James pointed to a green line of algae running chest high across the mirror. “That’s the high water mark,” he said. We were in dance studio on the second floor of Lawless High School in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans.

We walked down two flights of stairs and onto the stage, looking out over an auditorium of empty seats, still caked in mud

“Were there still people in here?” I asked

“1600 people died here bro, yeah there were people in here. Who knows how long they stayed alive for.

“I was here. I had my eighty-year old grandmother with me, an’ I gave my car keys to a total stranger. I said ‘man I never met you before in my life, but you get my grandmother outta here an you got a place to stay’, and he did he got her out.

“An I came down here sneaking past the military police to get to my grandmother’s house to find the whole thing just gone, nothing but my footlocker up in a tree an inside was a sawed off shot gun my fatigues and two golden eagle pistols. Just what I needed to survive and nothing else. Now how am I supposed to interpret that? What does that mean? Not a picture of my family, of my boys. Not food, but guns, weapons, and I had to use them right here two days later.

“So I was just going around clearing out houses and puttin’ up tarps one at a time. I would clean out a spot about as long as my body and lay down plastic on all sides, an that’s where I would sleep and work outward from there.

“I met these two kids, 17 year old black kids, they said ‘Everybody else left, we stayed. We don’t know where to go’ they were hurricane survivors. I said all right follow me and help me and you’ll stay fed.

“You’d find a place to stay, and be there for a few days before you found out that there was some 70 year old lady dead under a bed.

“You seen the people on TV, the “looters” taking beer and liquor?

“I went into the grocery store, and I’m like Yes! I’m surrounded with all this food. The canned goods weren’t touched. There was all this water…but all the liquor was gone.

“Half the people here are uneducated. You get this Southern hospitality and manners ‘yes sir yes mam,’ and you won’t hear me slip. I had that beat across my knuckles. And then this Creole understanding of the world where in your life you’re given signs an you follow those and that’s you’re karma. And it’s supposed to work out good for you. Then the flood came an it was all washed away. There were dead bodies floating in the streets for weeks. For weeks. So people just drank and waited for their turn.”

We walked through the blown out churches and whole blocks with nothing left but concrete steps and rows empty lots.

That afternoon we shared Thanksgiving dinner with Common Ground—people from New Orleans and from all over the country, coming together in solidarity to rebuild a community in the lower 9th. Around the fire that night, on an empty lot in the shadow of the levy, we shared beers and stories.

James told me about his upbringing as a white kid in the lower 9th, fighting his way through life. And at 18 he becoming a soldier and eventually joined the Army’s special forces. After a firefight in the Iraqi desert, and countless stand offs with his commanding officers, he finally came home with a bullet in his leg and a strong skepticism about his mission. Then two months later Katrina happened and forced him into another war zone. His home was destroyed and his neighbors became refugees, scattered across the country.

The next day Ethan, Fernando, my brother, Will, and I all picked up machetes and helped the folks at Common Ground hack through the weeds in vacant lots so that the absent residents would not be fined, and their land reposed by the city.

At sunrise, on our last day in the lower 9th, Ethan, Will and I walked down to the Cypress Triangle. We climbed over the cement wall and watched pelicans glide between smokestacks and over the broken stumps of the cypress tree protruding from Lake Ponchartraine. Cypress trees used to be the first line of defense against hurricanes, breaking off in the floodwaters and creating a natural dam. But most of the trees were dead due to industrial pollution around Lake Ponchatraine, and now, the rest will never grow back.

Before we left New Orleans, I had to ask, “So what about the next hurricane? Rising ocean temperatures will create more intense storms. What about the next Katrina?”

“I’m not sure if I’m going to stay here,” James told me, “and I don’t know if everyone should come back. But they should be free to return to their homes. If they don’t have a choice, they’re not free.”