Stay or go?

There was never a doubt in Rosemary Campo’s mind.

From the moment she arrived in Spokane – after surviving 100-mph winds, after being trapped for five days in a house without electricity or running water, after sitting in a pickup for more than 2,400 miles – the 78-year-old was still sure of one thing.

She was going home – even if there’s no home left to go back to.

After fleeing Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and living in Newman Lake for the last two months, Campo boarded a plane Saturday with a one-way ticket to New Orleans.

She left with her two sons – John, a New Orleans native who grew tired of the hurricanes and moved to Spokane 13 years ago, and Charlie, who fled with his mother but has no plans to live there again.

All three are going back to check on the family home, a one-story brick house where Campo lived for 45 years and raised her boys.

They’re not optimistic about what they’ll find. Like many parts of town, toxic black water submerged the house on Paris Avenue in New Orleans’ Gentilly section. Residents weren’t allowed back until two weeks ago.

“You’re crazy,” John said half-jokingly when his mother expressed the desire to go back.

He begged her to stay. There’s nothing left, he pleaded. More hurricanes will come. Stay here in Spokane and be safe.

“But I’ve lived there all my life,” Rosemary said. “New Orleans is my city. I’m going to carry on and do my best to pick up my life.”

When the deluge and ensuing levee breaches ravaged New Orleans, the only place for Rosemary Campo to go was thousands of miles away – to a large blue house at the end of a gravel road on a hillside above Newman Lake.

She and Charlie didn’t plan to drive all the way to Eastern Washington.

Survivors of Hurricanes Camille and Betsy, mother and son evacuated the city during previous warnings, only to return less than two days later. Often they were false alarms.

So when they left their homes in New Orleans, they took only a change of clothing, some cash and a little food. For entertainment, Rosemary brought a 10-inch TV.

They thought they would escape danger by heading for a friend’s house in Hattiesburg, Miss., 1 ½ hours away from the coast. But Katrina veered in their direction, trapping them in a house damaged by fallen trees. The situation became so desperate that Rosemary resorted to Imodium AD so that she wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. By the time they were able to get out and drive away in their Nissan pickup, the Campos were eating moldy bread and cereal with spoiled milk.

Rosemary cried herself to sleep most nights until they arrived Sept. 5 in Spokane.

“I did my crying but I ain’t crying no more,” she said a week later, sitting in the dining room of John Campo’s home.

“Sometimes, I wake up at night and think it’s a dream.”

After years of hard work caring for her sons and managing the family’s hardware store, Rosemary Campo finally retired about 12 years ago. Life was hard, especially after losing her husband to a heart attack more than three decades ago. But she persevered, putting in 12-hour days to get out of debt and set aside some savings for retirement.

“She’s a tough old bird,” said her son Charlie. Rosemary Campo’s the kind of woman who sleeps with her hair in curlers and never leaves the house without blue eyeshadow and a dab of rouge. But like the city she calls home, this die-hard New Orleans Saints fan is also bold and brash and won’t hesitate to speak her mind.

“I tossed and turned all night so I’m ornery,” she said, boarding the plane with a baby blue case full of curlers and cosmetics. “I better not meet anyone named Katrina.”

Her sons describe her as strong, stubborn and Sicilian to the core. “I finally had the life I wanted to live,” she said, describing the last few years in New Orleans.

She went bowling, took classes and drove her green Mazda sedan all over town. Every Friday morning, she got her hair done at the nearby beauty parlor. On weekends, she partied and gambled at the casinos. She had lots of friends – other seniors who also played table tennis and bridge, who reveled in the color and nightlife of the Big Easy.

Nearly two months after Katrina, Campo has only been able to find one of them. She has no idea if the others are even alive.

“It just breaks my heart,” she said, thinking about the kids in the neighborhood who called her “Mama Rosie.” “This was my life, with these people. I’ve just got to go back to them.”

Although Charlie is going along to retrieve some belongings and help his mother, he won’t be staying. He has a job at The Home Depot in Spokane Valley. He’s ready to start over – far, far away from the threat of deadly hurricanes and massive floods.

“I had a feeling the ‘big one’ was going to come,” said the 57-year-old. After evacuating prior to Hurricane Ivan last year, he put the condo he had lived in for 21 years up for sale. When it sold earlier this year, he moved into a second-floor apartment in Jefferson Parish.

Rosemary plans to stay in that apartment for a few months until she gets back on her feet. Although residents are allowed to return to her neighborhood in the Gentilly section, there’s still no running water or electricity. Some houses are so damaged they will need to be torn down. Hers is probably among them.

Last week, her granddaughter from Austin, Texas, traveled to New Orleans to assess the damage. She took a few photographs and left.

At first, John and Charlie wouldn’t let their mother even peek at the pictures sent by e-mail. But she insisted, and they eventually relented. “We wanted to prepare her for what she’ll see,” said John, 54, an insurance agent in Spokane.

When she saw the images on the screen, Campo wept.

Dried mud and mold covered the cabinets in the kitchen. The water line was about 10 feet high. And the furniture piueces looked as though they had swirled around in the floodwaters – a leather couch from the living room sits in the kitchen; the cherry wood dining room chairs rest on their side near the front door.

“Until I saw these photos, I still had hope,” she said. “They say it’s worse in person.”

A few days before they left for New Orleans, Rosemary and John pushed a cart up and down the aisles of Home Depot looking for gloves, coveralls and Darth Vader-like respirators to protect them from mold.

“Do you want one?” John asked, picking up the $27 masks.

“Of course I do, I’m going inside,” she said, getting a little cross with her son’s efforts to protect her. “You’re not going to keep me out of there, John. I’ve gotta go in.”

Even if she can’t live in the house, Campo hopes to save her precious photo albums, especially the ones with pictures of her wedding, her late husband, and of her sons when they were babies. She wants to retrieve her 25 medals – the ones she earned competing in the Senior Olympics – and other mementos that can never be replaced.

The thought of losing her home was hard enough; but the reality of starting all over from ground zero hasn’t quite sunk in.

She’s scared – of the future, of what she may find, of what she has lost.

“I’ve never gone through anything like this before,” she said, her eyes welling with tears. “Because of all this, I’ve gotten bitter. Why would God do this if he’s just?”