by Chris Rose
And there are subtle rewards to it all.
“I don’t see an incredible nobility in painting houses,” St. John says. “But we’re the last ones in during the renovation process, so we’re here when the families start moving back in, carrying their children’s furniture back into these houses.”
He pauses. “I’m proud of that. I don’t envision being a housepainter for the rest of my days, but we’re doing something good here. And rest assured: once we’ve got all these big blank walls finished, we’re not shy about letting them know who to call if they need something to hang on them.”
“She Rescued My Heart”
9/14/06
At the same time Hurricane Katrina was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean last August, Katie McClelland was attending a seminar in Atlanta on animal rescue techniques.
The instructor, Meredith Shields, a rescue specialist with the American Humane Association, had been closely following the storm’s track and asked the class, “If this turns into something serious, who’s interested in helping out?”
McClelland put her hand up.
At twenty-nine, McClelland had recently switched careers from television reporting to working for the Atlanta Humane Society. “I wanted to get out of the hustle and bustle and work with animals,” she said.
When Katrina took out the southern coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana, McClelland said, she went to her supervisors at the Atlanta Humane Society and asked for a leave of absence to help. They said no. She went anyway.
“I don’t know,” she mused. “I just felt this was something I had to do. I had just come out of a relationship and my life was in flux and I wanted to get involved in something that wasn’t about me.”
So she signed up with Shields and the American Humane Association as a volunteer and headed to New Orleans.
At the same time, across the country in Eugene, Oregon, a pharmaceutical sales rep named Paul Dyer got word that his National Guard unit was activating immediately for deployment to New Orleans.
At twenty-eight, he was floundering also. He felt static, as if he wasn’t moving forward. Like McClelland, he’d been thinking about a career switch and had also just extricated himself from a bad relationship.
Getting called up for emergency Guard service was almost a relief, freeing him from introspection and locking him into his autopilot, duty-bound role as a captain in the U.S. Army.
In the immediate aftermath of Katrina—with no central command to guide them—military, medical, and humanitarian organizations fanned out across the Gulf Coast, looking for dry, safe areas from which to stage their search-and-rescue operations.
Dyer’s 186th Infantry Regiment set up camp on the campus of Delgado Community College in Mid-City. Their tasks included clearing Esplanade Avenue for passage, powering up and securing the New Orleans Museum of Art, searching for survivors by airboat in the City Park area, and stemming the rising tide of looting activity from Esplanade Ridge through Gentilly.
Several days later, the American Humane Association showed up at Delgado and set up camp in the same parking lot.
“We were two independent organizations; we didn’t know quite what to do with each other,” Dyer says.
But one thing was clear in the lawless environs of New Orleans: the animal rescue folks were going to need security.
Dyer was handed supervision of the security details. He assigned himself to Team 6. That was McClelland’s team.
And so began a story of love among the ruins.
For three days they worked side by side, nonstop, breaking into homes whose owners had contacted a national hotline for help.
At night, he slept on the roof of a classroom building in the open air; she bunked down with her team in the parking lot. They spent what little free time they had hanging out in the college courtyard, getting to know each other.
“Her dedication was amazing to me,” Dyer recounts. “I mean, I was in the Army and they called me and told me we had to do this. I just got shipped here. I didn’t make a choice. Not her. She gave up everything and came here to help. That’s a real volunteer. She’s the real hero in all of this.”
It was September 19 when they met—one year ago today—but three days later, the impending arrival of Hurricane Rita sent their outfits in different directions. They talked every day by phone as they continued their respective missions into October.
As they headed home to their respective coasts—without ever having shared as much as a kiss—they made a promise to each other: the first one who could find a job in the other one’s town would move.
By Halloween, McClelland had dusted off her television résumé and landed a job as a ten o’clock news anchor with the Fox affiliate in Eugene. Duly motivated, Dyer enrolled at Portland State University to study for an MBA in hospital administration.
When it came time to plan a wedding, it was a no-brainer: the courtyard at Delgado.
So, this past Sunday night, McClelland, Dyer, and two dozen friends and family members gathered for the event.
Though the bridesmaids wore matching linen gowns—a sign that at least some planning went into the affair—the postceremony “reception” consisted of flowers purchased from Sam’s Club in Metairie, a lemon cream cake from the A&P on Magazine Street, and four bottles of champagne from a downtown liquor store, chilled in four ice buckets “commandeered” from their hotel rooms in the CBD.
A nondenominational New Orleans minister, Don Bohn, performed the service. His wife, Samantha, did the photography. McClelland and Dyer had found them online.
As the bridesmaids and groomsmen lined up and McClelland walked into the courtyard from a nearby parking lot, the crowd took up an improvisational a capella version of “The Wedding March”: “Dum dum, da-dum . . .”
During the brief service, a visibly nervous Dyer pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and read this:
One year ago my life changed in a way that only poets can dream. I was shipped to a city in ruins to help others recover from a terrible disaster. The funny thing was: My life, much like the city of New Orleans, was a disaster.
I had little direction, little guidance and little confidence I would ever find what my life was meant to be. Then, on a muggy afternoon in this very parking lot, I was introduced to a woman who, unlike me, volunteered to help rescue helpless animals with no home, no food and no water. Little did she know, but she rescued my heart that day as well.
My life has changed. Like the city of New Orleans being rebuilt, my life is being rebuilt in a way that I can be proud of. To everyone here as my witnesses, I share with you this: True love is real and oftentimes it is found where you least expect it.
The only sounds were sniffles and crickets. They were pronounced man and wife.
Asked about the difference between this moment and when they all met a year ago in this same spot, bridesmaid Colleen Porth, a pet rescuer from Austin, Texas, said, “We smell better now.”
Said McClelland, “It seems like everyone we worked with here changed after they left. Everyone either got divorced or changed jobs or moved to a new state or just started over again in some way because of what they saw here and what happened to them here.
“We went into these homes together and we would find clothes laid out on someone’s bed for work the next day and the people were now a thousand miles away and it made you realize: you never know when it’s all going to be over. New Orleans changed all of us so much. It will always be a part of us.”
Once the cake was cut and the champagne poured, Walter McClelland, the father of the bride, raised a plastic cup as the sun set over the courtyard and said, “Paul, welcome to our family.”
A sentiment to which I would like to add, if I may, to Paul and Katie, and your friends and family: Welcome to our family.
The Family of New Orleans.
Miss Ellen Deserved Better
12/3/06
As far as crimes go in this town, the incident in the parking lot on South Clea
rview Parkway outside Marshalls department store on October 26 was hardly a blip on the screen.
An elderly woman was walking with an armful of packages. A couple of guys pulled up in a car. They grabbed her purse, knocking her to the ground. They drove off with a haul that amounted to forty bucks.
Witnesses ran over to help the victim. The cops came. A report was filed.
In an era of brazen daylight shootings, horrific gangland executions, and postdisaster fraud schemes that run into the millions of dollars, this was just a petty annoyance, a piece of paperwork, a statistic. Except for one lingering detail.
The victim, eighty-five-year-old Ellen Montgomery, broke her left hip when she hit the ground. She had an emergency hip replacement operation at Ochsner Hospital and spent three days in postop and then nine days in rehab.
Her son Jamie picked her up and brought her to his house in Gentilly. By mid-November, she was making good progress with a walker; despite her age and injury, Ellen Montgomery’s life had been marked by an unbending will to get by on her own.
But on Friday, November 17, she complained of shortness of breath and had trouble with her balance. Sunday the nineteenth, she collapsed in the kitchen. An ambulance rushed her back to Ochsner, where doctors tried to revive her. But in the end, she died of a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot in the lung.
The Jefferson Parish coroner’s office determined that the blood clot was a result of the hip surgery and therefore a direct result of the purse snatching, and thus she became another member of the mounting murder victim roster in Jefferson Parish.
The muggers have never been caught.
Ellen Montgomery was my friend and, at times, my muse.
In the Days of Pain that followed Hurricane Katrina, she was my only neighbor, and it’s funny; I guess as a result of some sort of ageism on my part, during the weeks we spent together last fall, I always had this self-delusional notion that I was taking care of this old and eccentric woman, helping her get through the traumatic aftermath of Katrina, when, in fact, she was taking care of me.
But I bet she knew it the whole time.
We had first met shortly after I bought my house on Magazine Street in 1992. Her house had the classic pack rat/cat lady look to it, all paint-peeled and overgrown, hidden from the street by an iron fence and tangled trees that conjured Boo Radley or some other kind of weird or scary resident therein.
She lived there alone—unless you count her thirty-three cats.
Our single encounter way back then wound up being a small, life-changing event for me. I was single, reckless, and in a world of financial and legal trouble. My car was wrecked and my phone service cut off for months because I couldn’t make the bill.
My home had been burglarized three times in a six-week period, pretty much relieving me of all my possessions and distractions. I think I can say with certainty that it was the roughest patch, both personally and professionally, that I had ever known and would know until the fall of 2005.
I was thirty-two years old and welcome to any new idea or direction that might drag me out of my self-pitying ways. Miss Ellen had heard about me—the troubled soul on the block—and she offered what she thought was the key to happiness: a stray dog.
Lord knows where she got the thing, but its presence in Miss Ellen’s house was none too welcome by the feline masses that had been living there for years. The dog needed a home and I needed something, anything, and that’s how I wound up adopting an exotic silvery-blue mutt of some sort of husky derivation whom I named Alibi and who taught me the notion of unconditional love and who gave me something to do, something to love, and something to look forward to in an otherwise bleak time.
Alibi left a lasting impression. In the years since, I have adopted four more homeless dogs.
After that, I rarely saw Miss Ellen. Truthfully, she had made a great impact on my life, but in my typically self-absorbed way, I never really kept in touch with her. She had her life, I had mine, and there weren’t many opportunities for a shut-in cat lady and a gregarious party boy to commune.
And that was my loss, not hers.
I first returned to my home near Audubon Park on Monday, September 5, one week after the hurricane. There was no one anywhere—desolate, messy streets, debris and glass everywhere, and few signs of life other than police cars, Army Humvees, heavy-equipment trucks, and pickups pulling boats up and down Magazine Street.
I ran into my neighbor Martin as he was pulling up stakes and getting out of town after riding out the storm. He told me the area was basically abandoned except for Miss Ellen and her cats.
He had checked in on her and told me her stash of pet food and canned goods looked ample enough to sustain her until the city came back to life, and he had given her a radio and batteries, but that if I could look in on her from time to time, that would be helpful.
She had refused to evacuate and stowed away in her own home for the week because she feared that the police or the military would force her to leave. Then there would be no one to look after her cats. She told me she’d rather die with her cats in New Orleans than live elsewhere without them.
She was neither scared nor delusional nor lonely. In fact, in many ways, the near-total evacuation of New Orleans—the people, not the animals, that is—created a veritable Utopia for this self-reliant, literary, and poetic lover of animals, nature, and solitude, a woman of the simplest means imaginable with no need for modern technology and all of its noise and intrusions.
She was a woman of uncommon serenity and quiet devotion, living on the very margin of society, nestled among her modest but plentiful belongings—mostly books and paintings—in a nineteenth-century bungalow—more of a cabin than a house, really—with no cable, no air-conditioning, no shower, no lawn mower, computer, or cell phone, no ungainly attachments to the material world other than a beat-up old blue sedan for her occasional outings to the grocery, the pet store, the doctor, or church.
To her, the aftermath was an unfortunate circumstance, to be sure, but it was almost Paradise. Imagine a day, a week, a month—a whole season—with nothing to do but read dusty old novels, write poems about the weather and nature, and tend to her magnificent brood of felines, her family, some affectionate and playful, some aloof and nocturnal, all of them beloved and cared for with the patience and attention of a mother.
During daylight hours, she would often scurry about the neighborhood, literally ducking behind cars and between houses when the National Guard drove by, collecting slate roof shingles that had scattered all over the streets and yards of Uptown.
She had been a dilettante but extremely prolific painter for years and had filled her house, floor to ceiling, with her work. But she had run out of canvases and no art stores were open and she thought the slate tiles would make a base for lovely pictures—the color just jumps off them—and so she began to fill dozens, then hundreds, of other people’s rooftop debris with impressionistic paintings of trees and oceans and wind and sky, the night sky that shined so brilliantly last fall over a city with no working lights and that she often admired for hours in her backyard alone at night with her thoughts and her cats.
And so I took to looking after her in those days, making sure she was comfortable and content, and, of course, she always was, though she lacked a few luxuries that she dearly wanted. She was not the type to do what other members of the Resistance were doing—entering the darkened Circle K, Whole Foods, and Winn-Dixie, scouring for food, water, booze, and whatever else they needed to survive.
So, each day, when a supply truck from Baton Rouge would deliver supplies and food to the team of Times-Picayune reporters and photographers working out of the city, I would scavenge through the care packages for the things that Miss Ellen told me she desired: coffee, sugar, creamer, batteries, and, of all things, peanut butter.
She loved peanut butter.
And so I began my routine early last fall, bringing small care packages to Miss Ellen, and when the newspaper started appearing
in the city again, I would bring her a daily copy.
She read me her poetry—she wrote dozens of haikus a day, dreamy meditations on quietude, dappled sunlight, the sounds of birds returning to the area, things like that. She would tell me what book she was reading that day—she had returned to a collection of Beatrix Potter’s work that she had read many years ago—and she tried, in vain, to tell me the names of the cats as they wandered out of hiding, one by one, to check out the strange visitor.
In turn, I would tell her the most recent news and events of the city—the water finally receding, the military putting down the clamps on looting, all that stuff. I painted a mental picture for her of life in the city. She always greeted the news with a knowing pause. “Well, I suppose it will get better,” she would always say.
I realize now, all this time later, that I was living in my own little Tuesdays with Morrie. Miss Ellen was my one window into real life, the simple life, the beautiful life of just being, reflecting, and creating. Of living life in the moment, never complaining because what’s the use. She’s the only person I knew who could look at the violently jagged tangle of fallen trees in her yard and not see loss and anger but just smile and say, “It’s very interesting, isn’t it? The shapes.”
I also realize now that, despite the nagging notion I always had that I was simply humoring a simple and lonely cat lady, she might have been one of the smartest people I ever met.
Much as I tried to latch on to her Zen-like appreciation for the beauty, power, and grace of life and all its capricious fury, I was pretty much a wreck in those days. I had virtually stopped eating or sleeping, and my hands had begun to shake uncontrollably. One day as I stood up to bid Miss Ellen good-bye, I felt a dizzy rush hit me with the force of a speeding train.