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By Root 370 0

still have to this day. (During the Civil War, my father’s ancestors fought on the Confederate side, and my mother had relatives who’d been Union soldiers, so to me the Civil War had always been a battle between “mommy’s side” and “daddy’s side.”) In the photo, I’m clutching a shotgun; he’s in a Confederate uniform, his hand resting on a sword. I didn’t see it then, but looking at the photo now, I see the fear in his eyes. He’d already had one heart attack, the year before. He must have known that his heart was weakened; perhaps he felt it with each beat. A year later he was dead.

NOT LONG AFTER we launch the boat in the Lower Ninth Ward, we pass by the body of a woman floating facedown behind a house. A few feet away, on a garage rooftop, sits a box of unopened MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), emergency food dropped from a chopper trying to help. A few blocks from the dead woman, we find the body of a man sprawled on top of a car. His corpse is swollen and discolored.

Nearby I see a large white dog sitting in a partially submerged tree. There are dogs everywhere—stranded on steps, barking at the boat, floating on suitcases in slicks of oil. I see a dog lying on something; it appears to be dead. I ask Chris, my cameraman, to get a tight shot of its face. Both of us get startled when the dog suddenly opens its eyes. Excited, I decide to wade over to it, to give it some clean water, but as soon as I step out of the boat, I sink to my chest. I’m wearing waders, but they go up only so far, and water pours into them, destroying the microphone transmitter attached to my waist. The dog is scared by the sudden movement, and swims off.

THE NEXT DAY we are back in the boat, watching a Coast Guard helicopter prepare to pluck two people from their front porch. We shout at one another to steady the boat. The chopper’s heavy rotors blow dirty water in our mouths, our eyes. The water is black, filled with gasoline and oil, human waste and human remains, the carcasses of countless animals.

A boat filled with rescuers from a nearby parish tries to signal the chopper that they can pick up the two people on the porch. The rescuers have no radio communication, however, and are invisible to the helicopter pilot above. They watch the Coast Guard diver being lowered into the water, shake their heads and motor on. There’s no coordination, and they’re angry.

We wait until the chopper flies off, then check the house to make sure no one else is there. Drenched with the filthy water, we motor back to dry land to rinse out our eyes and disinfect our skin.

None of us talks about what we’ve seen. We focus on how to put the story together, which pictures will work, which sound bites to use. I suppose it’s easier that way. Each of us deals with the dead differently. Some don’t look, pretending they’re not there. Others get angry, sickened by what they see.

ONE DAY, I run into a paramedic who launches into a lecture about why corpses in water float (gases build up inside the body’s cavities and get trapped) and why they sometimes develop post-mortem head injuries (they get knocked about by the water and debris). I must appear interested, because he describes in great detail how shoulder muscles can rupture when a drowning person begins to convulse, and how coroners often find injuries to a victim’s hands and fingertips, because when they drown, they try to grab hold of something as they die.

“There was this one body, we called him Harry the Swimmer,” a soldier from the Eighty-second Airborne tells me, shaking his head. “He was just floating around, and every day we’d have to check to find out where he’d floated to. Harry the Swimmer. We finally tied his shoelaces to a stop sign, so he wouldn’t float away.”

I write it down, and it sounds callous and cruel, but you can’t judge until you’ve been out there, day after day, in the heat and stench.

“You find yourself making weird jokes to stay sane,” the soldier tells me, embarrassed he’s already said too much.

AT DUSK ON Sunday, I meet a young psychiatry resident from Tulane University. His