"The Lower Ninth Ward was the neighborhood of neighborhoods," Frank Relle, a New Orleans native, says, as we walk along the Industrial Canal Levee. Here 20,000 poor blacks built homes on a below-sea level cypress swamp no one else wanted. Here, in this fertile Petri dish, grew the cultural soul food this city thrived on. Here, when the levee broke, the surge of water and the howling wind scoured the land clean of homes and community. All that remains behind the levee are concrete foundations, a child's pink bicycle, and cars tossed like discarded toys.
      By a makeshift shrine to some of the nearly 1850 people Katrina killed, we watch the sun set over cranes and construction workers racing to repair the levee before the June 1st start of the next hurricane season. The estimated cost to repair some 150 miles of levees around New Orleans is $800 million. "But there is nothing left in the Ninth Ward to protect," Frank says. "We Americans are such a reactive people. We are good at fixing the symptom, but never the cause."
      Go back a few blocks and you see houses pushed against houses, boats in living rooms, a teddy bear hanging in a tree, and the telltale flood line high along the walls like the Devil's own bath ring. I lift camera to eye, and as I press the shutter, a screen door swings open. I gasp, imagine ghosts. But it is only the moist wind eddying with memories and loss.

At the downtown W Hotel you step from humid smog into the scented lobby of tilted mirrors, orchids in crystal vases and staff like fashion models. Decorated like an understated German Gentlemen's Club, the cold air crackles with permissiveness. Even the mini-bar is stocked with an Intimacy Kit of three condoms and lube for just seven bucks.
      After showering with exotically scented soaps you hit downtown, past the Harrah's Casino and up Canal Street where everything at first glance looks just fine and impersonal. The rent-a-cops beam big smiles and bigger guns, and the tourists walk dazed and glazed, uncomfortable in their pudgy bodies.
      But after a few blocks you again see some of the $115 billion worth of damage caused by Katrina's wind and flood that swamped 80% of the city: deserted buildings, blown-out windows, the looted Footlocker store boarded up. Traffic lights flash to their own dissonant rhythm. Even McDonalds is still not serving billions and billions. Is this a premonition of a civilization unraveling?
      Caught up in the overwhelming scope of this broken city eight months later, how can you step back far enough to take in the ungraspable fact of polar ice caps melting, sea levels rising? If global warming comes to pass, can you even ask: What's the point of rebuilding, when all this will one day be Neptune's playground?
      A street preacher waves a battered bible, calls out to repent and pray before it's too late. Young bucks strut past, flash gold teeth and bling jewelry. The atmosphere twangs just this side of lawlessness. Bitterness coats the back of the throat with some sick chemical taste you try not to think about.
      New Orleans has always been a twilight zone where the freed and escaped slaves came to live in the swamps with the French and the pirates. The dead are buried above ground, and God knows, voodoo thrives here-a connection back to Africa before we prayed to a skinny white guy on a cross. In this city resides the dark, eccentric soul of America. Let it die, and those that want to turn America into a puritanical mega-church have won.
      On Royal Street, past the antique stores and the art galleries, you step impulsively into Fleur de Paris hat shop, where a tall, thin woman with perfect ankles sells eccentricity for the head.
      Katherine Madere is her name, a tenth generation New Orleans native. "Katrina was worse than losing a loved one," she says. "She blew away our history." She lights a cigarette like Bette Davis, inhales, exhales. "But we're made from tough stock-we'll survive. Meanwhile," and she mimes tossing back a stiff drink, "we all self-medicate."

On the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Peter, a legless man sells $5 roses to lovers. Live music blows in from the four directions-a cacophony of dissonance and delight, through which streams of tourists strut and stagger, all high on the night and the possibility of the forbidden.
      Here, on these French Quarter streets more ancient than their age, Pan and the saints dance intertwined. The timeworn brick buildings stand adorned with wrought-iron balconies like a widow's lace veil. A place to sit above it all and catch the cool breeze, thick with the mingled odor of debauchery and decay, and a rank base note drifting in from the bayou.
      Outside a gay bar, where Emmy Lou Harris sings from a flat screen TV, fortunetellers peddle promise and hope. Two strippers in black corsets and pink pumps sashay on the balcony of the Hustler Club, and with cool distain, toss love beads to leering tourists. Street vendors sell post-Katrina, anti-FEMA T-shirts. And of course the God-Squad is out, preaching hell and damnation. They carry sandwich boards lettered with: "Jesus Said: Go And Sin No More," and a list of the Ten Commandments-every one of which will be broken countless times tonight.

New Orleans needs tourist dollars like Dracula needs a virgin's bare neck, and the annual Jazz Fest is where the city feasts on out-of-town blood. When nearly a half-million fans gather for six days of music, the hotels are booked, the restaurants bustling and the locals are filled, briefly, with hope.
      Clustered around the Fair Grounds, street venders flog over-priced water and hotdogs and Pay-to-Piss port-o-johns. Heat-flushed tourists crush past security gates, push through ticket checks like feedlot cattle.
      A thousand people are packed into the jazz tent, hot as a cane cutters crotch, listening to violinist Michael Ward and his band sweat and propel the music out into the vast space.
      As I crouch below the stage taking pictures, thumping speakers thrum my bones like xylophones. All my life I've tried and failed to catch the elusive jazz bird. Now sound and the creation of sound has never been this close.
      Fingers dancing, bow sawing, Ward's whole body convulses into music. Then a roar beyond the song fills the tent, and a Louisiana rainstorm pounds the canvas. Hail and thunder, and you're sure Mr. Ward's bow strikes lightening.

Stepping over a pile of rotting books, photo albums and a painting of Jesus, I enter T.T. Williams' home. Lungs tighten in the mould-laden air. "I was born in this room sixty-five years ago," this woman explains, tears furrowing down her dark face. "And in this room over here I watched my grandfather die."
      Although Katrina is forever wed to New Orleans, she also affected an area close to the size of the United Kingdom, displacing about 1.5 million people. Here in this small fishing village of Coden, Alabama, three hours east of New Orleans, Katrina's storm surge rushed miles inland, flooding most of the houses.
      Ironically, a hurricane's destructive ally is the humble mold spore. When the floodwater receded, this insatiable little organism found the perfect habitat to flourish in the warm, damp places behind walls, under floors. Within days homes became biohazard chambers. Months ago church volunteers stripped out some of the mould-infested insulation, wallboards, and ceilings in T.T's home. But the river of disaster compassion has long run dry, the knot of governmental or insurance help too tight to untie. Now the house stands half-gutted and rotting, the poor of Coden forgotten.
      T.T lives in a white FEMA trailer parked out front. She invites me inside, pours iced tea. "How can the government spend billions in Iraq," T.T. asks, "when eight months after Katrina, so many of us still live like refugees in our own country?"
      But she is determined to stay and rebuild. "I have to," she says. "I can't abandon my ancestors."

On a street corner in New Orleans East, where whites seldom go, Mr. Ollie, 88 years old, describes how his house flooded in a surge of water fourteen feet high. All his life he has worked, picking cotton at six, then building bridges over the Mississippi River. Now he lives in the back of an abandoned store, where a spray-painted sign over the door warns: Do Not Enter. Toxins Inside. Hundreds of people drowned in this neighborhood, some of their rotting bodies found only weeks later by cadaver dogs sniffing through piles of rubble. "In order to get the bad guys," Mr. Ollie says, "God had to take some of the good people too."
      Johnny Ray Turner, a construction worker, with hands like worn leather, nods his agreement. Two weeks before Katrina, he dreamt a big storm hit and he had to swim for his life. "I could feel every splash of my arms and how the water tried to suck me under." It disturbed him so much, he told his preacher. The preacher said, it's just a dream, don't worry.
      Now his prophetic dreams frighten him. Two weeks ago he dreamt that a storm even bigger than Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast this summer. "And New Orleans will be no more," he says.
      "But why are you still here?" I ask.
      "When I see all the birds flying north again, I'll know it's time to leave. The rest I just put in the hands of the Lord."
      Two young men pull up in an SUV, offer to sell us crack.
      "Remember," Mr. Ollie says, as we shake hands goodbye, "God told us to be ready for when He comes."

At the end of my last day in this city, Father Dung Nguyen of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church shows where Mayor Nagin ordered a dump to be built for all the Katrina trash. Swatting mosquitoes, we stand on a spit of land between the Bayou Sauvage and the proposed site. The good Father describe how, when the next storm comes, it will wash the 80-foot high pile of Katrina toxins back into the Vietnamese community. Tomorrow they will march to City Hall to protest the dump. Father Nguyen admits it's going to be a tough fight. As he talks on, already late for evening Mass, I just can't take in any more. I want drive away from the sadness, fly away from the madness tomorrow.
      For relief, I walk down to the bayou, the first ten feet of tree trunks along the banks still coated with dry flood mud. I see two herons spearing frogs, and step obliviously closer. Then, a sudden thrashing in the bushes, and three startled alligators splash into the brine. Heart thumping, I watch them watching me, their eyes yellow slits above the dark water.

….End