For 13 evacuees, a hard trip down memory lane

Litania and Bobbie Banks haven't seen their gray frame house since the levees broke Aug. 31, flooding the Lower Ninth Ward. Dorothy Cage's son had warned her there was nothing worth saving in her once-well-kept home. As for Joseph Melton, he's simply curious, "wanting to see" the brick-faced house where he once lived.

These four and nine others are here to board a bus - call it the "closure bus" - that will wind through the Lower Ninth, the only way they and 3,600 previous riders have been able to gain access to their old neighborhood. The streets and structures, now mounds of rubble, are deemed too hazardous for people to roam on their own.

Most of today's evacuees come with equipment in hand: a cellphone, to describe the ride to relatives or friends in real time, and a camera or camcorder to capture the scene, probably their last mementos of the places where they raised children, barbecued chicken, or sang in a church choir. Add to those items a particle mask, courtesy of FEMA, to protect them from a landscape now coated in dust, mold, and asbestos.

On board the Gray Line mini-bus, retired Marine Col. Jerry Sneed gives a little pre-tour talk. The bus will make a loop around the neighborhood, he tells them. Then it will weave its way through the streets. He asks residents to shout out when they see their house, so the driver will stop.

"We'll try to get you very close," promises the ramrod-straight ex-marine. But he also tries to prepare them for what lies ahead: "That big-screen TV, the family pictures, they are all gone. The Lower Ninth Ward does not exist anymore."

No one will be allowed off the bus to look in their homes because many houses are collapsing from rot, states Colonel Sneed. Instead, the driver will stop at one brick house, deemed safe enough, and everyone can go inside to see what the flood has done.

Why can't they at least see if anything can be salvaged, someone asks. Maybe a favorite china cup or teddy bear that can be scrubbed clean.

"Two days ago we found six more bodies," comes the grave answer, "and we have no way of knowing the structural soundness of your homes."

As the bus swings past National Guard troops and slows to a crawl, Sneed's words take form in wood and steel. Houses that floated off their foundations landed atop other houses, or cars.

"Look at that, look at that," says one former resident, pointing to a house tilted on its side.

Bobbie Banks, though, is not daunted. "I want to go back. Alabama is not for me," she says after just a few minutes' ride. "Just let us go back and start cleaning up."

But that's not about to happen. The bus stops next to a house that has collapsed.

"It just happened," says the bus driver. "It wasn't like this on my last trip."

The neighborhood feels strange to these fellow travelers, though many lived in the Lower Ninth for years. The usual landmarks are gone, or are now piles of flotsam, and it's disorienting. "Where are we?" is a common question.

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