Sara replies: "Hey honey, my fridge was filled, to the brim, with a huge load I'd just bought at Whole Foods. Almost no meat except for the very worst -- some bacon in the bottom bin. The problem is, I have a vague recollection we had to take the door off the thing to get it in the house. I got duct tape just in case I can't haul it out. But I may have no choice but to clean that sucker."

Somehow I just know: This means I have to help.

Thank God she brings her brother Randy. The next day the three of us go into her house. The room that flooded is bad, not as bad as it could have been. But bad enough. Horrible.

There's mold crawling up all the walls, toxic sludge washed into the corners. All the appliances are ruined, as is a cedar chest full of letters and drawings and a wedding dress and childhood mementos of her son, Isaac.

The kitchen is full of flies. At the foot of the fridge is an awful brown pool. Flies buzz up from the bottom of the fridge, along with some other weird little flying things I've never seen before. I don't want to know what they are.

Randy and I strap duct tape around the refrigerator and crab-walk it over to the door. There's a sickening slosh from inside.

The handles protruding from the front make the fridge too wide to go through the door.

Randy takes a hammer to the handles. All our jostling and wrestling has stirred up the bad things inside. Stuff is leaking out. A bilious greenish-brownish juice, the color of your insides if you have been dead a long time. Pouring out. Get it out of here. We go for the gas masks and poke Vicks VapoRub up our noses. We manhandle it out to the sidewalk with an excess of grunting and cussing and down to the corner, where it now joins the many thousands of abandoned refrigerators lining the streets of New Orleans. Sara is waiting for the "Voodoo" tagger to come by.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The Lower Ninth Ward is still off limits, and I don't yet know what happened to the couple from Dirt Cheap TV Repair. Their phone just rings and rings. The airline won't let me change my reservation and the hotel needs my room. It's time to go home.

On my way to the airport I drive through Mid-City again. For some reason I'm drawn to these devastated neighborhoods with the sad heaps of rubble and belongings. Piles of Mardi Gras costumes under waterlogged sofas, that kind of thing. Here and there are young couples in gas masks and homemade hazmat gear, staggering out to the curb with another one of those toxic fridges, adding to the pile of formerly treasured belongings that have now become ghastly. They sift through the muck for jewelry, and mostly find there is nothing to save.

When I sold my house and moved out of New Orleans, I left one thing behind -- my baby grand piano, for sale on consignment at a store in Metairie. I checked the address on the satellite picture on Google Earth, and that strip mall looked pretty darned wet to me. Before I go home, I allow myself one selfish errand.

From the looks of the waterline on the glass and on the legs of the pianos, Bitsie Werlein's piano store took on two to three feet of water. My piano is one of those in there coated with the white dust. I wonder if Bitsie's insurance will cover my piano. I know mine won't. Ah well, if I've lost my piano, at least I've lost something. Somehow that idea is satisfying.

I get on the bus from the rental car office to the airport. The driver is a polite gentleman in his 50s, with wire-rimmed glasses and a soft, deep voice.

"How'd you come out in the storm?" I ask. Nobody except the United Radio announcers refers to the storm as "Katrina." It's either "the storm" or "the hurricane," which is locally pronounced HER-uh-kin. Katrina doesn't seem like the name of a killer storm. Can we petition for a retroactive name change? Camille: Now there was a name for a storm.

"Well sir," the driver says, "I got luckier than most. We had part of the roof off, and some water got in. But no floodwater."

"I guess that is lucky."

"Yes sir."

I glance out at the enormous pyramid of debris. In four days the piles have grown to a height of 50 feet, three vast new landfills, each one four or five acres in size. And the demolition has only just begun.

The driver says, "You been over in New Orleans?"

"Yes sir. It's pretty bad."

"How much of the city do you reckon got flooded?" he says.

I think maybe he's joking. Or about to tell me his theory about the levee breaks. But no, he simply has no idea. He lives about 10 miles west of the airport. Hasn't been to New Orleans. Hasn't had electricity in five weeks. Hasn't seen any news. Doesn't know the first thing about Anderson Cooper.

"They say about 60 percent of the city got flooded bad," I tell him. "Maybe a little more."

"Do you mean it?" He looks shocked. "That sure is a whole lot of people."

"Yes it is," I say.

"Where are they all gonna stay?" he says. "If they can't go back to their houses, where will they live?"

I can't believe he doesn't know anything about what the TV keeps calling the most expensive disaster in American history, which took place a few miles from where we are standing.

"I don't know," I say, treading carefully. "I guess they'll live in temporary housing for now. House trailers. Like that."

"Look like the government might help 'em or something," he says.

I say, yeah, you would think so.

"That's why I thought you had a government for," he says. "What airline was that?"

"American," I say.

He stops the van and opens the door. "You have a beautiful day now, sir."

In the airport I see a man with a skinny kid about 10 years old, and I realize he's the first child I've seen in five days. New Orleans is too toxic for children at the moment. But it rains a lot down here. Eventually the rain will wash the city clean, or if not exactly clean, maybe the same kind of dirty as before. The bones of the city are there. Great swaths of it will have to be bulldozed, but even greater swaths of it will not. America can bring New Orleans back to life, but we have to really want to do it, and as I look around this country and the way things are going, I think of Anderson Cooper sleeping comfortably once again in his nice warm bed in New York. And I am not so sure we have the will to stay there and do all the work it will take.

When I land in New York, I call Sara's cell in New Orleans. She picks up on the second ring. I ask what she's doing.

"I'm out in the front yard," she says, "in my lumberjack shirt and my big boots, and I am washing my wedding dress in a great big bowl. I'm gonna hang it up in the tree to let it dry."

Maybe New Orleans will be OK after all.

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