Staying to Save What Survived

Douglas Young describes himself as the caveman of Marais Street, where he keeps a crude spear just inside his front door and a makeshift raft alongside his front porch.

The spear is fashioned from a butcher knife strapped tightly to a length of iron pipe; the raft is four car tires bound to 2-by-4s with electrical cords.

Young, 64, made them during his long, lonely days as one of the last holdouts in twice-evacuated New Orleans.

For the four weeks since Hurricane Katrina hit, he has been the only inhabitant of several muddied blocks of Marais. Young has lived without electricity or a telephone -- and without any word from his wife, daughters and grandchildren.

They fled to Texas the day before Katrina turned the “family street,” as he calls Marais, into a rubble field.

“I don’t know if they’re living or dead,” Young said.

The pole-thin, retired hod carrier said he has always been on the skinny side, but has lost weight on his post-disaster diet of canned goods and old fruit, most of it donated by passersby. Worry and fatigue have deepened the creases around his eyes, and his moods have grown increasingly dark.

“I’m tired, you hear? I’m tired and I’m sick of this!” he said, wiping furiously at his graying beard.

He shouted a string of curses into the street, venting at the forces of nature that turned his world small and fearful, and at the authorities who have tried to chase him from it again and again: “I ain’t going nowhere.” And while Young said he means nobody any harm, if it’s a matter of keeping looters from the carefully preserved contents of his beloved house, he would have the spear ready.

He has also converted a piece of tubing into a blowgun. Young tried it out, a dry run without the bean he’s keeping for a projectile. Then he tested the spear’s sharpness with a fingertip

“It won’t be threatened,” he said of his home.

He nodded toward his dog, a Rottweiler he rescued from Katrina’s floodwaters. He named it Black, for its coat, and chained it to the porch, another security measure. But the dog, a tail-wagger, would not bark at a visitor.

“What good are you?” Young yelled at the animal. “I feed you too much!”

Young said his family pleaded with him to leave before Katrina arrived, but he was determined to protect the house he shares with his extended family.

“My family will come back,” he said. “And when they do, I want them to have something to come home to.”

But it was Day 27 of his isolation, and Young conceded that the strain had become almost too much to bear. Overnight, the winds and rain of Hurricane Rita raked Marais Street, ripping more awnings off houses and refilling yards with floodwater. Furniture and broken doors floated into the street.

At the height of Rita, Young said, he wondered if he was imagining the cloudbursts and gale.

“Your mind plays tricks with you,” he said. “I hear weird things all the time. I don’t sleep at night, I catnap.”

Authorities said they did not know how many people like Young were hunkered down in the empty and echoing neighborhoods of New Orleans. But they said it wasn’t healthy for them to be there.

“You don’t have any adequate sewerage, or any way to keep food refrigerated,” said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

Young scoffed at any suggestion that his home had become unsanitary. He walked through the lightless, narrow structure, its windows shuttered. His provisions lined the floors: cans of green beans, a few soggy oranges and a flat of bottled water.

The rooms had some of the same musty smell of the neighborhood.

“This house is clean,” he said. “I’ve kept it clean myself.” He stopped at a nook crammed with family photos. He held up one of his wife, Marion, a smiling woman at a breakfast table.

“She’s the best, the best in the world,” Young said. “I was 21 years old when we met.” He shook his head as to dispel a troubling notion, a sudden fright.

“I just want my grandchildren around my neck,” Young said. “I’m wearing them around my neck.”

Untangling a length of whistle chain at his throat, he showed a small teddy bear clasped to it, his grandson’s toy. Young had been wearing it for luck.

Around the corner and down the street a bit, on St. Claude Avenue, Joseph Peters has kept his tire repair shop open during the evacuations. He said he checked on “Pop” now and then, riding a bicycle past the house on Marais.

“He didn’t want to face that madness,” Peters, 56, said of the evacuation. “He’s home.”

And that’s where Young says he’s going to stay. By now, he said, it would be too late to look from his family anyway. At least they would know where to find him.

“I’d like to tell them, ‘Hurry on back home, I miss you very much,’ ” Young said as he gazed at his ruined street from the porch. “I’m living here like a caveman.”