The three of us, myself and two clerks from a hotel I was taking shelter in, climbed to the top of the Crescent City Connection. The Superdome roof was gone and flames took root in the Central Business District. Black smoke choked an overcast sky, spelling out greater doom than already existed. We thought we could cross the Mississippi River to the Westbank and freedom. We thought wrong.

            When I first came to New Orleans three years earlier as a hobo, little did I know it would be a lady named Katrina who would send me packing. I'd seen hella storms while I lived there, torrential downpours with raindrops as big as gumballs. There had been floods, but this was the mother of them all.

            For nearly a week we endured a surreal situation. We kept saying we'd never be the same. Hurricane Katrina cut through New Orleans like a buzzsaw, knocking down thousands of trees so after the storm was over it was as if we were thrown back to pre-industrial times. The city looked like a wild, swampy forest. The electricity died Monday during the storm about four in the morning. We brought out the candles and the flashlights and rode out Katrina at the St. Charles Guest House on Prytania St. in the Lower Garden District.

            Four stations played on the radio and each one had the same broadcast; announcers said over and over we were lucky. The storm veered east. New Orleans survived again. They said that until about 11 AM Monday when walls along the Industrial Canal broke sending a flood of water into the 9th Ward. Beautiful, old homes were submerged. People took refuge in their attics and then were trapped. The lucky ones had axes to hack their way through the roof. But how many people grab an axe as they escape from a flash flood? Somehow people called in to the radio station and we'd hear live the grisly tales of whole families stuck inside their houses. They and the broadcasters would call out over the airwaves their addresses, hoping search and rescue would come their way. People were trapped for days. We all felt impotent to do anything.

            The only authority we saw on the streets were the police. And that wasn't too often. Then two more levees broke and New Orleans became Atlantis. The tide rose to the edge of the French Quarter. The Garden District area was dry. But Chalmette and the nearby St. Bernard Parish were sunk.

            Tuesday came and went with no word from the president, the National Guard, or FEMA. Nobody came. By Wednesday we began to worry because our food rations were getting low. An elderly man staying with us was urinating in his pants and his girlfriend said he was seeing demons. There were no doctors or hospitals to take him to. Luckily we still had running water. But some of us began turning off the radio. The horrible tales were endless. Even the president of Jefferson Parish located across the Mississippi River cried out over the airwaves for help. That's when the people of the city took survival into their own hands.

            The media cynically called it looting, but can it be looting if the police were supervising and permitting us to do it? The windows at the local Walgreens were smashed and hordes of people jumped in. Out they came with shirts, cans of food, drugs, anything you can imagine. I still remember an older lady on a bicycle saying to me, The National Guard aint coming, baby. Go in there and get what you want! Corporate giant Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas St. down by the river got looted too. By Thursday every corner store had been broken into as well.

            So this is what the end of the world looks like, said one of my fellow refugees. But the end of the world retained a large degree of decorum. People in the streets went out of their way to be nice. At night, despite all the reports the outside world received of the big, bad New Orleans, we heard no gunfire. Our party ate dinners by candlelight. The night skies, without any light pollution, displayed more stars than Id ever seen. One of us turned his room into a Gentlemens Club and we drank looted champagne and wondered what the hell we were going to do tomorrow.

            At Lee Circle on Thursday morning a policeman was stepping into an abandoned gas station He was looting too and we asked him, What are we supposed to do? He responded, Anything you need to do to survive. At that point, looking down Howard Ave. at the Superdome, we were completely on our own. For the first time in our lives we lived in lawlessness. That thought chilled me. All we were certain of was we were not going anywhere near the so-called shelter, also known amongst us as the Terrordome, concentration camp, and hellhole. Reports on the radio were that the National Guard was locking people into the Superdome at gunpoint. The roof had blown off and was leaking. The toilets backed up and the place stunk. The radio broadcasters kept repeating over and over they had no water. There were reports of rape and bullying. The irony of all ironies is that this happened INSIDE the shelter, not outside in the relatively calm streets.

            On Friday, five days after Katrina came and went and there were no signs of relief from our federal government, wed had enough. We got to the top of the bridge. The police stopped us. They allowed no foot traffic. They told us to hitchhike. It became chaotic. People from the Convention Center, the second shelter located just under the bridge, came pouring up the on-ramp. They too wanted out. My two buddies and I began waving twenties at the passing motorists. We made the mistake of drifting too far apart. A lady pulled over her pickup truck and let me jump into the back. I assumed shed pull over and let my two friends aboard. But she sped up. I wouldnt see them again for two days.

            I rode in the back of the pickup truck and watched the city burning. Through wind, rain, and sun we drove on Route 90 West, straight through the heart of Cajun Country and countless bayous. I had five ferrets that the driver kept in cages as company. They kept looking at me. I looked as strange to them as they to me. I was dropped off in the little town of Berwick, Louisiana, where I took refuge at a truck stop among a beautiful group of cashiers who gave me all the hot coffee I wanted. I charged up my long-dead cell phone and began contacting the outside world. I hitched my way to the town of Lafayette and in the morning caught a taxi to Baton Rouge where I reunited with my two friends from the bridge. When we met it was as if we had re-entered a whole new world. We’d left hell behind.