Badges of Honor.

Badges of honor

Part historic preservation, part act of defiance, the spray-painted markings of Katrina rescue workers remain prominently displayed on many reoccupied New Orleans homes.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Chris Rose

X marks the spot. And the spot is everywhere.

Two years later, the hieroglyphs of catastrophe still deface the city's surviving housing stock like some demented 90-square-mile contest of post-diluvian tic-tac-toe. X, zero, X, zero, ad infinitum.

Hurricane Katrina seemed to unloose the closeted spray paint taggers among the ranks of our military and animal rescue communities. Some used restraint in their duties, making small, tight Xs with only necessary coded information therein -- date, division, dead, moving counter-clockwise from the top.

Others, particularly some animal folks, wandered off course and a handwriting analyst might find delusions of grandeur in some of the oversized lettering and urgency of their painted scrawlings.

Imagine coming back to New Orleans from exile -- to a home that suffered neither wind nor water damage -- only to be faced with a $6,000 exterior paint job because some well-meaning but overzealous grad student on leave from Swarthmore branded CAT UNDER HOUSE in red 2,000-point type across the front of your house.

In retrospect, there was something almost biblical about those markings on all the front doors around here, posting notice of who was spared and who was not.

And that is why, perhaps, many in the region who have moved back into their homes and gotten on with their lives have purposely preserved the markings left behind by those who patrolled our streets while we cowered elsewhere in front of televisions wondering what fate would be ours.

The sun has bleached out many of the markings with a Southern exposure all this time later. But many remain brightly resplendent in the full array of Crayola color selections employed by the National Guard.

All of this came to mind recently as I began to notice the contrast in glyph preservation among area neighborhoods.

Bywater seems to be the largest preserve of the crisis markings, more than, say, Lakeview or Broadmoor or anywhere else where most occupied homes have received full makeovers.

Perhaps it's due to the somewhat bohemian tilt of the Bywater neighborhood, with its cultivated affection for the offbeat, the unusual and the just plain weird.

I randomly knocked on David Peltier's door on Montegut Street to inquire of the status of his remaining glyph, inscribed "9/6" (that it was 2005 goes without saying) and "Tx," the signature of the Texas Guard.

"You don't like our mark of distinction?" he asked sarcastically. Then, on a more serious note, he said: "It's part of our history now. It would be hard to just wipe it away. It's unique to this city."

As an afterthought he also noted: "And besides, it's orange," a comment which left me puzzled until he held open his front door to reveal an interior design dominated by . . . everything orange.

Peltier's neighbor down the block, Robert LaGrange, said complacency and budget play a role in the neighborhood glyph preservation.

"I noticed that a lot of homes around here were painted just before the storm," he said. "I guess like a lot of folks around here, I'll just let mine fade away on its own."

Farther down the block, at the corner of Montegut and Chartres, the glass sculptor Mitchell Gaudet's home is adorned with an iron replica of the existing glyph, superimposed over the original painted marking, a bold statement of intent to never let the memory fade away.

Memory is why Ellen Murdock kept her yellow-orange signature of the California Guard on her house on Vincennes Place in Fontainebleau.

"When people come to my house, especially friends from out of town, they say: 'Oh, you've got to get rid of that,' " she said. "I tell them: Katrina changed my life. I'm in no hurry to get rid of it. It's a reminder of what happened, and when I look at it every time I walk in my door, I definitely think about what it all means.

"Then my friends see the same marks on all the other houses and it really brings home the message of what happened here. I'm just glad there are zeros on it and not a 1," she added, a reference to the ominous number reserved for the bottom space of the X marking, the space that denotes how many bodies were found inside the house.

It stands in good reason that few such markings will be preserved for posterity's sake.

Edward Rogers, over on Delachaise Street in Broadmoor, will have none of this talk of nostalgia. He whitewashed his two glyphs, content to leave white blobs on his house rather than all those cryptic messages.

"It was sickening looking at it," he said. "Disgusting. Those Xs and Ys and whatever; they did a whole lot of unnecessary writing. I don't want that on my house. I don't want to remember that. I don't need a souvenir."

He paused to consider the preservation rationales offered by those living in Bywater. And then he spit contemptuously.

"History!?" he said. "The man that told you that -- they need to send him to a psychiatrist."

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Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.