Ray in Exile

We drove around Lakeview and Gentilly and a little bit of Mid-City and N.O. East today.
I don’t have the words. I just don’t. I only cried once, on Milne Boulevard in Lakeview, completely wrung out right now, posting from the outside of the CC’s Coffeehouse on Magazine which is closed but still has their wifi up.
We took pictures all day today, and when we got back to the room, we dumped them to the laptop and looked at them and we thought, “It’s not there.” What we saw is just not in the pictures. I just don’t know how to capture it on film. A picture captures a destroyed house and you look at it and you think, “oh, wow, that house is wrecked.” But the camera only shows the one house, and if you weren’t there you can’t imagine that the next house was wrecked, and the next, and the next, and if you stand in the middle of the street you can see to the horizon, block after block after block of destroyed houses and piles of debris and utter desolation and emptiness. Outside of the CBD and parts of Uptown, the rest of the city is utterly desolate. No traffic. No pedestrians. Just…Armaggedon. The Stand. Omega Man. Nagasaki.
I don’t have the words. I’m not a good enough writer and it hurts me that I can’t put this down and make you understand.
I’ve been turning over in my head all day how to write this and I can’t. I’ve only uploaded about half my pictures, I’m on too slow a link and the rest will have to wait because it’s late. But if you want to try to understand this, take any one of the pictures from my flickr page, and then imagine an entire city block where every house looks like that. Then go get a map of your hometown, a town that you know well, and mark off a 40 square mile rectangle superimposed over your town. San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, wherever. And imagine that every single neighborhood, every single block, every single house and business inside that rectangle looks like those pictures…and there are no people there.
It is more horrible than anything I have described, anything I have seen described. And we haven’t even been to the Ninth Ward yet.
More tomorrow. Right now I’ve got nothing.
Update: the Flickr set is here.