the eye of Nova's mind

I remarked to my roommate last night that I'd seen a headline of USA Today stating that the U.S. had finally airdropped food & water in Haiti. Just three days prior, officials were concerned that doing so would incite rioting, but the logistics of navigating the nonexistent infrastructure made it so that this was the only way to get the supplies to the survivors. "I would think the longer you waited to make the airdrop, the more likely a riot would ensue," I told her. "So, to me, the government's position doesn't hold water."

Also, Haiti has been really plaguing me because the imagery reminds me so much of Katrina. Then, on days five, six, seven and continuing, the rescue missions haven't stopped, and as of two days ago they were still finding people alive. But in 2005, our military abruptly halted rescue efforts four days in, stating that logically no one could survive that long. How many more people in New Orleans died hoping that one of us would save them?

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Spike Lee is good at making you angry.

They're out there. The shooters, the choppers, the looters, the lines, the foul water and the bodies. Especially the bodies. "But we're in here," says Victor Fruge.

Others — hundreds of thousands of them — had also escaped from New Orleans. But few could match the extraordinary, even miraculous odyssey of Fruge and his comrades — 16 mentally ill men and recovering addicts, cast out of their group home, Abstract House, by the storm.

For a week the men stuck together through Hurricane Katrina and its rising waters, following a survival instinct like a candle in the dark and gamely caring for each other as they traveled unsupervised for nearly 500 miles. They arrived at dawn in Houston, a sprawling and unfamiliar city among the thousands of hurricane refugees who have made the exodus to Texas, but without a friend in sight.

Along the way they ate and slept in at least four different shelters and caught rides on four different means of transport, always clutching the psychotropic medications that keep their imaginary devils at arm's length while the real world around them sunk into a deeper hell.

"You don't see that a lot in this business," says Dr. Sara Allison, a psychiatrist who treated the men during their first night in the Astrodome and has been checking on them daily since then. "But there were a lot of things in this (emergency) that you don't see a lot of."

Hollywood screenwriters might be tempted to pitch this remarkable journey as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" meets "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." But these guys don't quite fit the stereotype.

They are not inmates. While they might be delusional, largely toothless and at times hilarious, they are not really rebellious. Wearing scraps of donated clothing, the men range in age from 30 to 70. Several are quiet — Leonard, for one, didn't speak for 12 days after the storm.

For these men who are schizophrenic, bipolar, severely depressed, obsessive-compulsive and shellshocked from war — often simultaneously — Hurricane Katrina and its agonizing aftermath have forced them to function as a family, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

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