The odor was oppressive: water-soaked vegetation baking in the midday sun. The perfume of decay. It reminded David Shayt of the tropical outposts where he’d been stationed as a young Marine. But there was something else in the air that warm fall day last year, as he walked up to the two-story brick town house in New Orleans’ flood-drenched Seventh Ward. It was the sickly sweet smell of mold, and mud and crushed dreams.

Shayt, a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, was in Louisiana for five days late last September, the first of two trips to collect artifacts associated with Hurricane Katrina. By his side, making a visual record, was Smithsonian photographer Hugh Talman.

By the time they reached this particular house at 6420 Bridgehampton Drive, they had already carefully selected a few items from a number of communities through which the hurricane had passed. Now, as Shayt and Talman approached the former home, they pulled on gloves and surgical masks to protect themselves against harmful microbes. Nothing, however, could have shielded the two from what they felt after crossing the threshold.

“For the first time, we were alone in someone’s private house,” Shayt recalls. “We were rifling through their personal belongings, things they had fled from as waters climbed around them. We felt in a certain sense that we were violating their privacy again.”

They weren’t. Shayt had received permission from the owner of the house, Bryan Williams, whom he had met at an emergency shelter in nearby Houma, La. Shayt and Talman also were working with local authorities. Clearances were obtained. They even had a police escort. Everything was in order.

For a moment, they stood in the silence and overpowering odor, resisting the urge to turn and walk away. Shayt reassured himself that what he was doing was justified, sanctioned in the end by the human need to hold onto memories of colossal events by collecting and preserving physical reminders of them—even small ones. He was in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

Then he and Talman went to work.

National consequence
Generally, museums don’t deal with disasters. “From the dawn of antiquity, museums have been celebratory,” Shayt says. “Rarely have they focused on calamities: failures, losses, destruction, sadness, sorrow. When the Titanic went down, the Smithsonian didn’t seek any objects, despite the many lives that were lost.”

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered a debate over that tradition. After much discussion, the National Museum of American History staff decided that the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the downing of the jetliner apparently headed for a target in Washington, D.C., were catastrophes of such national consequence that they merited the museum’s attention. Teams were dispatched to collect artifacts.

 “It’s a subjective matter,” Shayt explains. “We—as a museum—basically have to read the event and make a judgment as to whether it rises to the level of transcendent national significance.”

Clearly, Katrina qualified. Striking the central Gulf Coast near Slidell, La., on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the hurricane left a landscape of ruin along the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The storm surge caused Lake Pontchartrain to rise, breaching levees and flooding roughly 80 percent of New Orleans. Katrina caused at least $80 billion in damages and killed some 1,300 people. Thousands more fled to other parts of the country.

Individual stories
Before leaving for New Orleans, Shayt studied maps of Louisiana, contacted local authorities, and brainstormed with other museum staff about where to go and what to collect.

He especially wanted objects that told individual stories of survival and rescue. Among the 17 objects collected on his first trip was a battery-operated, mud-spattered kitchen clock. It had stopped at 9:25—the hour it surrendered to the battering it must have been taking inside a house as flood waters rushed back and forth.

Three items came from the New Orleans Superdome, where many residents first took shelter after the levees broke. One was a well-used cot, representing both the sense of rescue and the discomfort that the evacuees experienced. The other two were reminders of the sports teams based at the Superdome before the deluge: a vinyl New Orleans Hornets basketball banner and a cast-metal fleur-de-lis about the size of a dinner plate—a symbol not only of the New Orleans Saints football team but also of the city and its French heritage.

Other collected items included fishing gear from a Vietnamese shrimp boat in Biloxi, Miss., and a leather halter from a horse rescued from a flooded field.

From the brick town house in the Seventh Ward, they took away the valances from two front windows. The hand-made lacework bore a unique Katrina autograph: a line of stain near the top showing the flood’s high-water mark.

Pompeii
“We were up to our ears in evidence of Katrina,” Shayt recalls of the daunting challenge of choosing specific objects from a sea of carnage. “It made me think of Pompeii, the buried city.... I was only dipping into the material remains of the region and making a small extraction.”

Because of this, Shayt considered it critical to try to locate owners of objects. Where possible, he tracked these people down and interviewed them, learning names, occupations, contact information, how an object was used, its personal significance and stories of the owner’s Katrina experience. For each item, Shayt also wrote a detailed explanation as to why he deemed it important enough to be added to the Smithsonian collections.

His notes will be placed on file in the Museum of American History as documentary support for each object. In addition, each file will hold maps and Hugh Talman’s photographs pinpointing where an object was collected, deeds of gift signed by the owners and other related information.

“In decades to come, the question, ‘Why did this Shayt fellow collect this item?’ hopefully need not be asked,” Shayt explains. “When collecting objects that are associated with a natural disaster like Katrina, support information is essential. The documentation and photography give objects context and make them authentic evidence of America’s social and cultural history.”

Plastic castle
A second trip to New Orleans in December concentrated on the heart of the city. It yielded 41 artifacts, including a 1930s clarinet in its blue case from the home of jazz historian Michael White; water-stained photographs of jazz musicians by photographer Herman Leonard; a hurricane evacuation route sign from one of the city’s emergency escape routes; a blue Federal Emergency Management Agency staff shirt; a window with an orange spray-painted X indicating a house that had been searched for bodies; a basket and hoist used by the U.S. Coast Guard for helicopter rescues; and a green mailbox with a butterfly decoration and hand-painted address—2005 Lizardi St. They found the mailbox on a post in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was still standing tall, flag up, even though the house it served was a pile of debris.

But the object that tugged most at Shayt’s heart was a plastic Fisher Price toy castle. He found it, during the first trip, lying in a field near some destroyed homes.

“It was right at the 17th Street Canal break in the Lakeview District,” Shayt recalls. “To me, it just captures the poignancy of a child dreaming of living in a castle someday, surrounded by all the comforts of home while playing with that castle. You’ve got your soldiers at the battlements. There’s a big fire in the fireplace. And you’re secure.

“Of course, that’s not true,” he adds. “Any house can be destroyed. And here was this child’s castle, lying in the mud. Another reminder that we are always dancing on the surface of catastrophe.”

Someday, Shayt intends to track down the young owner of the castle, learn his or her story and add it to the many other Hurricane Katrina stories on file at the Smithsonian.