Love story blooms amid city’s ruins
Published: September 14, 2005
They could be seen for days, the Adam and Eve of this city’s impoverished 8th Ward district, paddling a broken motorboat through their fallen Eden of tar-black floodwaters, downed power lines and rotting houses - two incongruously smiling figures, afloat under a festering sun.
There was always something different about them. A charmed air of leisure. They waved happily, not in distress, at the military convoys and the frantic journalists roaring overhead on the jettylike highways of this ruined metropolis. They looked like a couple on holiday. To some, they seemed insane.
But in fact, Vanessa Magee and Roger Hart, former neighbors in one of New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods, were enjoying a bizarre honeymoon of sorts.
“It’s awful to say, but I have Katrina to thank for my most precious days,” declared Magee, a gregarious 42-year-old with a weakness for hugging perfect strangers. “If this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have gotten to know Roger like I do.”
“Truth is, we like it here now,” agreed Hart, 54, who is more shy. “Sure it’s stinky. And yeah, we have no appliances or water. But we talk. We take boat rides. We feed the birds, the pigeons, the dogs and the rats. We connect.”
There are a million unbelievable stories oozing out of this eerie new world called New Orleans, a bleak Wonderland where the familiar husks of American civilization - golden arches, car antennas, church steeples - already jut like ancient artifacts from a thickening pool of toxic crud.
But as a counterpoint to Katrina’s deepening legacy of tragedy, few sagas can match the waterlogged love story of Hart and Magee, two of the Crescent City’s less privileged citizens, who were blown into each other’s arms by Katrina’s 100-mph winds, and who have toiled together to survive since.
And anyone bothering to park on New Orleans’ Interstate Highway 610 and walk down one of its freeway-exits-cum-boat-ramps to hail the friendly couple, would have been struck by one additional lesson about Katrina: While arguably the worst storm in U.S. history may have stolen everything else from New Orleans, judging by two of its citizens, it didn’t get its soul.
Misguided or not, Hart and Magee had begun homesteading their utterly destroyed city without a second thought, with neither fanfare nor permission. They came across as people who were recently awakened from a stupor. Bone-deep urbanites both, they were using pioneer muscles most Americans have long since forgotten. Alive and curious, they surveyed fetid streets as empty as Atlantis and were filled with horror, yes, but also a wonder that was infectious.
“Our favorite time is sleepin’ up on the roof,” said New Orleans native Magee, a sometime secretary who was unemployed when Katrina struck. “You know, I never knew there were so many stars.”
Part Robinson Crusoe ripping yarn and part rerun of “The Love Boat,” their story begins around 2 a.m. on Aug. 29, when Katrina rolled like a war down the 8th Ward’s Spain Street, a nondescript lane hemmed by humble clapboard houses and old beaters that could never outrun the storm.
Twenty-four hours later, the levees girding New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain had broken. Magee, who occupied an apartment below Hart’s, felt water rising around her bed. By the time she touched her bedroom doorknob, it was up to her thighs. The water was silent, and cold. Furniture floated crazily in her darkened rooms, bumping into the walls. At Hart’s urging, she fled upstairs. And for the next nine surreal days, the couple lived together in Hart’s islandlike second-floor apartment, the last holdouts in a soggy neighborhood that looked as if it had emerged from the bottom of the sea.
Hart, a part-time stucco worker originally from Mobile, Ala., had stockpiled food and 40 gallons of water. After the initial shock of the catastrophe wore off, he set about wiring salvaged car batteries to his old TV set. He liberated a beat-up old boat with an engine that didn’t work. Magee, for her part, marveled at the oily silence smothering the once-vibrant metropolis of 1.3 million. “This neighborhood ain’t ever been so peaceful!”
And in the spirit of an earlier first couple, they began naming the creatures they found, in this case a menagerie of starving cats and dogs stranded on rooftops: They rescued newly dubbed Dirty Red and Jughead, two excitable hound dogs, and Minu the dingy kitten.
And so, growing close, Hart and Magee spent their days inside the concrete swamp that is central New Orleans. They were mostly untouched by the furious clatter of helicopters and emergency crews whirling about their small, strange, ruined corner of the world. They were getting along fine. The nights were sweltering. But the meals of canned beans and spaghetti were warm, heated on the rooftop by the Southern sun. And though the sprawling city, under its layer of polluted black water, was weirdly bereft of songbirds, Magee attracted pigeons with scraps of food. She also fed stranded rats.
Ever enthusiastic, she described it almost as an idyll.
The failed Adam and Eve of the 8th Ward loaded Jughead, Dirty Red and two tattered bags not bigger than purses into their old boat. Magee toted grubby and wide-eyed little Minu in the crook of her arm. Towed behind the police craft on a rope, Hart’s vessel banged into light poles and the sides of houses on the way back to the wider world. Magee joked with the police that they needed to learn to drive.
On the concrete highway landing, an Army helicopter crew was loading an emaciated old man, a hurricane victim trapped in another neighborhood, who’d been living on nothing but Dr Pepper for nine days.
“They’re takin’ away my paradise,” Hart said plaintively, ignoring all the hubbub. He was a quiet, easygoing man. He didn’t say much else.
A 2 1/2-ton Army truck drove them away only a little while later. Wherever they end up, few will ever know the brave thing they attempted in the vanished 8th Ward. Still, they have each other, perhaps Katrina’s only gift.
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