RIVERTON - "This is a good place to heal."

So says Rosemary Kariker, 87, matriarch of an extended Louisiana family that has abandoned the New Orleans area after the devastation of last year's Hurricane Katrina.

Healing is a high priority for Rosemary, a noted watercolorist and retired professor of education psychology. She suffered a massive heart attack while trying to restore her spacious brick family home in Metairie, La., a New Orleans suburb just a block and a half from Lake Pontchartrain.

"I flat-lined," she says simply. It was due to the stress and crushing depression she experienced in fighting local, state and federal bureaucracies, gouging contractors, drastic increases in building materials and insurance companies that paid for wind damage but quibbled endlessly over water damage.

When costs outran insurance checks by tens of thousands of dollars, it was time to take a break - perhaps a very long break amid the high plains and mountains of Wyoming.

Rosemary is much better today, six weeks after returning to Riverton from New Orleans. Fremont County was her refuge immediately after Katrina; it now appears to be her home.

She's a new member of the Riverton Art Guild, whose members gather every Wednesday at the fairgrounds to paint, draw and give positive critiques to one another.

Rosemary's eyes are dimmed by macular degeneration, so her paintings are increasingly abstract and boldly colorful. White blotches suddenly snap into egret wings above a Louisiana swamp scene, still vibrant in her inner eye.

It is that inner eye and sharp memories that keep Rosemary painting, even if she sometimes presses her face a mere inch or two from the canvas. She has created 10 paintings since returning to Wyoming, broadening her repertoire to include the dramatic scenery of the Wind River country's mountains, rocky canyons, streams and forests.

"This is beautiful, spectacular country," Rosemary said - so very different from the scenery of Louisiana, Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

"Mom looked gray and gaunt when she got off the plane," daughter Sara Damrill recalled when Kariker came back to Riverton, where children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have settled. "Now she's got her sparkle back."

Sara, a supervisor at the Comfort Inn, and granddaughter Kaley ,a Riverton High School senior, haven't looked back and express no desire to go back to Louisiana. Other relatives have gone back to rebuild homes and lives.

"I think the big difference is that we rode out the storm and the flooding," said Karla Kariker, Rosemary's granddaughter, now outside sales coordinator for the Riverton Holiday Inn. Some relatives spent the storm playing golf in Houston, she said. "We have a very different perspective. We don't ever want to go through something like that again."

Karla and son Anthony, a kindergartner at Trinity Lutheran School, have traded their New Orleans apartment for a log cabin with a spectacular view of the Wind River Range. Karla shares the cabin with her aunt Sara.

Karla has made two trips back to New Orleans - first in November to escort Rosemary, and again in June, with her mom Ingrid Kariker. Karla saw little evidence of progress or change between those two visits.

"It looks miserable, sad and depressed," Karla said. "New Orleans will always be in our hearts, but I've no desire to go back."

Son Anthony is flourishing in Riverton, she said. "His cousins are here, and he can play and ride his bike outside - something he couldn't do back in New Orleans. This is a much healthier environment."

Searing memories

Rosemary's Metairie home weathered Katrina's powerful winds just fine, the brick walls flexing like the breathing of a large, beleaguered animal. It was the storm surge, the failed levees and the pumps that never got turned on that caused the most damage and made life a living hell for extended-family members gathered there.

No electricity. Two feet of grossly contaminated water standing in the first floor. Extreme heat and humidity. Three hundred-year-old oaks upturned - their roots snapping water, gas and sewer lines - sticking out of the ground and floodwaters like broken guitar strings.

"You could almost see the pathogens in the water," Rosemary said.

Nights were absolutely dark. The deep, dark silence was broken by car alarms from flooded autos, sirens and the thrum of helicopters in the distance. There was no help, and no assistance apparently coming.

To stay was untenable, indeed dangerous, said Garland Kariker, Rosemary's son and a retired Eastern Airlines station master.

But where to go? Relatives elsewhere in the New Orleans area or Mississippi coast were overwhelmed or missing. Relatives in Riverton became the goal, where daughter Kristen Barlow and son Kirk Kariker were raising their respective families.

For several unnerving days, during the height of Katrina and until the traveling Kariker band reached cellular phone coverage, "We didn't know where anyone was," said Barlow, an ad sales representative at the Riverton Ranger.

Garland loaded Rosemary, wife Ingrid and in-laws Einar and Eugene Pederson, as well as Karla and Anthony, Sara and Kaley into two vehicles - four others were claimed by the flood waters. (Ingrid's father has since died, while her mother is living back in the New Orleans area.)

A Wyoming welcome

The Kariker mini-caravan reached Wyoming last year and checked into the new Comfort Inn for the next three months. Immediately, people in Lander and Riverton reached out with a wide range of donations - food, clothing, jobs and money. The Federal Emergency Management Agency helped with the rent, but left Garland to burn through $22,000 of his savings and credit for meals and sundry expenses.

All the Karikers maintain that Wyoming has been extraordinarily generous and charitable with them, including a year's free tuition at Trinity Lutheran for Anthony.

Garland and Ingrid decided in December to stay in Riverton, buying a home near Central Wyoming College and moving in with donated furniture. They're rebuilding their janitorial supply and service business, importing special cleaning chemicals from Louisiana. Garland credits Riverton Mayor John Vincent for shepherding their business permit through the city council. Ingrid, who used to manage a large cleaning crew in greater New Orleans, is cleaning homes in Fremont County.

"I like clean," she said. Ingrid's busy enough that if more business comes in, she may have to get some help.

It is somewhat doubtful their janitorial business will completely recover. After all, their old business base was the New Orleans metropolitan area - about a million people.

Watching the Katrina/New Orleans saga unfold from afar, often through CNN reports, the Karikers are left with a bitter taste for Louisiana politics and politicians.

"I think they failed us," said Rosemary, whose old friends are being ground down by bureaucrats, insurance companies, contractors and even petty criminals who filch propane tanks from FEMA trailers.

"I have learned one thing: You really don't own anything, because it can be taken away in a flash," she said, reflecting on vanished antique furniture and her own paintings, swimming medals and all the documents associated with her academic life.

"All we really have is each other," she said.

For the Kariker family, that might just be enough.