Rat's Alley.

• Author: Gilmore, Brian G.
• Position: KATRINA, TWO YEARS LATER - Essay

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This spring, I was in New Orleans for the thirty-eighth annual Jazz Heritage Festival. Late one night, I entered a package store to purchase some bottled water to take back to my room. As I reached into the cooler for an ice-cold bottle of Evian, a large rat emerged from under one of the shelves that held souvenirs and fancy bottles of hot sauce and ran right between my legs.

After contemplating what I had just witnessed, I retrieved a bottle of water and walked to the counter only to find it unattended. Off in the distance, up a set of stairs, the shopkeeper sat aimlessly. He smiled at me. It was clear he had seen the rat, too.

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He held up two fingers, meaning "$2.00" for the water. It was business as usual in New Orleans. I set $2 on the counter, exited the store, and laughed all the way back to the hotel.

I went around New Orleans with my friend Steven Cummings, a photojournalist who has family ties here. Like me, he wanted to see the city from his own viewpoint. He didn't want to take a hurricane tour with fifty other gawking tourists, and he surely didn't want a narrator telling him what he was observing.

First, Steve and I drove to the Lower Ninth Ward or, as Steve calls it, the Lower Nine. Both of us had read about the devastation and seen it in movies and documentaries. But even with a huge level of preparation, you're never ready to see an entire neighborhood that is dead and gone.

The streets (if they can be called this) of the Lower Nine are deserted. There are few businesses, if any, on most streets. I didn't see any functioning schools. No barbershops, hair salons, pharmacies, doctors' offices, dentists, nothing.

Houses were destroyed. The Lower Nine, for the record, is simply rows and rows of vacant lots where houses once stood. Now and then, you see brick stairs that once led to a home, or a gate that led to a porch. Now and then, you see a trailer where someone is living, but I cannot imagine how desperate that life must be. Community, that ideal that sustains us all in the end, is nonexistent.

The few residents had made their own street signs and nailed them to the electrical poles. If they hadn't, you wouldn't have known where you were.

Some residents had For Sale signs on their home if it was still intact. Some had painted a contact number on their home asking for help. I doubt anyone ever called. Most of the homes remaining had three letters on front--"TFW" or "toxic flood...