Going home, when there is no home left

CAMERON, La. -- Hurricane Rita swallowed this small town on the Gulf of Mexico, but Joey Dockins yesterday scoured his neighborhood anyway to try to find what might be left. He skidded through the slimy mud, hopped over downed power lines, and stopped dead at a bend in the road.

His toolbox floated where his house once stood. The persimmon trees in the yard poked above more than 2 feet of water. He had been married in that house.

''I came to see if there was anything to come home to," said Dockins, his blue eyes hardening underneath a baseball cap. ''Not a damn thing left."

As flood waters slowly recede, relief and work crews are getting a first glimpse on the ground of the towns hit hardest by Hurricane Rita, which destroyed 80 percent of the homes in Lower Cameron Parish, home to about 4,500 people in southwestern Louisiana, said parish administrator Tina Horn.

Residents of this close-knit area are scattered across Louisiana and eastern Texas because of the widespread flooding and devastation in their hometowns of Cameron, Creole, and nearby communities. Authorities said they are trying to bring in temporary housing so that residents can stay in the area while they rebuild.

But officials are also breaking the news, through television footage and word of mouth, that the towns have virtually disappeared.

''Nothing has been spared," said Richard Sanders, the parish coroner.

No deaths were reported in the area because of the storm, partly because of the massive evacuation beforehand, officials said.

Hurricane Rita took almost everything departing residents left behind: bedroom furniture, washing machines, filing cabinets, even cattle.

The high winds and surging flood waters swept away Sanders's private medical office, along with patients' files and an X-ray machine there.

Rita snapped apart the Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, where resident James Boudreaux was married, and wrecked Cameron Elementary School, where Freddie Richard's 12-year-old daughter was a cheerleader. The strong winds flung school desks and chairs across the street.

Throughout town, where 2,000 had lived, dozens of cars and trucks floated in the flood waters like toys in a bathtub. The few houses that stood had had the furniture and walls sucked out of them. Roads were littered with dead animals -- an alligator, birds, and possums.

''Y'all can smell the death," said Joe Johnson, 49, driving an airboat two days ago while taking reporters on a tour of Creole, the town next to Cameron. Earlier, he said, he searched for his sister's house, trying to read the street signs that still stood above water.

''We drove for miles trying to find it and we couldn't," he said. ''Not even a trace."

Richard, who runs the parish Office of Emergency Preparedness, lost the house he bought three months ago, but the home he had sold was still standing. His daughter and his 7-year-old son peppered him with painful questions.

''My kids don't understand it," he said, just before he hopped into an Army Blackhawk helicopter to survey the area one more time. ''They say: 'What are we going to do? Where's our friends? We're not going to have a school?' "

He said work crews with bulldozers are starting to clear the debris and checking to make sure hazardous materials were not leaking from gasoline pipelines and chlorine tanks for the drinking water supply. Others are retrieving horses and cattle that survived the storm, and the corpses of those that did not. Officials from the parish coroner's office are driving or taking boats and helicopters to search at least a dozen cemeteries to see whether the flood waters have upset tombs and made it necessary to remove the bodies.

Many workers who are clearing the town lived there.

Dockins, 37, a water department worker, and Boudreaux, 44, a parish road worker, checked pipes and water wells that fed the neighborhoods where they lived. Yesterday, they saw their neighborhood on Dewey Street for the first time. Boudreaux said only one of about 40 houses was still standing.

But he had lived here all his life, near aunts and uncles and cousins, and said he was certain to rebuild. He loved his quiet neighborhood and the small town of workers and shrimp boaters.

At home, he would barbecue every Sunday. His 4-year-old son, Michael, played in the yard. Little children would play kickball or ride bicycles on the side streets.

But Dockins, who has lived in Cameron since the third grade, was devastated. He doubted he would rebuild his house, and mulled buying a house trailer instead. Or maybe, he said, it was time to move away.

''I just don't see how we're going to clean this mess up," said Dockins, his green boots caked in mud, as he surveyed the street.

''A piece at a time," Boudreaux answered.

Then the two neighbors walked back to their truck and went back to work.