/ Katrina Recovery

04:40 PM EDT on Wednesday, September 21, 2005

By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News

PORT SULPHUR, La. – Patty Vogt is a red-faced fighter with a pistol in her pocket and an attitude, ready to take on all that a killer hurricane left behind to save what's left of her beloved family farm.

ERICH SCHLEGEL/DMN

Patty Vogt and friend Don Morris try to rescue one of her calves stuck in floodwaters near Port Sulphur, La. Miss Vogt has been working for days to save what's left of the herd, though some cows died after being pulled out.

When Hurricane Katrina ripped into this finger of land jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, Miss Vogt and her brother John went inland. It was the first time in four generations that a member of the family didn't remain at the homestead to watch a big one roll in.

Three weeks later, they are struggling to snatch back all they can from the wreckage of the storm, desperately trying to save their last 60 cows.

Photos by ERICH SCHLEGEL/DMN

John Vogt and friend Don Morris walk some of the Vogt family's surviving cows down the levee past the family home in the southern tip of Louisiana.

To an outsider, their battle seems quixotic: working dawn to dusk for weeks to pull 46 animals off a salt-blasted levee and 14 more out of floodwaters they've been up to their bellies in since the storm roared into Louisiana. How can saving a small herd of cows matter to a family that lost almost everything it owned, in a region that has seen so much unvarnished human misery?

For the Vogts and their sister Monica Wertz, the battle is about something bigger. It's about compassion and promises to those who came before, about wresting shreds of meaning from a world that they longer recognize.

An agriculture man from the federal government flatly told Miss Vogt that the herd that somehow stayed alive for weeks in the stinking green water wasn't worth one of the bags of feed he'd grudgingly handed over.

"I pull my .25 on him," she tells anyone who will listen, patting the front pocket of her grimy blue jeans where she carries a worn Beretta .25-caliber automatic. "I tell his boss, 'Don't send him back down here, cause I'll knock his lights out.'

"We get a few more cows out, then I can have peace of mind. I don't care if it's six cows. I'm gonna fight to save them," said Miss Vogt, 51. "When we caught the first, just the other day, we had to rassle it, and we nearly flipped the boat in 30 feet of water. But I said, 'At least we got this one. And we gonna call this calf Baby Katrina.' "

Her brother John, 55, says: "To leave 'em there, that's cruelty. All they doing is suffering. You can't stand by."

The Vogts' great-grandparents had a farm across the river until a monster hurricane smacked the coastline in September 1915, following a track eerily similar to the path that Katrina would take nearly a century later. Officials with big plans for flood control after the 1915 storm swamped New Orleans – plans that never came to anything, in the end – took the Vogt family's first farm away.

So they resettled on the west bank of the river on a stretch of land they dubbed Home Place. They put in orange groves and tomatoes and started running cattle on both sides of State Highway 23, and they vowed that no storm would ever make a Vogt leave the land again.

They handed it down through generations, along with family lore about past storms such as Betsy, Audrey and Camille. Mr. and Miss Vogt's grandmother cooked coffee on the middle of the highway after Betsy because it was the only dry ground. Their grandfather rowed her every morning in a pirogue down to St. Patrick's Church.

Her grandchildren say the reason was as plain as any Vogt: A God-fearing woman who went to Mass every morning would be at that church even if she had to paddle there. Someone had to offer prayers. She and her husband taught their grandchildren that anyone might take what they had if they didn't stay to protect it, even if a hurricane came raging up the gulf.

"We told them, 'We'll always stay with the place.' It's home," said Mrs. Wertz, 48.

Miss Vogt passed up a chance for a medical scholarship to keep that promise and run the farm with her older brother, her sister said. She loved the land too much to leave, even dodging kindergarten by hiding in a farmhand's tool chest so she could work in the orange groves with her grandpa.

By the time she was grown, Miss Vogt was known for miles around as a woman who could care for cows, mend a hurt dog or cat, or take care of any neighbor in need.

"She's hard. She's an Annie Oakley in the rough," said Mrs. Wertz, a high school principal up the road in Belle Chase. "To see an animal suffer, that's hard for her."

The farm Miss Vogt runs with her brother is typical in this southernmost tip of the state. A rural corner with 28,900 residents, Plaquemines Parish has fewer than 200 farms, averaging 182 acres and clustered on the thin strip of land between the Mississippi River and the marshes of the gulf. But they grow more oranges than anywhere else in the state, and the 10,000 cattle raised in Plaquemines bring in about a third of the parish's agricultural income.

The Vogts maintained 4,000 orange trees, an acre of tomatoes and 300 cows, with a farm stand beside the highway to sell their oranges and tomatoes and a steady market for their produce from buyers in the New Orleans French Market.

A tractor accident several decades ago nearly cost Miss Vogt her leg. But her sister said they all fervently prayed to St. Jude, patron of desperate situations, and the battered leg was miraculously spared.

Mrs. Wertz calls her brother and sister's decision to leave the farm just as Katrina bore down another St. Jude miracle. They had decided to stay but relented at the last minute after Miss Vogt heard on television that the storm's winds might hit 200 mph.

Mrs. Wertz later told relatives that she had also gotten a sign. "Patty said she heard my grandpa tell her, 'It's okay. You can go now,' " her sister said.

The legend of the family's refusal to leave the land was so strong in the area that some folks thought Miss Vogt and her brother must have died in the storm. Both of their homes were knocked clear from their foundations, and their barns were shredded.

Within a day after the hurricane, someone posted on an Internet site that a deputy had found Miss Vogt facedown in the water; another person supposedly identified her in a body bag.

Mrs. Wertz said she was frantic until a friend went to a farm the family had bought several years before in Amite, La., and found Miss Vogt there with her brother and their farmhands.

When they got back home, their family farm seemed to have died in the hurricane. The orange groves were covered in oily saltwater. The equipment was scattered; looters had carted off some of it.

A call to the state agriculture commissioner produced a flat boat so they could begin ferrying feed to the cows.

More pleas got a National Guard Black Hawk helicopter, which tried to drop water into big troughs the Vogts had hauled to the levee, but the aircraft blew the troughs off. The Vogts and some friends scavenged pallets of drinking water left on the side of the road, cutting them open one by one to water the animals.

But they got nowhere in trying to find a helicopter to haul in a cattle barge so their cows could be floated to safety.

By Tuesday, the Vogts had managed to save two calves by boat and had herded a $5,000 bull to dry land. But the bull was so cut up that it didn't last a day. Mr. Vogt had to shoot three other animals to put them out of their misery, and he could see hides rotting on the ones stuck in the water. Several that he coaxed out of the water promptly laid down on the levee and died.

"You can't sleep," Miss Vogt said. "Every time you turn over you see a cow in your face."

While they waited for help, they salvaged what they could from their wrecked family homes. Fighting water moccasins, they pulled out of the muck an antique kitchen table. A photo of the Vogts' grandparents was on a neighbor's porch, unscathed. A set of antique gumbo bowls also survived, as did the prized bottle of champagne that their great-great-grandparents brought home unopened from their wedding in New York.

By Tuesday evening, the helicopter and the barge still hadn't come, and the Vogts were forlornly trying to figure out their next move.

To everyone who passes by, she says: "Can you believe this? Can you believe this? Ain't nothin' left."

As she looked, exhausted, over her ruined farm, she declared: "I ain't coming back. ... If my brother wants to stay, he can have it," she said. "I can't grow no more oranges here."

Her sister said she believes that what they have been able to salvage are signs, much like the hurricane and her siblings' decision to leave the farm before the storm.

"The things that we're retrieving are all the things that belong to the grandparents. It's a repeat of the 1915 storm, when they had to start over," she said. "It's time to move on and take the best memories. It'll never be the same. We're 50 years old. It takes 10 years to make oranges. It's time."

But Miss Vogt said she won't go until she's helped every animal she can find. With 80 percent of the parish's cattle missing and thousands scattered like hers over the levees, she said, she can't quit anytime soon.

"Why we want to save just 60 cows?" she said. "If someone asked me that, I'll put my .25 in they face and pull the trigger. ... I'll put they lights out."

E-mail lhancock@dallasnews.com