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NEW ORLEANS An unlikely pair has taken on a stirring mission in the urban swamp of New Orleans. With a crowbar and a flat-bottom boat, the two have helped people break into their own homes and steal back from the city's most audacious looters -- the falling water and rising mold -- some reminders of what was: an inherited painting, a homemade quilt, a colorful print made by a child's hand that has since grown much bigger. "Here's what I've learned," said the captain, Ramsey Skipper, a building contractor whose own home is under water, and whose wife and two children have taken refuge with family near Houston. "This chapter is over. It was a beautiful chapter in our lives. So it's important -- for the kids, especially -- to have something to remember." Skipper also has learned more prosaic lessons, such as how to free a boat that runs aground, with a grinding jerk, on a car. He shifts all passengers to the stern and guns the reverse. "Look at the antenna," he muttered after one grounding, nodding at the telltale stalk. He has learned that body bags, with their tubular shape and many handles, make "the best transport bags ever" for belongings, fitting right through a window. Skipper's bowman is Laurent Guerin, a 46-year-old, French-born freelance photographer who lives in Taos, N.M., and came to New Orleans to photograph the destruction. He wound up, for the most part, setting down his Leica cameras to help. "You have to be a U.S. citizen first, and a photojournalist after," he said. To break into John Peuler's house on Louis XIV Street, Skipper pressed the bow between the white columns of the front portico. Then Guerin crouched in the bow and put a life jacket on one shoulder. Skipper, 41, put a foot on the life jacket and grabbed the iron rail of the portico roof to haul himself up. He smashed a window, then unlocked and opened it. At other houses, when no window was in reach, Skipper clambered onto the roof, ripped off a ventilator, and wriggled his 6-foot frame through the hole. After Peuler, 53, also scaled Guerin, he began ransacking his own bedroom. Standing nearby, Skipper spoke of how his passengers set their priorities for salvage, performing a kind of emotional triage. "If we only kept the things we truly loved in our homes," he said, "we'd have so much space." Guerin and his captain named Skipper have been working the water-logged Lakeview neighborhood, where some homes had fetched more than $1 million. Skipper says thousands of houses will have to be demolished. Street signs protrude just above the water, lending a jarring note of seeming coordination to the radical reshaping of the cityscape. By Monday, a current pulled the water like a sheet southward, toward the pumps. With the outboard off, the only sound in Lakeview is the keening of dying homes; some alarm systems, falling back on their batteries, are still trying to warn departed owners that the electricity has failed. An acrid smell rises from the water. The crew encountered no mosquitoes and saw few birds. The leaves of the magnolias, pomegranates and crepe myrtles are turning brown. Yet there is still life here. On Saturday, the crew found a 78-year-old man, walking above the water on a railroad trestle, trying to return home. They brought him to an improvised landing, where Veterans Memorial Boulevard dies in the water. Skipper learned the value of collecting mementos after returning to his own house, which he built, to retrieve belongings including his 7-year-old daughter's tea set. His wife had seemed depressed, he said, but lit up after he told her what he had done. There is no doubting the depth of Skipper's feeling for his neighbors. He repeatedly expressed frustration that emergency officials had not helped residents salvage belongings, and he accepted nothing but thanks for the risks he ran. He knows how it is. "It's OK, I've done my crying already," he said Saturday, as he stared down at the water and mold consuming his home, on General Diaz Street. "At least, I think I have."