Local artist plans to bike along Katrina's path

CJ Ritchie sat in her West Seattle living room and watched stark TV images of dying people being moved into a New Orleans morgue -- so the men and women could die in peace.

Ritchie may have spent years in social services work, but she was shaken by what she saw.

She wanted to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina -- as an artist of nearly 30 years, not a professional aid worker.

So the Renton native decided to ride her 15-year-old Novara bicycle 1,600 miles along the Gulf Coast to see the lingering devastation for herself.

For five weeks in May and June, Ritchie, 51, and her brother, Bill, will pedal through Pecan Island, New Iberia, Houma, Pass Christian, Biloxi, New Orleans, Pascagoula, Heron Bay, Gulf Shores and finally Key West to see what Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma did and what remains to be done.

Along the way, the two will snap photographs and shoot video, with the goal of creating art -- black-and-white images transformed with paint and a film -- that reminds people of the lasting damage from one of the nation's worst natural disasters.

"I know this isn't over. This is going to go on for generations," Ritchie said. "People need to still keep that in mind."

Eight months after the hurricanes began ripping up the Gulf Coast, the region is still far from whole. The storms destroyed nearly 400,000 homes, scattered about 500,000 people to Red Cross shelters and sparked a cleanup effort expected to cost more than $2 billion in relief funds, the Red Cross said.

In Louisiana today, people live in 64,000 trailers and mobile homes, while tens of thousands fled to other states around the country.

Ritchie, though, hopes to get beyond those figures to the personal sides of the disaster on a bike ride with no real itinerary.

She will stop when people need help, and talk with families as another hurricane season opens June 1.

Fifteen years ago, Ritchie rode this same route, on the same bike, through many of the same towns.

This time, the brother-sister team will push off in Galveston, Texas, living on energy bars until they reach better food near New Orleans.

"We will supplement with anything we can find," Ritchie added.

After years working with homeless families, Ritchie wanted to do something different, in part because television reports about the hurricanes painted an incomplete picture

"I wanted to go back and see how it's changed," Ritchie said. "I wanted to see for myself what's going on."

The trip, however, won't be easy.

Currently unemployed, Ritchie plans to cash out a small retirement account to help finance her trip and artwork. At a recent Art & Soul gallery fund-raiser in Ballard, she sold roughly $1,300 worth of her work to help cover the bills.

Ritchie continues to cut corners wherever she can, booking budget flights, searching for cheap gear.

She plans to camp out most of the trip, and if her brother wants to spend a night in a motel, he is paying the bill.

During an art career that spanned three decades, Ritchie has regularly meditated on themes of death and life like those that played out in the wake of the hurricanes.

By the age of 14, she had lost six friends and family members, and spent subsequent years losing others to suicide, murder, AIDS and other maladies.

Her most recent exhibit sprang from a 2003 trip to Vietnam with relatives who lost family in the Vietnam War.

Ritchie's photos capture sites where men were killed, including the valley where her own uncle was shot down. But, her brushstrokes of vibrant green and orange paint make the scenes glow, and add surreal qualities to portraits, still lifes and other scenes.

"I photograph what's there, and I paint what's not there," Ritchie said. "What's not there is what's happening inside people."

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