Ten Spurs

IB3IE§1r of the IB3IE§1rLiterary Nonfiction of

The Mayborn Conference

Vol. 3, 2009-,.,..

'~~'..

~~-...•.

Introduction by'-...•.Ken Wells... '-

Published byborn Graduate School of Journalism

at the University of orth Texasand

Foreword

Introduction

18 HEIRLOOM TOMATOES - Aimee Berger

26 RIVER OF PONIES - Alexandra Bonifield

34 STANDING AT CROSSROADS LUMBER - David Cicoletti

49 LADY IN THE HALL - Victor Epstein

A WRINKLED SUIT - Vance Gonzales

THROUGH THE GLASS,DARKLY - Kay Hubbard

LIMP - Audrie Palmer

THE DECISION - Andrew K. Rogers

HORSEPLAY - Denise Short

MY SHADOWS - Stanley Toilet

Authors

The Moyborn Conference

TEl'\! SPURS

"... 1saw the rest of her bo i ..the faded,sky blue housedress .. .reminded me of

my grandmother ... "

LADY IN THE HALLby Victor Epstein

Lady in the Hall was wearing a blue, cotton housedress and a dark sweater when wemet outside New Orleans in 2005. Her gray hair was cut short. She looked to be inher mid 80S.

Her unassuming garment reminded me of my Grandmother Margaret, who had apenchant for wearing housedresses until they were nearly diaphanous.

I first encountered Lady in the Hall on Sept. 6, 2005, a few miles south of Chalmette, aworking class community between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. She was facedown in a dark brown stew of bayou mud, feces and decomposing fat inside St. Rita'sNursing Home when my foot landed beside her skull. The week-old corpse was bloatedand the back of its elbows and knees were turning black. The receding floodwaters had leftan arrangement of plastic orange flowers beside her. I never saw Lady in the Hall's face,because the muck rose to her ears. She was wearing a sweater in the stifling Louisianaheat. Her arms were spread wide.

I'd flown into Lake Charles, Louisiana, five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall onthe Gulf Coast. Photographer Dan Acker and I drove more than two hundred miles fromthere through the flood of evacuees to New Orleans, which was awash in cops, soldiers,reporters, stray dogs, abandoned vehicles, half-crazed holdout residents and sewage-tinged floodwaters.

I'd covered more than a dozen hurricanes and severe tropical storms in the field and wasexpecting to rough it for a while. Disaster coverage is all about sacrifice - there's little inthe way of creature comforts - but the surreal, post-apocalyptic-like environment in NewOrleans was a singular experience.

The news from New Orleans was horrendous. But what the world didn't realize yet wasthat the calamity was even worse in Chalmette, which is between the Gulf of Mexico andthe Big Easy. It had been hit harder and received less emergency relief aid - almost all ofwhich had to pass through the chaos in New Orleans first.

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TEN SPURS

Katrina transformed St. Rita's Nursing Home into a tomb for more than half of itssixty-one elderly residents. I counted fifteen decomposing corpses there during the firstofficial body count. The rest weren't discovered until the flood waters receded. The finalcount was thirty-five. Some of the bodies were hidden by the dirty brown pond that hadformed around the building, which sits on a four-foot high concrete foundation. The lastcorpse was discovered in a tree several weeks later.

The story riveted the national spotlight on Chalmette and became one of the iconicevents of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. It also gouged a permanent mark oneveryone who had anything to do with it.

early four years later, I can still see it in my mind's eye. I can feel the sweltering heatand smell the tangy aroma of decaying tissue that clung to me and my two companionsafterward like cigarette smoke. Floodwaters rose above the concrete steps, spillinginside the open doorway of the north wing. The unlit interior looked like a deep,slippery cave littered with upended furniture and corpses. Darkness closed around us aswe moved deeper inside the single-story building. We could only move a few inches at atime in the putrid muck.

As the nimblest and the youngest, at forty-one, I soon found myself leading the way.With only a penlight for illumination, I typically smelled the decomposing bodies beforeI actually saw them. I'd call out "that's one" or "that's two" over my shoulder to ParishInspector Raymond Couture each time I encountered a corpse. He'd shout somethingback to let me know he was still back there, that I was not alone.

Lady in the Hall was NO.3.

I stumbled upon her in a flat area between piles of furniture. It was several secondsbefore I could even make sense of the tangle of mud and grey hair beneath me. Then Isaw the rest of her body and the faded sky blue house dress. The dress and the grey hairimmediately reminded me of my Grandmother Margaret and her two sisters. The threewidows who lived together and anchored my family were "The Graces" to us.

"Look out bro, there's a body on the other side of that dresser," I said to Ray. "Step toyour right on the way down or you'll land right on top of her."

It was an awkward time for reflection, with one foot on top of an upended dresser andthe other beside Lady in the Hall's head. A bead of sweat spattered against the insideof my glasses, snapping me back to the present. I had waded through my share oflukewarm sewage in New Orleans before venturing into St. Bernard Parish - whereChalmette serves as the county seat. But the yellow rivulet emanating from Lady in theHall was new and disturbing. The signature of decomposing fat, a paramedic wouldlater explain.

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VICTOR EpSTEIN

I pointed my penlight at Lady in the Hall as Ray inched toward her. He stepped onto thedresser and took a long look down, searching for any sign of friends or acquaintances.The parish inspector shifted his short, barrel-chested body and stretched a foot into themuck below.

"This is da wahrst thing I've evah seen and ah drug bodies to the levee aftah HurricaneBetsy in sixty-five," he said in Louisiana accent, brushing a beefy hand through his faceand hair.

We'll always be the only people who really understand what the count inside St. Rita'swas like, which is typical of the bonds that developed in those trying summer days.Coastal Louisiana had been transformed into a flooded wasteland where the only thingsthat mattered were how much you had suffered, how well you functioned under duress,and how much more discomfort you were willing to endure. After the storm, Louisianawas no longer divided by race, class or education. Katrina washed away those walls.

Ray and I are very different people. He grew up in St. Bernard Parish, has a heavybayou accent and the calloused hands of an outdoorsman who made his living skinningalligators, catching crawfish and working as a commercial fisherman. I grew up in theBronx, speak with a New York accent and have the soft hands of someone who makestheir living at a computer keyboard. But on that day, in that place, those differencesmeant nothing.

There were still haves and have-nots, but the haves had electricity, air conditioning,running water, television, working restaurants and gas stations. Even the calendarchanged. Instead of saying "Monday" or "Sept. 5," we kept track of time in post-Katrinaspeak: "Day Seven" or "the day the Superdome was evacuated."

Being a reporter in this kind of environment is analogous in some ways to being a sin-eater in Eighteenth Century England. You wind up assuming some of the emotionalweight of the events you witness without ever living them fully yourself, much as sin-eaters once assumed the sins of the newly deceased by eating a crust of bread that hadbeen laid on their chests.

Our mission as reporters is to strive for objectivity as we gather information - to avoidtaking sides and to distance ourselves emotionally from the stories we cover. However,most people don't open up to reporters who lack compassion and empathy. We'reconstantly trying to fulfill two contrary goals by getting information without gettingemotionally involved. There's no way to be a good person and not be impacted by someof the things we see, particularly in a place like St. Rita's. I doubt I've ever tried as hard todistance myself emotionally from a story or been hurt as badly.

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TEN SPURS

I've seen plenty of bodies during a twenty-eight year reporting career that began at agesixteen and included stints coverings cops and courts in the Bronx, Florida and Georgia. Iwas such a fixture in the St. Lucie Medical Examiner's office at one point that the forensictechnicians began asking me to help them close the corpses. That's the kind of experiencethat helped insulate me from the horrors inside St. Rita's. It also helped that there was noone who needed to be saved. Everyone had been dead for a week. So I didn't have to dealwith the ethical dilemma of becoming a participant by aiding a wounded survivor.

It sounds stupid to even talk about such concerns to a general audience that's been raisedon celebrity journalists like Geraldo Rivera and Maury Povich, but becoming a participantis taboo for old-school reporters. South African photographer Kevin Carter called attentionto the dilemma of getting the story without getting involved in it emotionally when hecommitted suicide in 1994 after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for a photo of a starvingAfrican toddler being stalked by a vulture. People never forgave Carter for not saving thatkid himself, even though there were thousands like her in the area.

St. Bernard Parish was in desperate shape on Day ine when I shared my shrinking supplyof Padron cigars with a friendly National Guard general I'd just interviewed. When hefound out I was trying to hitch a ride into Chalmette, he offered me a ride in aboard onehis of Blackhawk helicopters. The Parish was surrounded by floodwaters, accessible onlyby boat or helicopter. A residential area around one of its two major refineries had beentarred black with spilled oil.

I didn't know at the time how much more Chalmette had suffered than New Orleans. Sixmonths later, statistics showed that St. Bernard's Parish suffered one and nine-tenthsstorm-related fatalities for every thousand residents compared with one and two-tenthsdeaths per thousand in New Orleans. Several smaller communities, outside its protectivelevees, were virtually destroyed.

But on Day Nine, the parish was still nonexistent in the national news mix as reporterscovered the riots and looting in New Orleans and federal politicians scrambled forface-time on CNN. The parish remained invisible to outsiders when federal officials finallyresponded to the humanitarian crises at the Superdome and the New Orleans ConventionCenter, and Americans began to learn about the failed federal response.

That's why Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez was so cooperative when I showedup. He was desperate to get St. Bernard's story out: a litany of horrors that included tyingbodies to telephone poles at the height of the storm and rescuers who had dodgedstreetlights and submerged tractor trailers with their motorboats to reach people caught inthe floodwaters.

Then Junior told me something that stopped me in mid-scribble. "That's not da wahrst ofit," he said. "We think we've got a nussing home with thirty-five dead in it, but we ain'tbeen able to get to it because da water's been too high."

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VICTOR EpSTEIN

Junior said that five of St. Bernard's massive pumps had just returned to service,dropping floodwaters below the road to St. Rita's for the first time since the storm. Hetold me that a DMORT team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency waspulling bodies from the nursing home. DMORT is FEMA-speak for the Disaster MortuaryOperational Response Team - specialists charged with helping to clean up the more thaneighteen hundred corpses Katrina left behind.

Junior is a heavyset man in his late sixties, who sports a gold-topped cane and carrieshimself like the "Boss Hogg" character in the old Dukes of Hazard TV show. Thedifference is that Junior is whip-smart beneath his bumpkin exterior. He knew the bestway to help st. Bernard was to get its story on the wire.

Junior asked Ray Couture, sixty, and Ricky Melerine, fifty-four, to drive me to the scenein one of the five parish vehicles that still worked - a Public Works Department pickup. Iassumed they were sewage workers at the time because they looked like vagabonds. Aweek spent sleeping on borrowed floor in the same clothes will do that to a man.

All the cellular towers in St. Bernard had either been damaged or destroyed, which meantwe had no way to call for help if we ran into trouble. It also meant I had no way to file mystOIY.I had a hunch Junior would find a way to get me back to New Orleans.

Standing upright in the bed of the battered pickup truck, I clung to the cab for much ofthe fifteen minute ride to St. Rita's. We passed under splintered telephone poles hangingin the air from their cables and zigzagged through piles of debris. I'd never seen anythingto rival the destruction wrought by Katrina. The structural damage was reminiscent ofHomestead, Florida after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. But Katrina left a sickening scourgein her wake: a three-foot to six-foot-deep mixture of gasoline, oil, and sewage thatcovered almost everything. The toxic mix had been simmering in ninety-degree heat fora week. It wasn't just disgusting; it was septic. Every nick and scrape became infectedafter you waded in it. Clothes hung up to dry in the ninety degree heat eventuallyassumed rigid forms.

As we drove southeast from Chalmette, the helter-skelter landscape of shatteredbuildings gave way to flooded fields inhabited by limping horses, dead cattle, andbeached fishing boats. Dogs clustered around National Guard checkpoints, their fursticky with muck. Patrols could be heard shooting feral dogs elsewhere in the Parish.

Katrina marked almost every structure with a dark brown high-water line that ranged inheight from twelve to fifteen feet, depending upon the elevation of the ground beneaththem. Coffee-colored water lapped against State Highway 46 as we stopped beside thenursing home access road. The three of us stared out at the moat-like swamp around thesprawling structure.

There was no FEMA. obody.

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TEN SPURS

I don't think anything I saw or heard during my time in Louisiana surprised me as much aswhat happened next, when Ricky's told me that he was the commissioner for the Parishdistrict that included St. Rita's. "It doesn't look like anyone's been here yet to make dacount," he said. "Dis was my district. We gonna have to do it."

We grabbed a stray Jonboat floating next to the road, broke off some tree branches andpoled the aluminum skiff about one hundred fifty yards to a side door. Brown water sloshedover the top of the concrete stairs and into the interior as we tied up to the aluminumbanister outside. There was no fanfare, no warning sign that said "bad stuff here" - just twoswollen bodies in the main hallway that looked as if they'd been carved from butter. They hitRicky hard.

"I'm gonna stay with da boat fah a bit," he said shakily.

No one thought any less of him for it. In the context of the moment, it was a perfectlyreasonable reaction. A young paramedic carrying a shotgun would utter almost the samewords the next day when he accompanied me back inside the structure with photographerTim Fadek. The paramedic, who had been macho going in, was meek and quiet on the wayout. Tim had covered the conflict in Iraq and was handpicked to shoot the interior of St.Rita's because of his past experience photographing bodies. The shocking photos he tookthat day were removed from the wire after only a few minutes and have never beenpublished in any paper.

"This is the worst thing I have ever seen," Fadek told me.

People like to say that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," but I don't feel thatway. Mostly, I just feel a kind of familiar numbness when I see something horrible, as if thehorrible stuff is the norm and everything else is the exception. It's like I'm sitting in a chairinside my head, pushing the levers that move my arms and legs, while presenting animpassive face to the outside world.

That's always been enough to get me through the occasional body or two. But the body countinside St. Rita's just seemed to go on and on. It wasn't the worst thing I had seen - afterhaving been present at a score of autopsies. But it was the longest series of horrific, visceralevents I have ever witnessed. I saw bodies tangled in bed sheets against their bedrails,corpses with catheters or feeding tubes protruding from them, a.body here, a body there.

Each of them, I thought, could be somebody's grandmother or grandfather. What wentthrough each of their minds as the water slowly rose above their noses and mouths is toodisturbing to ponder. My biggest concerns at St. Rita's that first day were slipping into themuck in the hospital-style hallway and being bitten by snakes. The wooden doors to eachroom had swollen tight in their jambs and it was hard to force them open. I never knew whatI would find behind them. The first thing to hit me was the blinding summer light. Thehorror show inside didn't reveal itself until after my eyes adjusted to the glare.

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VICTOR EpSTEIN

e hall grew brighter and less forbidding with each open door. I remember seeing asnake slithering slowly past me through the muck, pushing the brown residue in

~posite directions with each rhythmic undulation of its sinuous body. The swingingeparating the north wing from the main lobby were blocked by debris on both sides,

- eluding several of the huge wooden wall units every room was equipped with. I wasieved to learn that we could go no further - until Ricky said we had to. "We gonna have to

o around to da other side. We gotta finish da job."

Ray suffers as well as anyone and I'm a task-oriented person, meaning that I can put up witha lot of discomfort provided I stay busy. But neither of us was looking forward to resuming- e earch. We were squinting in the bright sun as we poled through the muddy water in theparking lot. It was slow going as the tree branches scrabbled against the pavement below and.e fretted about pulling a sodden corpse to the surface.

'e passed the obese body of one elderly woman on the veranda. She was sitting on theconcrete floor with her back pressed into a corner, looking almost alive in a floral housedress. Again with the fucking housedress, I remember thinking.

The parking lot was full of partially submerged cars, their roofs covered in dead grass andvines. One of the vehicles was a full-size Hummer H2. "When we saw dat Hummer still inda parking lot a few days ago we knew we were in trouble, because dat's the first vehicle daywould have used to escape," Ricky said. "Da wata level rose from da ground to eight feet infifteen minutes and it did dat all ova da parish."

Fire officials told me the floodwaters reached as high as twenty-two feet in some areas ofSt. Bernard Parish. One house was deposited in the middle of a roadway, still sitting on itsconcrete foundation.

Ricky stayed with the boat when Ray and I headed inside the south wing. A blackened handstuck out from beneath a pile of furniture in one room. The sound of a rattlesnake greetedme from the debris of another. I closed the door without waiting for my eyes to adjust to thesunlight. "Don't go in there Ray," I said. "Rattlesnake."

I found four bodies in the next room. In the lobby, the frail body of one elderly man wasdraped over a chair like a folded suit jacket. A statue of the Virgin Mary stared out the lockedfront door beside him, palms forward.

Two days later I was squeezing my way through a cluster of reporters around Vice PresidentDick Cheney and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco as they toured the 17th Street leveebreach in New Orleans. Cheney had been publicly cursed a few hours earlier by a survivorin Mississippi. I rarely feel out of place among my fellow reporters. But I felt awkward thatafternoon among the group that had flown in from the land of air conditioning to meet withthe vice president and governor. The ring of crisp khaki slacks and pinpoint oxford shirtsseemed to part more easily than normal as I pushed forward in my dirty shorts and vest.

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I identified myself and asked Cheney how it was possible for fifty Canadian mounted policeto find their way to St. Bernard Parish - scene of the st. Rita's Nursing Home tragedy - aweek before anyone from the federal government. His intelligent eyes measured me fora second as he sorted through the possible responses. I knew he was aware of what hadtranspired there from my prior conversations with his advance team, who had been weighingthe wisdom of a stop in Chalmette. The pause between question and answer seemed todrag on. "I'm not familiar "lith that situation," Cheney finally said, unfurling the politicalequivalent of a white flag.

I wound up staying in New Orleans, with neither air conditioning nor potable water, fornearly two weeks. I was afraid to leave, even to spend a night in Baton Rouge, because of thepersistent rumor that the Feds were going to bar reporters from entering the disaster area.

The Katrina field reporting team was led by Kristin "KJ" Jensen, who sent a new reporter toNew Orleans just about every day from her own location in Baton Rouge with food, waterand gasoline for us. She even sent us new underwear and shorts to replace our rottingclothes. We spoke several times each day, but we were worlds apart. KJ still lived in aworld of AC and restaurants. Dan and I made do at first in a sealed-up Best Western Hotelwithout electricity, lights, air conditioning and working toilets. The hotel stunk like a latrine,but it had a shotgun-toting security guard in the lobby. His presence was a comfort as wemeandered through the dark street outside each night, cradling our laptop computers as wetried to lock in a signal from one of the city's damaged cell towers.

Outside our hotel, tens of thousands were without food, shelter and any sense of security.The floor of our room was still littered with dozens of price tags from earrings looted by itsprior occupants. On Day Eleven, we upgraded to a rental house in Jefferson Parish, whichhad been spared the full force of Katrina's fury. The new place had running water - non-potable- and a balky generator that allowed us to plug in our electric fans and lights. Acooler of diluted bleach served as a boot-wash on the front porch.

We were living on beef jerky and MREs, the military's acronym for meals ready to eat. Iremember salivating one afternoon when KJ interrupted a cell phone conversation to ordersandwiches at Subway. "Listen to this," I said to Dan, moving my head next to his. We lickedour lips greedily as the words "tuna on whole wheat" and "roast beef and provolone" chirpedout of the tiny speaker.

A week later, I was back in Washington, D.C., eating steak and drinking single malt Macallanscotch at a clubby restaurant near the White House named Old Ebbitt Grill. Five of the topeditors at Bloomberg gathered there with the Katrina field team to celebrate our efforts inNew Orleans. The consensus seemed to be that I'd gotten hot at the ideal time, anchoringour coverage of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history with a string of big stories. I wasproud of my work and it was comforting to sit beside my teammates again. But I knew Rickyand Ray were still struggling. They didn't have a normal home and a normal life waiting forthem somewhere else.

VICTOR EpSTEIN

My thoughts kept drifting back to them and to Lady in the Hall. I wondered about herchildren and grandchildren. I was certain that somewhere, someone missed her as muchas I missed Grandma Margaret. She taught me to count to ten before letting anger fly outmy mouth. She always cleaned and washed my clothes whenever she visited. I rememberher smelling like ivory soap as she balled up my socks and put them in the drawer. Shewould keep me company when I was eating, even if she wasn't eating anything herself."Slow down," she would say. "The food's not going anywhere."

I wondered if ~he Lady in the Hall left her loved ones with such lasting memories. I knewwith certainty that she deserved a better ending than the one she received. Reportersaren't supposed to dwell on such thoughts, but it's hard to be a human being and not coverstories that keep you up at night afterward. I've never been the kind of reporter who wouldpush a microphone in front of a mourning parent and ask, "How are you feeling?" But I'vepushed hard to get stories first the right way.

A scoop on the death of a baby that had been wounded during a drug-related shootingnagged at me for years, not because the child would have lived had I acted differently,but because there are just some races a good person shouldn't worry about winning. DidI push too hard? Is it right for a decent person to pursue such scoops? Those are the kindof questions you ponder late at night as a reporter if you care about people. You wind upwondering if it's possible to be both a good person and a good journalist. And you usuallydo so alone.

Reporters rarely talk about the way stories impact us for fear of being accused by oureditors of being too emotionally involved to cover them. After a while, that emotionaldetachment becomes second nature. But you don't forget about a place and a time likeHurricane Katrina that easily. Those coping skills haven't been invented yet.

I recounted the body count during the dinner at Old Ebbitt Grill at the request of my oldereditors. It seemed to release painful images imbedded in their memories. ''You've probablygot post-traumatic stress disorder," one said. "I remember when I was covering the warin Bosnia. I thought I was fine. Then one day I was vacationing at the beach with my wifeand children in Scandinavia. I started having hallucinations. 'Boom, boom, boom,' I sawgrenades and mortars exploding all around us."

Another recalled coming back from covering Vietnam to a life of hallucinations,nightmares, and explosions. Then a third. "I hate to let you guys down," I said, "but I don'tthink I've got PTSD. I haven't had a single nightmare. I even went back to St. Rita's thenext day with a photographer. Really, I think I'm fine."

They were skeptical. "That's what everybody says," one told me.

In hindsight, I can see now that Katrina made a lot of people a little crazy. Dr. BryanBertucci of Chalmette estimated that sixty percent of the survivors in St. Bernard were

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TEN SPURS

still clinically depressed six months after the storm. A delusional, dehydrated woman with ashotgun was rescued from a closet in her home in the Parish three weeks after Katrina madelandfall. I remember the words businessman Rick Torres called to his wife and friends thefirst time he saw what was left of his hardware store in New Orleans' Uptown neighborhood.It had been in the family since 1938.

"That's my life," he said matter-of-factly, pulling a revolver from his waders as he stood in thewaist-high water outside. "Somebody come over here and take my gun before I shoot myself."

I saw the Lady in the Hall during my waking hours for a few weeks afterward, much assomeone's thoughts might wander to a recently deceased friend. But she was never a sourceof horror.

I visited Ricky a few months later and discovered that his hair had turned a snowy white. Thesame thing happened to my dad during World War II, when he served as a combat engineerin Europe. Instead of wondering if I had post traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD, I startedwondering why I didn't. I like to think I'm a nice guy. Why hadn't my hair turned white? Iwondered what kind of person could see the things Ricky and I had seen and not be impactedby them. Revolving the worst scenes in my mind, I was searching for answers to questionsthat I couldn't even verbalize.

One day I had an epiphany.

I recalled an indignant voice that broke the silence at St. Rita's as we were finishing the hour-long count. Ray and I were in the lobby, where a few beams of sunlight shone on the bodiesand debris around us. I was looking up at the high water mark all around the big room. "Thisain't right," the voice said, dripping venom. "These guys never had a fucking chance and thatain't right."

I didn't even realize who was talking until I glanced at Ray and saw him looking back atme. The outraged voice was my own. The "me" I keep penned up inside. The "me" that isn'ta detached, professional observer of the human condition. The "me" that knows each ofthe bodies I saw inside St. Rita's is someone's grandmother and grandfather, just like myGrandma Margaret. For a brief moment, my professional detachment had been overwhelmedby my humanity.

As it should be.

The second moment of clarity for me occurred about a year after Katrina when a co-workerRussell Wing asked to see the photos Tim Fadek had snapped inside St. Rita's. Russ is agentle giant, who stands about six-foot-four-inches tall and probably weighs about twohundred eighty pounds. He's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. Russ told me he wasthinking about venturing into the field to help out with the next hurricane. He wanted toknow what to expect: "how bad is bad?"

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VICTOR EpSTEIN

I had kept Fadek's digital photo of "Lady in the Hall" on my hard drive. For some reason,I double-clicked it open. Russ stared at the shot for a full ten seconds, then turned tome with anger in his eyes. "Don't you ever show me anything like that again," he said,stalking away.

I was surprised at first, and a bit hurt. But his reaction made more sense as I replayedthe incident in my mind. That's how a good person should react, I thought. You're notsupposed to get used to some things.

It's ok to be outraged.

I realize now that people are supposed to be emotionally involved. Continuing to pursueobjectivity in the face of those emotional entanglements is what makes us good reportersand good people. Not denying them. Somehow, I guess Ijust got used to bodies and tolooking at them with a professional detachment. After a while, it became second nature.

When I first sat down to write this story I was surprised to find myself trembling attimes, and even more surprised when I realized my biggest concern was concealing thoseshakes from my new wife. Clearly, there was more going on than I realized. If that meansI've had a touch of PTSD, then PTSD is an awfully complicated way of saying someone issad. I guess I've seen some sad things.

I still have Fadek's photo of Lady in the Hall on my hard drive. I can't bring myself todelete her, though there are times when it's tempting. I just don't think it would be rightto forget her that completely - to destroy the evidence if you will. To me, that wouldbe a sin. Good people have to remember such things. We can't hide from them, sanitizethem or pretend they don't exist.

We can neither pretend that the areas devastated by Katrina will ever be the same, northat those of us who lived the news of the day will ever be the same.

Reporters are meant to bear witness.

I'm also a human being.

If Lady in the Hall taught me anything, it's that you can't be one without the other.

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