By SHARON COHEN,
In the quiet of early morning, she sits alone surrounded by bare walls and donated furniture, reminders that the world she once cherished is gone. But her day begins with a prayer — for what remains.


“Thank you, Lord … for watching over me, my daughter, my mother, my sister during the night and keeping us safe,” she says softly. Gaynell Bogan is grateful her family is together, and yet she desperately misses her home and her job, both washed away by Hurricane Katrina.

On this morning in Austin, Texas, Bogan pines for the comforts of her old life in New Orleans as she gears up for chores in her new one — cooking, bathing and tending to her 75-year-old invalid mother and mentally disabled sister.

In Bay St. Louis, Miss., Pastor Edward Murphy begins the same day tapping his right foot impatiently, sitting at his computer in the basement of the battered, red-brick Shoreline Baptist Church. The sun is barely up, but he’s already annoyed that new city building codes could add thousands of dollars to church redesign plans.

“If the government will just get out of our way, the churches will get the people back into their houses,” Murphy grumbles. Then relaxing, he confesses with a sigh: “I just hate to spend money.”

In Chalmette, La., Jimmy Bartholomae, a longtime sheriff’s deputy, ushers in this workday with a glass of sweet tea and some good-natured complaints about trailers. He’s sick of them.

No wonder. He works in one cramped trailer, he lives in another with his wife and their five children. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the two straight; most times, it’s nearly impossible to find a moment’s peace.

One year after Katrina thundered across the Gulf Coast and into the history books, survivors of the nation’s costliest natural disaster are struggling to put their waterlogged world back together.

This is the story of one recent day on the long road back.

It’s a day in which progress is measured in ordinary routines that seemed extraordinary after the storm: the crack of a bat at a Little League game, the wail of a New Orleans jazzman’s guitar, the blare of horns in a traffic jam.

It’s a day in which frustrations are mirrored in small ways as well: a mayor’s worried face at blossoming ‘for sale’ signs, a storm refugee’s persistent phone calls to scare up some cash so he isn’t homeless this night.

It is, in short, a typical day.

___

It’s 9 a.m. on July 26 and Bartholomae, sweet tea in hand, hops into his tan Explorer squad car to patrol St. Bernard Parish. He cruises through a once lush stretch of bayous and stately oaks now reduced to a littered landscape of muddy, lifeless silence.

Only a few gas stations and bars, a pizza place and a small grocery have reopened.

The Bartholomae family’s favorite standbys — Blockbuster and McDonald’s — are long gone.

Only about 20,000 of 70,000 people have returned to the parish southeast of New Orleans, where 129 people died and all but a handful of 27,000 buildings flooded.

Some places still don’t have streetlights.

“At night, anything that moves is fair game,” says Bartholomae, a captain and 22-year veteran. “We’re still technically under a curfew. But if you’re driving around at night, we’re going to check you just to see what you’re doing and why you’re out.”

Bartholomae pulls up to his old house that was submerged for weeks in a 14-foot brew of oil and water. He’s still not sure why he received a $1,000 electric bill for the empty place.

Bartholomae had just taken a second mortgage to renovate the house before Katrina and had it appraised at $165,000. Now, after gutting it and driving out the alligator that had been living there, he hopes to sell the home. His best offer so far: $5,000.

As the sheriff’s captain returns to his trailer office, Murphy, the minister in Bay St. Louis, drives down the coast.

Murphy is on U.S. 90, where signs of rebirth are easy to spot. Workers are stocking the new Lowe’s building supply warehouse. The thwack of hammers on wood planks echoes through heavy traffic.

But as the minister reaches the beachfront downtown, only concrete slabs or square plots of dirt remain where restaurants and souvenir shops once thrived.

“We’re in a real Catch-22,” he says. “The people aren’t coming back until the businesses reopen, and the businesses won’t reopen until the people come back.”

Murphy arrives at an area where 10 church volunteers from Knoxville, Tenn., are unloading shovels, wheelbarrows, weed-eaters and face masks. They swat at mosquitoes as dragonflies buzz overhead.

They’re preparing for a “mudout” — the dirty, grueling job of digging out muck and grime from flood-wracked homes. Today’s assignment: a sagging two-story frame house with mud coating the driveway.

“Smells like death,” volunteer Kelly Raines says through her face mask. “I work in a hospital. I know the smell.”

Chris Smith, another volunteer, crawls up a ladder into a second-floor window. Inside there’s a mildewed couch, a water-filled deep freezer, chimes made of seashells encrusted in dirt. He knocks out windowpanes, clearing a path so he can toss out the junk.

The minister watches, then tells one worker:

“Give it a shot this morning. If it’s too much, come and let us know.”

___

It’s coffee-break time at Fair Grinds, a New Orleans haunt that isn’t open, but isn’t really closed, either.

Robert Thompson hobbles around the patio — his right knee is bandaged from repeated bending and climbing during the months of repairs that he and his wife, Elizabeth, have been making at their half-rebuilt coffeehouse. The cafe sits in a picturesque neighborhood of pink, mauve and green Italianate mansions, Creole cottages and shotgun homes.

Regulars often bring and brew their own coffee outside — free of charge. On this sunny Wednesday, they’re joined by folks who’ve just attended an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting upstairs.

Coffee isn’t the lure. Camaraderie is.

The patio with green macaws flitting above has become an oasis for artists and philosophers, dog lovers and dreamers, and anyone else with an opinion on matters big or small. Today’s discussion ranges from democracy to the intelligence of Shih Tzu dogs (one weighs in with a yelp).

Thompson, who studied philosophy long ago, moves from one conversation to another. An electrician offers to look at a circuit that will run a refrigerator and coffee grinder.

“Some days I go home and say, ‘I got a light switch plate on the wall,’ and feel like I got something done …,” Thompson says. “It’s small victories — that’s really the sustaining thing at this point.”

___

Across town on Crowder Boulevard, Allen Smith is well into another long day. He sometimes feels his work in New Orleans will never be over.

Smith migrated from Ohio after Katrina to join one of the busiest debris-hauling crews in the city. Right now, the team is working on a 10-foot mountain — much of it from a flooded Family Dollar store and a beauty salon.

The hired hands are sweltering in white moon suits, masks, reflective orange vests and hard hats. They’re called “IWIs,” short for Ineligible Waste Inspectors. They look for appliances and hazardous materials that need to go to separate landfills.

Bobcat loaders scoop debris from the mound, then drop the piles in front of the workers.

At one point, Smith, holed up in the truck cabin with his Marlboros and a Tami Hoag thriller, jumps down to poke at a metal scrap so it doesn’t hang over the side of the truck. It’s a safety precaution.

Shortly before 11 a.m., a safety inspector signs off on his full load. Smith heads for the landfill.

Not long afterward, Renard Poche is lying on a thin blue yoga mat in a first-floor bedroom.

He stretches his slender frame, bends his knees and lifts his pelvis and torso toward the ceiling. “I feel better already, a lot more relaxed,” he says after his routine.

Poche, a jazz musician, has a show tonight. He’ll spend much of the day at his home, built by his father, who died shortly after Katrina.

Poche’s house is something of a music shrine: Guitars rest on an antique chair and his father’s recliner; others hang by leather straps from a closet rod. African and South American-style drums stand in the dining room, another percussion set sits in the upstairs studio that’s decorated with purple, green and gold Mardi Gras beads and a poster of Louis Armstrong.

Poche, who has been performing for 30 years, has toured with Dr. John and collaborated with such New Orleans giants as Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas and the Neville Brothers.

He’s working on his first album where he is the premier artist, but it has been slow going with others still scattered about: One singer is in Alabama, another in Georgia.

Even now, it’s hard rounding up substitute musicians for live gigs. Once it took just a few calls. “Now,” Poche says, “I sometimes call 12 guys and can’t find anybody.”

___

It’s lunchtime and Billy Skellie, mayor of Long Beach, Miss., is returning from Biloxi, where he and others just met with the governor’s disaster representative.

“We need money,” he gently reminded the governor’s man after the meeting.

Skellie has plenty to worry about, everything from finances in a city that has already borrowed $3 million for recovery to fears that dying pine trees on Long Beach streets could tumble over and start a fire.

Heading home in his candy-apple red Explorer, Skellie passes “for sale” signs and tattered American flags whipped by the gulf breeze. But he also sees people up on ladders, painting, repairing their homes — starting over.

Skellie arrives at the Harbor View Cafe, which actually overlooks a parking lot. Before Katrina, it had a scenic view in nearby Pass Christian, but the storm forced the change of address.

Skellie inhales the pungent scent of shrimp frying as he waits for a seat, then walks from table to table.

“How are things going?” asks one customer after another.

Skellie replies with enveloping handshakes, hugs or pats, and soothing words.

Rebounding from Katrina is “just like building a house,” he says. “You go out on a piece of dirt and start working on the foundation. That’s what we’re doing — working on the foundation.”

Back in New Orleans, it’s not quite lunchtime for Dr. Peter DeBlieux.

The doctor, who is director of emergency systems for New Orleans’ charity hospitals, started the morning with a lecture to 165 Louisiana State University medical students. The topic: vascular disease emergencies. By afternoon, he’s back at the medical school for the Emergency Department residents’ weekly meeting.

DeBlieux set up a tent-based clinic after the storm; it eventually moved to a former Lord & Taylor store. He still is appalled by the post-Katrina collapse of medical care.

“If you’d told me I was going to take care of people in tents for seven or eight months, I’d say, `That’s not possible,'” he says. “If this catastrophe had occurred in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta, there would have been such a political outcry that those people’s needs would have been met. But since this is New Orleans and they (the poor and uninsured) have no political voice, it was allowed to happen.”

By mid-afternoon, Elizabeth Thompson, who owns the Fair Grinds coffeehouse with her husband, is at the central library where a Small Business Administration has set up a disaster center.

She has been here before. She drops off some papers for a loan. It goes smoothly. She’s relieved.

Around 3 p.m. Gaynell Bogan in Austin makes a late lunch — turkey sandwiches — for her sister, Valrie, 39, who has Down syndrome, and her mother, Helen, who suffered a stroke two days before Katrina. Her 15-year-old daughter, Christy, is at cheerleading practice.

Bogan prepares meals slowly. She hates to cook. But it gives her time to ponder all she misses: her home in New Orleans, her porch, her job as a pharmacy technician, her life in the outside world. Now, she’s cooped up most of the day in their three-bedroom apartment.

“It doesn’t seem real,” she says. “I find myself saying `Yes, you ARE here.'”

Bogan wants to work again, but she can’t afford home health care and won’t put her mother and sister in a nursing home or institution. She doesn’t even like to leave them alone more than an hour.

Around 3:30 p.m., she wakes them from naps. Valrie pushes an empty wheelchair down the hall. Her mother shuffles toward the table with her walker.

The two women eat in silence.

It’s just past 4 p.m. and Darrell London hasn’t eaten anything all day except a pepper sandwich. But he has bigger worries.

He’s on his cell phone outside room 331 at the Sun Suites Extended Stay Hotel in Houston, where he had been staying in a $35-a-night room off a noisy eight-lane stretch of highway.

London is talking with another storm survivor, Imelda. They met when he helped her during Katrina. She promises to bring over $40 so he can pay for another night. She says she’s waiting for a ride.

London has just $2.38 in his pockets. But he’s confident he can get a $200 check from a charity the next day.

London moved to the hotel after he was evicted from his townhouse when his federal assistance expired. His life’s possessions are stuffed in two duffel bags and a suitcase. A folder holds his papers, including pay stubs for his $6.50-an-hour job in a New Orleans meat market.

At 5:15 p.m., London calls again. Imelda says she’s still waiting for a ride.

“I’m still waiting, too,” he says.

The workday is over, meanwhile, for James Johnson, a Katrina evacuee who put down stakes 1,000 miles north in suburban Minneapolis. His daughter had lived in the area years ago and recommended it.

His employer in New Orleans — Pep Boys, a car parts chain — found a place for him in a store there. He’s thankful for so much: his job, the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and her 86-year-old mother, the furniture and car they received as donations. And yet, he yearns for the past.

“I used to tell people, “Welcome to my cottage, my cozy little cottage,” he says wistfully of his flooded New Orleans house that had two patios.

After 6 p.m. in Houston, Darrell London decides to check for mail at the townhouse where he had lived.

He turns off the lights in room 331 and treks three miles through soggy grass along a frontage road parallel to I-45. When he reaches the run-down neighborhood, he notices the tomato vine and begonias he planted are withered.

He has no mail.

___

As night approaches, the soothing sounds of music fill the air.

In Bay St. Louis, about 100 worshippers gather on folding metal chairs, surrounded by the unfinished walls of Shoreline Baptist. Pastor Murphy leads the prayers.

“I want peppy songs tonight,” he proclaims, an open Bible in his hand.

A woman at the upright piano obliges. “I’ll fly away,” the parishioners sing, their voices soaring. “O Glory, I’ll fly away.”

In New Orleans, at the Fair Grinds coffeehouse, the Thompsons listen to a guitarist friend softly strum a Stephen Foster tune he had played for them just after Katrina.

“Hard times, come again no more,” he sings. Robert tears up.

At a brightly lit ballfield in a neighborhood of dark houses, Dr. Peter DeBlieux serves as catcher and batting coach as he cheers on his 6-year-old son, Zachary, in the Little League playoffs. Zachary’s Gray Gurus trounce the Gators, 22-12.

At his crowded trailer in St. Bernard Parish, Jimmy Bartholomae tries to nap before his midnight to 6 a.m. second job as a security guard. It’s not easy. His kids have friends over, televisions blare and there’s no end in sight to the chaos.

“People think it’s over. `Get over it.’ Yeah, I’ll get over it,” he says. “You come live in my shoes for a week … then you can tell me what to do. … Until you feel it, smell it and see it for life — real life — live and in person, you ain’t got a clue what I go through.”

At 9 p.m., a smiling Poche enters the Maple Leaf Bar, a guitar case flung over his shoulder. In purple velvet pants and a flower-print shirt, he takes the stage and adjusts microphones for his conga, tumba and quinto drums. Three band mates arrive.

As two ceiling fans whirl, the music starts. Poche zips his fingers along metal chimes hanging from his drum set. He sits, he stands, he moves from one instrument to another — drums, flute, bongos, guitar, tambourine.

He takes his shoes off. He bobs his head, he bounces to the beat. A small crowd is building.

Some 300 miles away, Darrell London is alone.

The friend who promised to deliver $40 never showed.

London decides he won’t sleep but will hang around until 5 a.m. when he can catch the first bus downtown to collect $200 from a charity. But his paperwork is locked in his hotel room. And a security guard won’t let him in without that $40.

“I understand,” London says. “Thanks anyway.”

Around 11 p.m., he decides walking around will make time go faster. London tries a door at a Wendy’s to get water — his first food or drink since the afternoon — but it’s closed.

He finds a table in a park gazebo. A bank marquee reads 83 degrees, but he wears a long-sleeved sweater to ward off mosquitoes.

At midnight, London disappears along a dark trail, waiting for daylight.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Contributing to this story were Cain Burdeau, Mary Foster, Janet McConnaughey and Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, La., Shelia Hardwell Byrd in Bay St. Louis, Miss., Garry Mitchell in Long Beach, Miss., Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas, Paul Weber in Houston and Archie Ingersoll in Minneapolis.