AFTER THE STORM

home underwater, they were shocked.

“Everything was just like, ‘What do I do? Oh, I can walk. I can do that,’” Tiffany says, trying to explain the confusion they felt. “Just so lost. On top of that, cell service wasn’t working, so we had friends we weren’t able to get ahold of that we were worried as hell about. We finally figured out that texting worked.”

They weren’t going home, they realized, at least not anytime soon.

They also couldn’t stay with Tiffany’s mom forever, so they needed to find jobs — pronto. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of insurance claims, applying for what little assistance was available and searching for jobs.

One day Mark was in Richardson Bike Mart and he struck up a conversation with general manager Woody Smith about cycling.

Above/ When Mark and Tiffany Manson finally accepted they weren’t going back to New Orleans, they decided to set down roots by purchasing a home in Dallas.

Left/ Before the Mansons bulldozed their home in New Orleans, they collected windows, doors, floorboards and other pieces, and Mark Manson used the pieces to create a wall in their new backyard.

When Smith learned Mark was a Katrina evacuee, he asked Mark if he needed a place to stay. Then Smith was quick to offer him a job — a decision he hasn’t regretted.

“He’s a great, great employee,” Smith says. “I think the world of him. He has a lot of knowledge about bikes and he loves people.”

During the transition, people within the cycling community in Dallas embraced the Mansons, ready to help in whatever way possible.

“[Woody] was very willing to help us,” Mark says. “I told him, ‘Look, it’s only going to be for a couple of months. I’ll sweep the floor or whatever you need.’ He said, ‘No, we’ll set you guys up.’ They were great.

“The owner of the company was going to Italy with his wife, and he said, ‘If you need a place to stay, you can stay at our house. If you need a truck, we’re not going to be driving ours.’ I’d never met him. It was just unbelievable, and that’s when I really started to feel like, OK, things are going to be good here.”

They lived with Tiffany’s mom for a couple months before moving into an apartment and later into a house on Lower Greenville. It was the closest thing to New Orleans they had.

“There were multiple gossiping sessions that happened in the middle of the street between neighbors,” Tiffany says. “The neighbors would host a quinceañera and everyone would bring food.”

“There was a month when I rode my bike every day to work,” Mark says. “It was great. We loved going to eat at the Char Bar. We loved going there to talk about football.”

They avoided the news as much as possible, and both were hit with a heavy dose of survivor guilt.

“We felt like here we were in another city instead of in New Orleans helping to repair the city that we loved more than anything else in the world,” Tiffany says. “We both had that guilt.”

Both vividly remember the first time they saw their home after the flood.

“Driving into the city was surreal,” Mark remembers. “Everything was covered in this funky grey film.”

“It was like watching a black and white film out your car window,” Tiffany describes. “Not muddy brown. Grey. And the smell was unlike anything you could ever describe. It was a mixture of chemicals and mold and death.”

“When we drove down the main street into our neighborhood there was nothing nobody was around, nothing was stirring, there was no movement,” Mark explains.

“No birds, no sound,” Tiffany says.

“We didn’t even speak,” Mark says. “We were just driving in silence.”

“Crying,” Tiffany adds.

They pulled up to their house with a sense of “morbid curiosity,” Mark says. They wanted to see it and didn’t at the same time.

“I got out of the car and collapsed onto the lawn,” Tiffany says, her eyes welling up with tears at the memory. “Mark was saying, ‘It’s go- ing to be OK. It’s going to be OK,’ and all I kept thinking was, ‘This is not OK. There’s nothing about this that’s OK.’ ”