NEW ORLEANS - They could be seen for days, the Adam and Eve of this city's impoverished 8th Ward district, paddling a broken motorboat through their fallen Eden of tar-black floodwaters, downed power lines and rotting houses - two incongruously smiling figures, afloat under a festering sun.
There was always something different about them. A charmed air of leisure. They waved happily, not in distress, at the military convoys and the frantic journalists roaring overhead on the jettylike highways of this ruined metropolis. They looked like a couple on holiday. To some, they seemed insane.
But in fact, Vanessa Magee and Roger Hart, former neighbors in one of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods, were enjoying a bizarre honeymoon of sorts.
"It's awful to say, but I have Katrina to thank for my most precious days," declared Magee, a gregarious 42-year-old with a weakness for hugging perfect strangers. "If this hadn't happened, I wouldn't have gotten to know Roger like I do."
"Truth is, we like it here now," agreed Hart, 54, who is more shy. "Sure it's stinky. And yeah, we have no appliances or water. But we talk. We take boat rides. We feed the birds, the pigeons, the dogs and the rats. We connect."
As a counterpoint to Katrina's deepening legacy of tragedy, few sagas can match the waterlogged love story of Hart and Magee, two of the Crescent City's less privileged citizens, who were blown into each other's arms by Katrina's 100-mph winds, and who have toiled together to survive since.
And anyone bothering to park on New Orleans' Interstate Highway 610 and walk down one of its freeway-exits-cum-boat-ramps to hail the friendly couple, would have been struck by one additional lesson about Katrina: While arguably the worst storm in U.S. history may have stolen everything else from New Orleans, judging by two of its citizens, it didn't get its soul.
Part Robinson Crusoe ripping yarn and part rerun of "The Love Boat," their story begins around 2 a.m. on Aug. 29, when Katrina rolled like a war down the 8th Ward's Spain Street, a nondescript lane hemmed by humble clapboard houses and old beaters that could never outrun the storm.
Twenty-four hours later, the levees girding New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain had broken. Magee, who occupied an apartment below Hart's, felt water rising around her bed. By the time she touched her bedroom doorknob, it was up to her thighs. The water was silent, and cold. Furniture floated crazily in her darkened rooms, bumping into the walls. At Hart's urging, she fled upstairs. And for the next nine surreal days, the couple lived together in Hart's islandlike second-floor apartment, the last holdouts in a soggy neighborhood that looked as if it had emerged from the bottom of the sea.
Hart, a part-time stucco worker originally from Mobile, Ala., had stockpiled food and 40 gallons of water. After the initial shock of the catastrophe wore off, he set about wiring salvaged car batteries to his old TV set. He liberated a beat-up old boat with an engine that didn't work. Magee, for her part, marveled at the oily silence smothering the once-vibrant metropolis of 1.3 million. "This neighborhood ain't ever been so peaceful!"
Last Wednesday, though, the illusion of starting life over in New Orleans, only this time with the resourceful Hart, was fading.
Rescue crews in boats, many beefed up with heavily armed soldiers, began stopping by in earnest. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had ordered a forced evacuation of the city the night before. Finally, a sassy team of volunteer Illinois Conservation Police officers showed up at the half-submerged address of 2723 Spain St., and the sunbaked Midwesterners spent half an hour persuading the couple to finally leave. New Orleans was uninhabitable, they said. Hart and Magee had to go.
On the concrete highway landing, an Army helicopter crew was loading an emaciated old man, a hurricane victim trapped in another neighborhood, who'd been living on nothing but Dr. Pepper for nine days.
"They're takin' away my paradise," Hart said plaintively, ignoring all the hubbub. He was a quiet, easygoing man. He didn't say much else.
Meanwhile, state animal-control agents gently took away the couple's dogs and cat for health reasons. Magee cried, holding up her filthy shorts with her hands because Dirty Red was using her belt as a leash. And she cried hard again when told that the neighborhood might have to be bulldozed.
"I'm gonna hate that," Magee said, her face contorted with agony. "It hurts to leave. It's really hard startin' over somewhere else. It really is."
