Janet Fullwood: Katrina tour truly focuses eyes, heart

Print | E-Mail | |

For 2 1/2 years, the world has been saturated with images and stories of the day New Orleans died. The photos of ruined neighborhoods and tales of human misery know no end. Yet news from the shattered city is pretty much relegated to the back pages these days.

Call it Katrina fatigue. But don't write off the Big Easy as a place to visit.

I'm just back, and my ears are still ringing with the music I heard. (Make a note: Frenchman Street. Ray's Boom Boom Room.) It will take at least a month to repair the clothes- tightening damage done by too much Creole and Cajun food. (Make a note: Petunia's, 817 St. Louis St., great gumbo.)

I could kick myself for not carving out several days to explore a region of the country so culturally different from my own. But living in Sacramento – one of the most flood-prone cities in the nation – I'm cognizant 24/7 that what happened in New Orleans could happen here.

The shared risk of living behind levees is what spurred me to devote three hours to one of those "Katrina tours" that generated so much controversy when Gray Lines began offering them just a few months after the August 2005 storm.

Back then, the big, shiny buses rolling through neighborhoods whose residents had suffered a huge personal loss were despised by some as symbols of callous profiteering, while the people looking out the windows were dismissed as gawking looky-loos.

Emotions were raw, understandably so. But miscommunication was at play.

"The people who said tourists were here just to look, they didn't understand what we were doing, that we were here to educate and inform," said tour guide Carol Stauder, 65, whose Metarie, La., home was flooded in the storm.

New Orleans' pain was her pain, too. The career guide, who once led everything from architectural walking tours in the French Quarter to swamp tours in Cajun country, was among the first Gray Line employees to sign on for the Katrina tours, finding a degree of catharsis in an admittedly painful exercise.

"I can't tell you how long it was before I could do these tours without tears rolling down my face," she said. "I was just overcome by the devastation."

So was Kevin Dandridge, 45, who drove our bus past the FEMA trailer in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he, his fiancée and their child have lived since January 2006.

Eighteen members of his extended family fled to Nashville, Tenn., in the face of the hurricane, migrating on to Toledo, Ohio, and Jackson, Miss., before returning home.

People in those places were generous and sympathetic, Dandridge recalls, "but it got under my skin to be called a refugee."

The former limousine driver got behind the wheel of the Katrina tours not just as a means of employment but also as a way to help visitors understand what the hurricane had done to his city and its people.

"In the early days when I would drive these tours, it was overwhelming," he said.

Dandridge and Stauder said they were shocked at first to find the bus surrounded by angry mobs, many of them volunteers who had come from far and wide to help the city recover.

"They would give us the finger, curse, everything," Dandridge said.

Tempers have since cooled. The sobering excursions, though not promoted by the otherwise aggressive New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, are Gray Line's most popular local offering.

To me, the thought of coming to New Orleans, staying in the relatively unscathed French Quarter and ignoring the aftermath of Katrina seemed shallow and callous indeed. That's not to say I didn't experience a feeling of dread before boarding the bus.

What the tour did, bottom line, was impart upon everyone in the bus a feeling of empathy and respect for the tens of thousands whose lives were turned upside down. An in-person visit conveyed, in ways that two years' worth of media coverage could not, the sheer vastness of the area affected.

The bus route covered 60 miles, yet barely touched the edges of the 145 square miles that were flooded.

"They say a picture is worth a thousand words," Stauder said as we stared silently at the shuttered shopping centers and abandoned schools moving past the windows. "But seeing this in person is worth a thousand pictures."

Three weeks after my tour, I'm still mulling over mental images of vacant lots and gutted houses in neighborhoods whose names by now are household words: Gentilly, Lakeview, Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish. The spray-painted Xs denoting when structures were searched and what was found; the holes in the roofs where people hacked themselves out as the water rose – all were somehow familiar.

The shock lies in how it goes on and on and on.

Make no mistake, there's lots of rebuilding in progress. Resurrection and renewal are evident in every block. But it will never be the same.

"You never get over it, but you see things improving," Dandridge said. He hoped to be out of his FEMA quarters this week.

One thing both Stauder and Dandridge said they've come to appreciate in the wake of Katrina is the generosity of the American people.

"The volunteers are always here. They keep coming, week after week, month after month," said Stauder. "... It's heartening to know that people still care."

And now, almost all of them wave.

Gray Line's Hurricane Katrina tours are offered three times daily. They're guaranteed to open your eyes – and your heart – to a major event in American history. Tickets are $35 general, $28 for children. Advance reservations are recommended at www.graylineneworleans.com or (800) 535-7786.

Many organizations offer short-term and long-term "voluntourism" opportunities in the ravaged city. Neworleansonline.com, the consumer arm of the city's Convention & Visitors Bureau, has links to organizations ranging from Habitat for Humanity to Catholic Charities that will put visitors to work for a morning or a month.

About the writer:

• Call Bee travel editor Janet Fullwood, (916) 321-1148. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/fullwood. For more travel and outdoor news, check out the blog sacbee.com/goingplaces.

Unique content, exceptional value. SUBSCRIBE NOW!