outcome is stasis. Government ineptitude is only part of the problem; New Orleans had been for decades, and remains today, a poor city, one in which great blocs of citizenry were already effectively wards of the state. Endemic corruption has eviscerated the body politic; officialdom -at local, state, and federal levels- has scant credibility. Those who have the will have not the means, while those who control the means have, we greatly fear, at best a wavering will. \r\n\r\nPeople wait expectant for when \"they\" will finally make up their minds and come and fix things right, but there is no \"they.\" No government has a policy -economic, social, or political- that can expunge tragedy. From whence can the requisite energy come? The sheer magnitude of the task overwhelms the spirit, hope quails… the number of homes that must be rebuilt, the materials needed, the workforce to achieve this feat. And then there is the endless trash, garbage, and refuse of a lost city to be piled into heaps, where great dragon machines load it onto trucks, and remove the remains of a hundred thousand families to unknown, overflowing pits for the delight of future archeologists. And what of future storms? What assurance of future protection can technology and the state afford? Build us better levees, we cry, and please send more garbage collectors.\r\n\r\nBut it\'s not the proclamations of politicians, or even the billions in squandered and incompetently allocated aide, that will eventually rebuild what has been destroyed. Even in the ruins, the scent of fresh-boiled crawfish carries across the neighborhoods. Gumbo pots are refilled and set aboil. The glint of determination shines in the music halls. The Louisiana Philharmonic, an organization so used to rebirth that its symbol is the phoenix, recoalesces from the Diaspora. The government counsels twenty-five years, a generation, will be needed to rebuild our lost city, but our eyes, like the eyes of rebuilders everywhere, are fixed on what will be finished next week, next month, next fall, and surely before next year. The City has seized upon a symbol of rebirth, the fleur de lis of Bourbon France, so in their jewelry, tee shirts, and banners we can all advertise our commitment to renewal. Neighbors plant their flags of occupation next to FEMA trailers perched on improbable foundations. Ultimately, whatever job is done will be the Re-Newed Orleans, that will emerge in the older locus.\r\n\r\nWe are, for now, content to remain Lords of the Chalet and pray our world will regain its character of old. We are thankful for your concern, your sympathy, and your fond hopes; that once again we shall have Our Lives back and our Home will be reborn.\r\n\r\n Henry & Joan