"There's no phone. The electricity comes and goes. The gas just got turned on, so now we have hot water, but don't drink the tap water without boiling it." Such was my introduction to the ninth ward, the area of New Orleans that the vast majority of America would never have heard of were it not for Hurricane Katrina.

We were staying on the upper end of the ninth Ward, which is the only part that is even sparsely inhabited at this point. About one in ten houses have someone in them. Still, the conditions are remarkably third world. There are no grocery stores, no drug stores, almost no services of any kind beyond a few liquor stores. Survival involves regular trips to soup kitchens, and poking through MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, compliments of the military) trying to find edible material. The air smells foul, some combination of sewage, trash, and just plain rot. There are mountainous piles of refuse everywhere, in the street, blocking the street. Pieces of buildings, pieces of people's lives piled made into trash and piled in the street. One house two doors down from us simply had the front removed by the storm, a cutaway section of Americana, a perfectly arranged living room exposed to the street.

True to the warnings, the slightest wind or rain knocked out the electricity for a day at a time. The word here is that the power company only has 140 or so workers trying to restore power to the city, and that only in the last few days have they decided to hire more. In the ninth ward, there is little sign of recovery beyond a very few individual homeowners and business people shoveling out, repairing and rebuilding. One sees no city workers, no recovery contractors.

The damage to the rest of the city is extensive as well. New Orleans has become the Blue Roof City, with thousands of blue tarps installed by FEMA on damaged roofs all over the city. One can even see the pock marks, missing windows covered in plywood, in the towering hotels downtown. No one escaped damage, but the recovery effort is certain to be selective.

In the upper ninth ward, the water stayed below floor level. As one moves further into the ninth ward, the high water line starts to climb. As the water marks climb above the floor level of the average house, even the sparse rehabitation ceases, and then there is only garbage, stench, and destruction. The scene defies description, the only word that comes close is apocalyptic. Many large buildings and churches are simply collapsed. The brick walls to two story low-income housing complexes were simply ripped right off the buildings. The water level here reached 12-15 feet judging from the water marks. Cars with the windows rolled up floated, and drifted with the current until they collided with something. It is clear that many houses were not all that well built to begin with, because many of them are simply collapsed. There are no people, just endless destruction. The ninth ward is not a small area, but rather comprises a large section of the city. There will be no fast rebuilding, even if there were the will, or the money. The destruction is too vast. A major portion of the city will have to be rebuilt as if from scratch.

Beyond the gentrified upper edge of the upper ninth, where the streets have been cleaned, and the power stays on, there is little sign of any reconstruction in the ninth ward. The word here is that they are simply going to let things languish until they can come in with the bulldozers. Already people are preparing for that, with signs of "No Bulldozing" springing up in an almost uninhabited landscape. Numerous community organizations have descended on New Orleans, from Acorn to various roaming packs of white youth in biodiesel buses. The problem with organizing anything in the ninth ward of New Orleans is that almost all the people are gone, scattered to the far corners of the country. Some efforts have begun to organize the New Orleans diaspora, but that will likely prove difficult.

There are food kitchens in various areas, some set up by independent groups, some by churches, some by the Red Cross. The Red Cross food distribution center has its own Blackwater Security (private security agency with ties to the Bush Administration) milling among the crowd, each carrying nothing but a gun and numerous spare clips of ammunition on their belts, as if the dispersed and hungry people who come might somehow form a spontaneous insurrection. The military retains a presence here as well, as various heavy brown and green vehicles lumber occasionally through the neighborhoods. One finds them parked occasionally as well, in various corners of the city, with distinctly bored soldiers sitting atop them, passing the day to what end no one knows.

All over the ninth ward there are the ubiquitous spray painted signs of the rescue workers, marking every house, numbering the dead and alive. Near the tracks where the water was particularly deep, one finds the bones of decaying canine corpses, and the spray painted signs marking the places where human remains were found. The local animal rescue followed behind the rescue workers, painting each house on their own. In an area where many of the churches are nothing but piles of rubble, the door of one of the few churches still standing bears the sign, spraypainted by an animal rescue worker, "God Created Animals Equal Too."

Uptown New Orleans might as well be another planet. Well-groomed people sit in coffee shops, one laptop computer for every two people, and sip expensive frothy drinks. As one enters the wealthier uptown area, suddenly the threating spray painted signs appear. "Looters will be shot," "Looters shot on sight," a number of variations on that theme. In the ninth ward itself, there are not such signs. Presumably no one took the time to paint them as the flood water came in, any more than someone would bother to paint a crashing airplane as it headed for the ground. But at the edge of uptown, the message is clear.

In uptown, there is no spraypaint on the houses, but as one travels in any direction away from the wealthy neighborhoods, the racial segregation of New Orleans is clearly marked by the spray paint of Animal Rescue. As soon as you see spray painted houses, you know they belong to black people. On the side of an abandoned van, the animal rescue gets a return message. "Animal Rescue Fuck Off, Stop Stealing Our Pets."

I've been working at "Plan B," a community bike shop that is importing bicycles to the city, repairing them, and selling them at $15 each to whoever needs a bike. There is a dedicated crowd of activists, working on bicycles, working to try to make something here better. They have been having regular gatherings. They seem a little overwhelmed. Many of them have lived here for years, and some have not ventured down into the ninth ward any further than where they live. It seems like it is too much for them to bear. They say everyone is drinking more than they used to. They are clear though about what they think is going to happen. The city is not going to let the ninth ward reconstruct as it was. They are going to let it languish, and as it rots, time will provide them political permission to do what they want with it, which will almost certainly not include reconstructing real low-income housing. Under normal circumstances, there would be overwhelming resistance to destroying thousands of low-income houses, entire neighborhoods, housing projects, and replacing them with shopping centers and houses for wealthier people. But the political resistance to gentrification has been eliminated by a convenient confluence of nature and politics. It may not come to pass in that fashion, if the developers are not willing to build major projects in the lower ninth, or if the housing market falters. If that occurs, then the lower ninth will probably be repopulated as it was the first time, slowly as people move in and build themselves. The other alternative being floated about is to let it return to marsh. That, in the very long run, will certainly be its fate.

So what is New Orleans like three months later? A little dryer, a little destroyed- and where is it going from here?

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this week that the Thanksgiving holidays brought many people to the breach- the Seventeenth Ave levee breach, that is, snapping photographs of deserted foundations, their phantom houses disappeared. Maybe I am no different, biking around bombed-out areas of New Orleans, unable to take in everything I see. After twenty days here I finally decide to go see some of the most flooded neighborhoods for myself, at the urging of a friend. It isn't as though I haven't seen storm damage- it is omnipresent, ranging from dramatic skeletal homes to pristine but silent streets; but the Ninth ward is its own ghost. I don't have to go far. The neighborhood I stay in is almost totally deserted and bombed-out but to the north and west it gets worse quickly. We start out following dead-end dirt roads that face out on the railroad yard. The mounds of trash are more mountainous here than anywhere else and the air stinks. I take a picture of a minute brick house, not raised up like the other houses, the doors and windows flung open, the metal curlicued grates hanging askew. The flood line is not visible because it is over the peak of the house. A minute later I back up to photograph another water-beaten home and turn around into the stare of a dead dog's skull. His carcass is stretched out over the top of windshield. The car is covered in a mysterious white film that covers most objects the floodwaters have touched: bikes, frying pans, dolls.

Black mud contours the streets. Swingsets are overturned. Cars are overturned, smashed, rammed through walls. In the housing projects brick walls are split open and flopped down; a huge brick church is buckled and its walls are hanging off. In an area of maybe one hundred blocks that we randomly wander through, we see a few work crews clearing a roadside, some people taking rubble out of houses. There is almost no activity. The whole area is dead. Maybe these images have already saturated every visual media to the point where the destruction is unreal. After the first few blocks I stopped taking pictures. I needed a panoramic lens. I needed an aerial photo. I needed to drop down into the midst of stomach-jerking neighborhoods and recognize again that they are not gutted by wind and water alone; they are gutted by design. It is no accident that the places destroyed were both the most fragile and resistant, poor and black communities, places that have struggled together for years. Later we took our tour uptown. The back streets are equally silent, but the homes are beautifully painted and trimmed and the fences are covered in flowering vines. Out on the main drag some businesses have re-opened and there is light traffic. The trip from the Ninth Ward uptown is a classic tale of economic and racial injustice, and it is nothing new or unique to this city. What is shocking is the way that Katrina has stripped the face off, left a bare reminder measured in lives, neighborhoods, histories destroyed. Even the quality of silence in uptown streets is different, a far cry from the silence in the Ninth Ward that follows a last uttered breath.

Not all neighborhoods will return. The Times-Picayune reported on a proposed "bold and daring plan" to centralize the entire rebuilding process through a board appointed by the President, the Governor, the Mayor and City Council, that would have the power to buy and sell properties, restructure mortgages and decide timelines and order for rebuilding to take place. The board would be accountable to a second board appointed by the President, the Governor, the Mayor and City Council. As of now, there is no citywide rebuilding that is evident. It's basically like living in a third world country right now- granted, a higher end third-world country, but it is not sustainable. The only concerted efforts at revitalization are coming from local residents and volunteers who are able to be involved in an arduous and emotionally wearing process. It's a catch-22; the city is difficult to live in, so many people aren't returning, and people who return are those who facilitating recovery. People are scattered across the country and reports of destruction fail to include the life that is returning in less destroyed areas, the people who are pushing back, people I will write about in future articles.

Sometimes I feel like I am on an island here, totally disconnected from the rest of the country. It seems like we don't get a lot of news in and it feels like most news doesn't get out or has been superseded by the next tragedy. I hate to think of where the tsunami victims must be a year later; they are so 2004. I witness destruction here and realize that I am experiencing shock over old news, and the real shock is that so little progress has been made. The shock is that this feels normal to me now when it is really messed up.

I spent a lot of the morning sitting in the sun with a lovely 65-year old woman, Ms. Ella. She told her epic escape from the flood story, pausing to take sip of her Coke and cackle at the memory of a neighbor floating down the street on her loveseat, being pushed by a guy swimming through the water. Her house is relatively unscathed, and moldy or not she's back and staying. She even has some insurance. It's a relief to just soak up sunshine and laugh with her and hear her tell her own story. It's a merging of the messed-up and normal nature of a post disaster city, and I inwardly cheer her on with the crowd on the bridge as she passes through the floodwaters to high ground.