Picking up the pieces

NEW ORLEANS – All that’s left of 78 years of life can now be packed in six cardboard boxes.

There are two Pyrex bowls, five martini glasses, dishes, jewelry and knickknacks, including a crystal angel and a collection of ceramic cats.

They reeked of fish, feces and fetid water, but they were everything that could be salvaged from Rosemary Campo’s New Orleans home.

“This part of my life is over,” she said. “This is worse than I ever imagined.”

On Sunday, nearly two months after Hurricane Katrina forced her to flee to Spokane, Campo returned to her house for the first time.

Along with her two sons, she pulled up in a green rental car near her home on Paris Avenue. “This looks like a war zone,” said Charlie Campo, her oldest son, who had driven more than 2,400 miles to bring her to Spokane.

Her other son, John Campo – the Spokane resident who invited his mom and brother to stay with him after Katrina – was quiet when he got out of the car. He just shook his head as he watched his mother slowly walk toward the one-story brick home.

Like other parts of New Orleans’ Gentilly section – a racially mixed, mostly middle-class area between downtown and Lake Pontchartrain – Rosemary Campo’s neighborhood was ravaged by the flood waters that flowed out of a breach in the London Avenue Canal. It was only two weeks ago that residents were allowed back to assess the damage.

As she approached the four-bedroom house that had been her home for the last 45 years, Rosemary Campo began to cry.

“Ain’t no way I can live here again,” she sobbed, even before walking inside the door. “Ain’t no way I can live in this part of the city again.”

Her neighborhood on Sunday morning was eerily quiet except for the occasional buzz of a chain saw. The streets had been cleared, but the sidewalks were covered with tree branches, trash and broken furniture. Katrina even blew the 6-foot white cross off the steeple of St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church, located kitty-corner from Rosemary’s home and where she could be found at Mass every Sunday.

Dried mud, looking like cracked ceramic, blanketed everything except the recently posted signs advertising deals on hurricane cleanup.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Rosemary Campo had been hopeful she could salvage the family home.

While waiting for their connecting flight to New Orleans in the Denver airport, she and her sons joked and told stories as they ate breakfast.

“We’re going to the Big Easy,” she said playfully, as though she were headed for the casinos of Vegas instead of a disaster area.

“You mean the Big Sleazy,” teased Charlie. “The big sleazy soggy.”

There was little laughter on Sunday as they opened the back door, unleashing an overwhelming odor of rotten eggs, mold and sewage.

Wearing white painter suits, old hiking boots, rubber gloves and respirators that made them look like aliens, they ventured inside and gasped at the sight.

Mold – black and fuzzy with tinges of purple and blue – covered the flowered wallpaper, creeping past the 5- to 6-foot-high water marks all the way up to the ceiling. The flood had swept up all the furniture, churned it around and left it soaked and broken throughout the house. The refrigerator door was wide open and its dark, putrid contents covered the floor like a sticky, primordial ooze.

Charlie could only utter profanities. John turned on a flashlight and forged on into the pitch-black bedrooms, his mom close behind.

It took the help of old friends – Charlie and Paula Bongiovanni who drove down from Baton Rouge – to move the debris away from the doorways so that Rosemary could look through her things.

“John,” she called out throughout the morning from various rooms. “John, come here! Come help me!”

Rosemary kept her jewelry and cash throughout the house in kitchen cabinets and chest drawers. By the time they were able to pry open a rusty old safe and find all her secret hiding places, her team of helpers had discovered $1,000 worth of mucky, stinky bills that they had to dry outside on the dead grass along with other odds and ends.

The family was able to save the 25 medals that Rosemary won in various Senior Olympics competitions, but the photo albums of her late husband and her sons when they were babies were lost to mold and muck.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Campo,” said the insurance agent from the Allstate National Catastrophe Team, after inspecting Rosemary’s home.

“You expect a little damage, but you never dream that everything would be destroyed,” she replied. “I’m a widow, 78 years old. How the hell can I start all over?”

Rosemary’s flood insurance is worth about $125,000, plus another $25,000 for the contents of her home. She may get a little more for wind damage, but not much. The money’s not enough to fix the house that she and her husband had bought brand new in 1960. She would have to strip the house down to the studs because of all the mold. And even if she could afford to rebuild, all the other homes around her will likely remain empty. Rosemary plans to take over her son Charlie’s apartment in nearby Jefferson Parish, while she figures out what to do next. New Orleans, she said, is her home, and she wants to return despite pleas from her sons to come back to Spokane.

“It’s not just my mother,” said John. “Take every house in the neighborhood and you can have an encyclopedia of tragic stories. We’re just a drop in the bucket.”

By 2 p.m., after digging through the soggy mess and breathing fetid air for nearly four hours, everyone was ready to strip off their gloves and go home. But Rosemary kept going back in, determined to save every little thing she could.

“Where’s my bowling ball?” she asked, digging through the Mario Lanza records, poker chips and other junk in a closet. “It’s gotta be here.”

“The mold’s getting to you, Mom,” Charlie said from the doorway. “A bowling ball? The bowling alley’s gone!”

In a more serious tone, he turned to the Bongiovannis and said: “The sad part is, it’s all gone. (The flood) sure didn’t spare anything.”

Rosemary eventually emerged from the dank closet with a stinky green bag containing a purple and teal bowling ball.

She seemed almost irrational in her determination to save whatever she could, but John, the more sentimental of the two brothers, continued to help.

“This part of my life is now over,” Rosemary said, ignoring Charlie as he begged his mom to dump everything and get back in the car. “I’m too busy right now to cry.”

Among the debris that the flood water left outside her home was a torn, moldy hardcover book titled, “When All You Ever Wanted is Never Enough.” Rosemary picked it up and glanced through the pages.

“Was there something I was supposed to do with my life?” she said, reading the title of the first chapter out loud. The introductory page contained a quote from the philosopher Carl Jung and a short passage from the Bible:

“Utter futility. All is futility. – Ecclesiastes 1:1.”