Donna and I started off Monday morning with a visit to the Lower Ninth Ward. I'd told her about my Gray Line trip, and she said I shouldn't leave New Orleans without seeing the worst of Katrina's devastation.
As she drove along St. Claude Avenue, the surroundings didn't strike me as being any different from what I saw a few days earlier ... but after we crossed the Industrial Canal, what stood before us was an apocalyptic vision that not even Philip K. Dick could've imagined. Sadness morphed into anger as I saw houses knocked off their foundations or, even worse, sitting in the middle of the street. (In some cases, houses were reduced to rubble.)
I didn't expect the city to look the same way it did before the storm ... but, judging by the lack of cleanup and rebuilding, it looked as if the calendar had been flipped back to the day it happened. The canal breaches were so large until you could drive a bus through them. Some critics say their faulty construction -- and the resulting flood waters -- classified Katrina as a man-made disaster ... but, no matter how one looks at it, what happened was a tragedy.
Seeing Fats Domino's house rounded out our time in the neighborhood. It was easy to find not only because his name was on it, but the roof was painted yellow and black. Compared to the other places I saw, his house was in good condition. But the good news wasn't that it withstood Katrina -- it was that he lived to tell about it.
