They dogged me interminably. Those niggling bean counters, the ones in charge of the world and of my destiny. All I wanted was a license to practice medicine in Mississippi. They wanted a copy of my diploma, as if such a piece of paper qualifies as proof that I completed medical school, and more importantly, learned something in the process. I thought, naive me, that a valid license in another state, a verification letter from my residency program, a valid DEA certificate, and an active listing with two medical specialty boards would be proof enough. Hardly.
The problem: I left that piece of paper behind when I evacuated for Hurricane Katrina. My diploma was somewhere in what was left of my flooded home.
I tried to order a new copy from my medical school, but that would take 12 weeks. So, after explaining repeatedly that my diploma was lost, and after getting letters every single week for 2 months straight saying that I had to produce it, I gave up and decided that I would try to extricate the thing from my ruined home, come what may.
One fine Saturday morning, my wife and I set out for our old home in Chalmette, LA. We took with us the tools I knew we would need to prove unequivocally that I am a well-educated American Medical Graduate -- a hammer, a shovel, a set of screwdrivers, plumber's boots, and an ax.
The trip through New Orleans has changed significantly since the days right after the storm. The city is now well divided into the quick and the dead, the boundary between recovering communities and struggling ones snaking thought the city like the sharp line of dry gangrene on a withered limb. Those areas that have survived the storm have consolidated into spaces of vivacious activity, while those most heavily hit remain sagging and crushed, almost as they were in August.
Our neighborhood was showing some signs of life. A few of the houses were now gutted of flooded material and stood empty, stripped inside to the bare studs. The FEMA-supplied trailer, ubiquitous in recovering areas of the city, was rare but nonetheless present. This meant a few people were moving back in, and starting to rebuild. There was maybe one trailer on every block -- not many, but a start.
Our street was still blocked by a house that had been swept off its lot on the back street of our subdivision. It sits intact, slab and all, right in the middle of Bradbury Drive. Our new neighbors.
Before we went into our house we paused to look at the maple tree in our front yard. It was under 12 feet of saltwater for 9 days, and stood up to 140 mph winds. Most of its branches were stripped away, but there it stood, breathing green leaves in defiance of the surrounding devastation. The only living tree on our block, it is a symbol of nature's immortality if there ever was one.
Then to work. First, to get some light in the house, we pried the plywood we had used to board up our doors and windows before the storm off the front door and a back window. We moved in. To get the front door to open and close freely, I had to shovel away about 6 inches of swamp mud in our foyer.
Our door had a large hole in it near the lock, a calling card left by the National Guardsmen who broke the door down in the days after the storm. They were looking for dead bodies, and to let us know they found none they kindly left the number 0 spray-painted in hot orange on the front of our house.
My diploma, we knew, was in the utility room. In preparation for the storm, my wife took a number of important items and stored them there, some inside the clothes dryer and some wedged between the washing machine and the wall. She was thinking of wind damage rather than flooding, and the tiny utility room was the most secluded room in our house. Unfortunately, when the water rose the washer and dryer floated up and resettled against the door, wedging it closed. The water rose all the way to the ceiling, soaking it and causing it to collapse, which left a layer of insulation and sheet rock on top of everything. Getting the diploma out would not be easy, which was why I put it off for so long.
The door was immobile, so I went at it with the ax. In a few minutes it was in splinters and I was inside the room. Next, with a shovel I was able to clear away the sodden insulation and sheet rock and took a look around.
Under the washer I spotted a stack of what looked like picture frames. The first one I tried to pick up came apart in my hands. I recognized it as a commendation from the French government to my mother's great uncle for distinguished service in the French Army during World War I. Under that was my residency certificate. Also soaked, and falling to unreadable pieces as I tried to peel it up. And under that, there it was, my medical school diploma. Carefully I was able to separate it from the muddy floor. I lifted it up, and my wife extended her hands to receive it. She quickly carried it off like an OB nurse whisking off an afterbirth.
In a sweep of the house we recovered a few dishes from the kitchen, and most of our wedding china, which was filthy but remarkably intact. Piece by piece we carried everything outside, and lined the items up on the driveway to dry.
Across the street, our old neighbor, Mr. Jim, was home. The 77 year-old Korean War veteran was slowly stripping moldy sheetrock from his walls and carrying the pieces out to the street. A huge pile of debris stood in front of his house. It looked like his flooded home had retched up its guts, the pile of rubble a mound of vomitus on the sidewalk. He had set up in an RV about a half a mile away and was living out of it, renting a small parking space next to an old shop that had power and, in the American entrepreneurial spirit, had converted its parking lot into a temporary trailer park. His wife sat in the front seat of his pickup, patiently watching us through the windshield. She had lung disease, and he didn't want her coming into the house to breathe the dust and mildew.
There was at least a ton of debris in front of Mr. Jim's house. He had moved every bit of it by himself.
Like the good neighbor he always was, Mr. Jim stopped to talk. He planned to strip out his home and then wait to see how things developed. If there was enough activity in the neighborhood, he would eventually sell or rebuild. Like all of us, he was waiting to see what would happen. None of us want to put money into our houses and then be the only person on a block of abandoned houses. So we all wait in community limbo, to see if a critical mass of citizens returns to make repairs worthwhile.
Mr. Jim had news about Mr. Brian, his 75 year-old next-door neighbor and the inhabitant of the house directly across the street from ours.
As he spoke, I remembered the last time I saw Mr. Brian. It was August 28, the morning before Katrina. We were packing up our car to leave town and Mr. Brian walked across the street to speak to my wife.
"I have never left for a storm before, but I'm leaving now," he had told her then. My wife had asked him if he thought the Mississippi River would overflow. "Oh, no," Mr. Brian had said. "The water is going to come from that way." He then pointed down the street in the direction of the levee facing the 40 Arpent canal, then 17 feet high but today only a nubbin.
Mr. Brian left his home that morning, and died during the evacuation. Mr. Jim said he heard it was pneumonia. The story Mr. Jim heard was that during the evacuation Mr. Bryan got sick with chest congestion and fever and that his family was unable to find him a hospital.
That would be ironic if true: He had lived 4 years across the street from a doctor (me) and then died because he couldn't get appropriate medical care.
As we stood there talking amid the ruins, a tourist bus cruised around the corner. I had heard that visitors to the city were taking tours of the disaster zone, but so far I had not seen it. I took a certain grim pride in knowing that my neighborhood had made the National Registry of Devastated Places. Maybe we should apply for National Monument status.
The sun was hanging low; time to move on. We collected our now-dried stuff from the driveway. Back at my mother-in-law's house later that day, we had everything spread out in the grass again. In the cool January air, as the daylight failed us, we hosed down all the dishes to get the swamp mud off and then put them away in the garage.
Before I went to sleep that night, I had a vision. I saw my wife and I preparing a dinner at my new house, with FEMA director Michael Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff the honored guests. We were serving them food on our wedding china, the plates that had soaked in the equivalent of sewer water for nine days. Naturally we hadn't bothered to wash them very well.
My tattered diploma came back to our new home in McComb in the back seat of our car. On Monday I made a photocopy of it, and impishly sent the faded image to the bean counters.