Ellen Montgomery’s house near Audubon Park was already almost invisible from the street before Hurricane Katrina shattered the massive cedar tree in her front yard and left a tangled, camouflaged mess that now obliterates the view of just about everything.
If anything, that helped her hide from the National Guard during the tense days—now ancient weeks ago—when word came that they were forcing those who had remained in New Orleans to leave.
“If I was out walking in the neighborhood and I heard the Hummers coming, I would duck down behind a porch or some broken shutters,” she said. “I felt like a Confederate spy in enemy territory.”
Montgomery was a holdout. A straggler. The resistance.
She stayed behind without power or running water or even a generator. The simple reason: “My babies,” she says. Thirty-four cats. (It was thirty-three for several weeks, until one that had gone missing returned home last Saturday night, “to say hello,” Montgomery says.)
She knows what you’re thinking. It used to bug her but not anymore.
“Years ago, I said to my vet, ‘But I don’t want to be a cat lady!’ ” Montgomery recalls. “And he says to me, ‘But you are a cat lady.’ So there you are.”
And so, for thirty days, what has she done?
“Well,” she pauses. “I sleep late. Let’s see . . . and then I feed the cats. I read The Journal of Beatrix Potter. It’s a lovely book. And then I have my cup of coffee. And that usually lasts a couple of hours. And then I paint and—I don’t know. The days just fly by. I’m in another world here. I don’t feel the heat. I don’t feel anything. I am very able to exist on my own. I just paint, and that’s what keeps me from going bonkers. That’s my therapy.”
Montgomery has been painting since 1977, when she read the book of Vincent van Gogh’s correspondence, Letters to Theo.
“I read it and I said, ‘I want to do that,’ ” she says. “So I got down and did that and have been doing it ever since.”
Indeed. She sits on the floor in the front room of her house—it would be a stretch to call it a “studio”—and she fills canvas after canvas, board after board, paper after paper. If you stood still in front of her for long enough, she’d probably paint you.
Her home is filled with thousands of paintings she has made over the past three decades. Admittedly, she has sold few works, so mostly they line her walls, floor to ceiling in every room, and then they fill stacks and piles randomly assigned through her cluttered 1890s cottage.
And, having recently run out of canvases to work on, she is now working a medium that only a hurricane could provide: she has gathered scores of slate roofing tiles that were scattered off the roofs of her neighbors’ homes into the street, and now she paints them.
“They’re so beautiful,” she says. “I couldn’t bear the thought of the National Guardsmen or some contractors trampling over them, so I collected them. I won’t have enough time in my life to paint them all.”
Over the years, she has painted various abstracts and florals and faces and landscapes, but now her work is fairly dark and muddied and swirly, work clearly influenced by the monstrous forces that have visited her life this past month.
Funny thing is, in the beginning, she didn’t really know what had happened.
Montgomery has been living the consummate, isolated cat lady existence for years, and she was only vaguely aware that a storm was even coming.
The shattered cedar tree and the loss of power, water, and phone—and the disappearance of all her neighbors—told her it was something big.
“I went to church that Sunday morning before the storm, and a sign on the door said, ‘Services canceled,’ so I bought a paper and that was the last news I heard,” she says.
“There were four or five days where I had absolutely no idea what had happened. But I was safe, the cats were safe, so I thought: Why be scared? I firmly believe in God and prayer. I knew I would just ride it out. I am probably more prepared than anyone else in the world to spend time alone.”
It wasn’t until several days later, when a neighbor returning to retrieve some items loaned her a radio—and stocked her with food and water before leaving again—that the magnitude of the event settled upon her.
“I try to listen to the news a couple of hours a day, and it’s unimaginable, really,” she says. But she has seen no images of it all; has not seen that more than half the city was underwater and has not seen the human misery that filled the Superdome and Convention Center, sights that are now burned into the American consciousness.
“At first, actually, it was kind of nice around here,” she says. “The birds came back, and the squirrels would come deliver me the news. It’s all been so peaceful, really. But it’s nice to have the thought of people coming back. I suppose there’ll be lots of chain saws and hammers and all that, so I might miss the silence. But, the truth is, I’m just about out of candles.”