A Retired Oysterman Returns
Home to Get His House in Order

YSCLOSKEY, La. -- Joe Gonzales is on a journey that thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina are contemplating: He's trying to move home.

Mr. Gonzales's house is still here in this small, ravaged fishing village about 30 miles east-southeast of New Orleans. But it is not where it's supposed to be. It sits in a field of matted marsh grass and storm debris about 300 feet from its broken foundation at the foot of a circular blacktop driveway Mr. Gonzales, 79 years old, put in only last year.

Katrina carpet-bombed this village and its surroundings, leveling about 90% of everything that stood. Yet the house, with its jaunty green tin roof, arched windows and white cypress clapboard exterior is mostly intact. That is no small point of pride for Mr. Gonzales, a retired oysterman and self-taught carpenter who designed and built his home with hand tools and the help of his father 59 years ago.

Indeed, Mr. Gonzales, a man with a tanned, finely weathered face from a life spent outdoors, is hoping to restore his house to its original position and move back in. "If I can get it moved back for $20,000, I'm going to put it right back where it was," he says.

One recent day, he picked his way through the debris to take a visitor on a tour, brushing away clouds of biting gnats that swarm from the surrounding marsh on a cool, calm afternoon. "Look at that," he says, peering through an opening in a wall torn away by the storm. "Solid pecan floors. You can't get lumber like that anymore." He pats the house as though he were patting an old friend on the shoulder.

Mr. Gonzales's return to this 200-year-old hamlet is testimony to his determination to die in the place he was born and has lived his entire life, except for two years with the U.S. Army in the Pacific in World War II. His father and his father before him were born and lived all their lives here too. So even when a granddaughter offered to buy Mr. Gonzales a house in Baton Rouge, he couldn't imagine it.

"What would a man like me do in Baton Rouge?" he says in a broad, Cajunesque accent common to these bayous. "The noise, the traffic, man. It's quiet out here. Anyway, I don't know anything else."

But moving back to Yscloskey is a lonely and daunting undertaking for a man whose present means of support is an $800-a-month Social Security check. Mr. Gonzales owns a rental house next door: Badly flooded, it lies vacant and broken beyond repair, as does another house he used for storage. He figures his losses could add up to $500,000, and insurance will not come close to covering that.

He had arrived about a week before at a dock across the road from his house on a 50-foot oyster-dredging boat, the Miss Carol, on loan from a son-in-law. His ailing wife Selena, 78, a cancer survivor who still needs chemotherapy, is with him, as is his disabled son, Richard Joseph, 61, who lost a leg long ago after being struck by a car. They sleep in a tight cabin aboard the Miss Carol on rough-hewn bunks. They cook on a propane stove and share a bathroom so cramped that a person with his elbows out would scrape the walls. A small droning generator supplies electricity.

The Gonzales family has plentiful water and food, their cupboard supplemented with speckled trout Richard occasionally catches in Yscloskey Canal by casting shiny plastic lures with a spinning rod off the end of the boat. But on a recent day, Richard, a rangy chain smoker and Mrs. Gonzales, a tired-looking woman with sad brown eyes, had to drive 50 miles to a relative's house in Slidell, La., just to do the laundry.

After Katrina, the family arrived back home with troubling memories of their ordeal. Having evacuated Yscloskey for a relative's house in Violet, about 10 miles away, they watched a wall of water batter down a glass door. They narrowly escaped in a small boat and spent seven weeks in nomadic exile, living off the kindnesses of relatives and strangers.

Lights, water, gas and phones are still out here and nearby fishing villages scattered across St. Bernard Parish and it's hard to know how many of the several hundred full- and part-time residents will come back. Outreach workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency say their informal surveys in nearby areas show that only 60% of the residents they encounter are considering a return. Mr. Gonzales's neighbors at the moment consist of a trickle of visitors who return to pick through the rubble of their homes, and a man who has pitched a pup tent on his property about a mile away.

To restore his home, Mr. Gonzales will have to rebuild his foundation and then retain one of the numerous companies in South Louisiana that specialize in moving houses. They will have to jack up his house and transfer it to a flatbed trailer. Mr. Gonzales is hopeful that the draglines and dump trucks that have been slowly clearing roadsides and yards, will soon be able to clear debris from his property so restoration work can begin. FEMA promised him a trailer if he can find a place to put it and Mr. Gonzales has already spent a couple of days picking away at the rubble with a garden rake.

There are things he wants to account for before they are forever swept into a Dumpster. "I had a tool shed -- here," he says, pointing to a spot just off of his front porch that stayed put in the storm. "You wouldn't believe the tools I had." He goes through a partial list: band saws, table saws, lathes, sanders, grinders, chisels, even high-end welding equipment. Katrina's salty surge reached at least a dozen feet here, ruining everything electrical and burying the rest. He rakes away some marsh grass and picks up what turns out to be a router, a tool used to finely mill wood. "Look at this, it looks like a chunk of mud," he says.

He shakes his head. "Well, you can replace tools," he says. "I'm going to have to."

Which leads to another reason Mr. Gonzales came back. You don't notice the boat right away because it sits to the far left of the Gonzales's rubble field. It's an elegant oyster boat, 64 feet long, 22 feet wide at the beam -- built purposefully wide to hold copious sacks of oysters. It's crafted of planked cypress, painted white, trimmed blue at the waterline and red along the gunwales and the bow sprit. The cabin sits aft, finished in milled red cedar.

Before he evacuated, Mr. Gonzales tied the boat down with four gigantic ropes and all the storm could do was knock it off the construction blocks. He slowly climbs a battered aluminum ladder propped up on the port side. "I started it 25 years ago -- 25 years and about $200,000 ago. Every nail, every screw, every bolt. I did all that."

He walks to an aft door, opens it and describes what's left to do: complete the finish work in the spacious cabin where he envisions bunks, a galley and a fully furnished bedroom down below. Then a company that specializes in such things will come and lift the boat from his yard and gently put it into the bayou across the street. He'll drop in a diesel engine and motor off toward the Gulf of Mexico nearby.

How long will that take?

Mr. Gonzales shrugs. "I don't know," he says. "But I've got to take a ride on it before I die."

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