FRESH YARN presents: Stay... by Katheryn Krotzer Laborde

FRESH YARN presents:

Stay
By Katheryn Krotzer Laborde

Editor's note: This piece is in recognition of the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and in honor of those who struggled, and continue to struggle, as a result of the devastation. Never forget.

The sky was a calming shade of blue that mid-November morning. In the fall of 2005, you noticed such things in the days that passed after the floodwaters drained away from New Orleans. You noticed when the skies were grey and bloated, you noticed when the heavens were mockingly clear and, since most of the broken city had no electricity for traffic lights, street lights, or lights of any kind, you noticed when the sun was slipping toward a dark horizon.

I was working as an exterior damage assessor. This involved wearing a hard hat, reflective vest, and steel toe boots as I examined the damaged neighborhoods of New Orleans, block by block, on foot. Usually I was paired with Nick, a guy used to wearing a hard hat before the storm ever hit. In the seven weeks we worked with one another, putting in six or seven, 10 to 12-hour days a week, dutifully noting the waterlines and pierced rooftops of house after house after house in one virtually abandoned neighborhood after the other, we grew to know many things about each other. One thing Nick came to know very quickly about me was that I was worthless without my fill of morning coffee -- not good in a place where open coffee shops were few and far between.

It was a Sunday, and I was sipping medium roast Nick had brought from home in a thermos as he parked his cherry-colored truck on a street in Mid-City. Weary from weeks of looking at a broken city, we poured ourselves out of the cab. He grabbed the map while I snapped up the pad and pen, double checking to make sure the laptop was hidden under the seat. After making sure our doors were locked, we reached into the flatbed for our helmets and jackets. In no hurry, we ambled toward the peach stucco house on the corner to start another day of recording water levels and estimating unfathomable loss, moldy block after block after block.

The neighborhood was pretty, distinctive, and old. The homes there were 100-year-old structures originally built with the possibility of flooding in mind. In such homes, the first floor is called the basement, while the second floor, where the living space was intended, is considered the first floor. The charming architecture of these ruined buildings gave Nick and I cause to mourn every now and then as we recorded the damages.

"323." Nick called out the house number and I walked a few steps behind him, scribbling. "Two story, one unit, four feet of water. Give the roof a ten." I instinctively looked up; we rated damage from zero to one-hundred, and we often argued over these numbers. Having been at this for a month at this point, I had learned not to haggle over every little number and wrote down what he said. Walking still, he got to the other side, saw some additional damage and called out, "Make that twenty on the roof." I scratched out the ten with a sloppy X.

He was on to the next house. "325. Two stories, two units. Roof looks good."

"Still four feet of water?" Some houses were raised and took on less water. On some blocks the houses were all the same height off the ground, but the ground itself got lower and lower as we walked the block, and as a result the water marks reached higher and higher.

"Yeah, four feet," he said. Next. "327. Two story, two units." Nick stopped speaking, stopped walking, and I was still writing when I bumped into him. I looked furtively at the red X that had been spray painted near the lower door, the one that announced that, as of September 19, the house had been checked and there were no bodies found on the premises. Following Nick's glance to where it then rested at the top of the stairs, I saw large block letters just under the opaque house light, written with a marker:

Burn in HELL for the Life of this Innocent Dog.

On the other side of the weather worn white door, was an additional note, scrawled in a script that was possibly the work of another hand.

Note to owner: Next time there is a storm I will make sure to come by and tie you to the rail with no food no water.

"That would have been a slow death," Nick said, and with a quick and harsh, "I know," I stopped him from going on. After weeks spent looking at water-ruined homes, seeing rooftops marred by escape holes, stepping past the occasional lost photograph or book or shoe or toy, smelling mildew and rot and, yes, occasionally the scent of a decaying animal, I felt I had seen it all. But that morning, seeing the notes scrawled on the wall, I felt something in me give as we drifted, slowly, to the next house.

In a perfect world, we would all pack up our pets before heading off to hotels or homes of friends and family. But that is not always possible. Some hotels will not accept animals, and not all homes, no matter how loving and sympathetic the occupants, are welcoming to animals. And, to be truthful, the animals themselves do not always fare well during an evacuation. Cars travel at the speed of snails as they inch along evacuation routes. Pulling over is difficult. Being cooped up in a car full of worried humans is stressful. A colleague of mine lost a dog and a cat during the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004 -- one animal ran away when the owner opened the door, and the other one died of a heart attack en route. All that, and the hurricane hit Florida rather than Louisiana proving the evacuation to be, in rueful hindsight, unnecessary.

For these reasons and others, many homeowners resign themselves to leaving their pets behind. They load up food and water bowls to last for several days, explain the situation to their pets in a way that probably only serves to assuage their own sense of guilt, then leave the animals in a house where light is blocked out by the plywood that covered each window. These animals are given free reign of the house, or closed off in tiled kitchens, or put in an upstairs bedroom.

Or tied to the railing of a porch.

When flooding forced New Orleanians to stay away for an extended period, volunteers searched homes for animals to rescue. Some searchers were prompted by phone calls or emails, while others took it upon themselves to enter homes and look for starving pets. When pets were taken, liberators wrote: "ONE DOG TAKEN FROM BEDROOM," or some other such note on the wall; at other times, messages such as "ONE DEAD DOG - SORRY" were left for all to see. Homeowners who returned to their already X-marked homes often added can't-miss, spray painted messages of their own announcing that their pets were being cared for and were not to be taken. Meanwhile, stray dogs, some with matted hair and haunted eyes, formed packs and roamed the once-friendly streets in search of food. Still alive, they were the "lucky" ones. In St. Bernard Parish where the homes were topped by water, survivors were forced to leave their dogs behind when they were rescued, only to find out later that the animals were eventually shot by deputies. In the Ninth Ward, where the homes were not only topped by water but moved off their foundations as well, dogs were swaddled in live electric wires and electrocuted. Other dogs were frightened, starved, dazed, perched atop cars. And still others were stranded in trees long after the waters had subsided.

Weeks later, we'd find the carcasses of such dogs on the curb, in the debris, not knowing how this dog or that one met its end, and not really wanting to think about it. Nick and I had pets, had lived childhoods made richer by animals. Neither one of us could imagine leaving our pets behind. Neither one of us had ever been forced to, either, and had read sobering accounts of people who drowned because they had stayed behind to be with their animals. That, we could imagine, though didn't want to.

After a Red Cross lunch we moved from Mid-City to another map of houses, this time in the middle class, brick ranch neighborhoods of New Orleans East. Moving slowly past a gutting crew, we rounded the block and parked. On the curb there was a mound of ruined drywall, some orphaned branches, a pile of black trash bags and a plastic dog carrier marked with a spray painted "RIP." I could see that part of the carrier was missing. I mentioned the container to Nick. He nodded vaguely.

"I'm going down the street," he said, reaching for a legal pad. "We'll get more done if you stay here and enter this," he said, tossing the other pad, busy with numbers and notes, my way.

"I know," I said, removing the seatbelt and loosening my scarf to settle more comfortably in my seat. I put the computer in my lap, opened it, logged on, and then typed. The windows were open, and when the wind blew, that distinctive smell wafted -- decaying flesh, the calling card of the dead. I looked over to the dirty plastic carrier. Yes, there must be a dead dog in there.

"3927," I typed, "One story, one unit, two feet of water in home." The wind blew. "Forty on the roof. Blue roof people have already been by. Ten on the exterior." Check it over. Submit. "3933..."

And then I stopped. I put the computer down, looked around. No sign of Nick. No sign of anyone. Getting out of the truck, I walked to the carrier until I was facing the Sharpie-scribbled RIP. Tentatively, I walked around the carrier , wanting to see what was inside but at the same time, afraid to know. It became evident that the little door had been ripped away, as had much of the front of the carrier. Still edging myself around, I caught a glimpse through a crack in the molded plastic: a canine mouth, teeth bared. Yes, there was a dead dog in there.

I hurried back to the truck and picked up where I had left off. "3933. One story, one unit," I typed, my eyes dashing from the notepad to the computer screen.

The wind picked up. "Water level: two feet." I stopped.

I put the computer down again. I got out of the truck. I looked once more for Nick. (Oh, I could just HEAR his WHAT are you doing? WHY are you getting up to look at a dead dog?) He was nowhere around. I approached the carrier and, taking a breath, walked straight to the gaping opening.

And there the dog was. His face was gone -- all that was left was his skull, long nose pointed chestward, teeth bared in a grimace. Beyond the face the body was curled, still covered with flesh and fur that was melting away from the bone. My God -- what had happened? Had he been left behind by the owners? A family of four who left their dog thinking they'd be back in three days, no problem, no use putting him through what he'd been through during the needless Ivan evac -- the long drive, the cramped hours in the carrying case, the infrequent walks around the Red Roof Inn parking lot?

Or was he somehow just found, in the street? Drowned, perhaps. If some people had found him dead how could they have gotten the dog into the carrying case? And why was the carrier in such bad shape? More questions streamed into my mind as I stood there. I walked back to the truck, my eyes cast downward, my hands wrapping the scarf around my throat against the chill.

I was entering info in the computer when Nick opened the truck door and slid back to his place behind the wheel. He took off his hat, placed the pad of scribbles in the space between us. I kept my eyes on the screen as I typed, as I told him that there was, indeed, a dead dog in the carrier.

I could feel him twisting to look at me. "You got up and looked?" A dusty truck glided past, swerving to avoid a nearby pot hole.

"Yes."

His eyes burned through me. "You mean to tell me that you actually got out of the truck to go look at a dead dog?"

"Yes." I continued typing about a house that a tree had fallen on; with ninety on the roof, a house in such bad shape that it could never be a home again.

"And you stayed here? You didn't move the truck? Even though you could smell it and you knew what it was?"

I told him yes.

He twisted the key in the ignition. "There's something wrong with you. There's something very, very wrong with you."

Later, Nick told me that he was quoting a line from a movie, that he had meant the line as a joke, kind of, and thought I would get the joke…but that he did find my actions a little strange. Whether he meant it was strange that I did not leave once I knew there was a carcass there, or strange that I had gotten up to look at a dead animal in the first place, I didn't ask. I didn't want to talk about it. I found that I actually couldn't talk about much of anything as we headed toward operation headquarters to turn in our computer and sign out for the day. What I didn't say then, and I suppose am saying now, is: I couldn't leave the dog. He had been left before, like so many others, canine and otherwise, to face the Storm of the Century alone. Whether he had drowned, or starved, or been killed by another frightened survivor was beyond my knowledge, and beyond my comprehension. But what I do know was that, in death, he was curled up quietly. And on that day, with a cold wind blowing and the sun edging toward a battered horizon, I just couldn't bring myself to leave that innocent dog.