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Commentary - Oct 25, 2005 - Printable Version
- Report From Pascagoula
by D. E. Neighbors
No stray cats or dogs. Yeah. No strays.
That thought came to me in the wee hours of October 10. I’d only returned home a few hours before from a weekend in Pascagoula, Mississippi where I made a (very small) contribution to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort going on there. I had awakened sometime around 4:30 that morning to Mother Nature’s call, and as I lay there trying to muster my sore muscles into getting me out of bed and to the euphemism, I thought about what I’d seen there. Suddenly, I realized I had not seen any stray animals. Later in the day I realized that I had also not seen any squirrels in an area where white oak trees are among the most common. Thoughts flashed through my mind of a morainal ridge of dead animals at the farthest reaches of the storm surge, or of others who were unfortunate enough to have been swept out to sea.
Lest some who may read this consider me a “tree hugger”, I probably should tell you all that I’ve long had a weakness for strays. Anybody that knows me can tell you I have more than my share of cats in the house, most of which were dropped off in my neighborhood or born under my house. Also, years of traipsing through the woods trying to keep up with a group of Boy Scouts I’m supposed to be leading has made me a bit more sensitive to the environment. As a result, it follows that I happen to notice the local flora and fauna, or lack thereof.
But I digress somewhat.
I’m a Mormon, and the LDS church has played a large role in trying to help the victims of Katrina and her evil little sister, Rita. I traveled south with seven other guys from Kentucky in a Ford van, and a trailer full of “shovels and rakes and implements of destruction” (Thank you, Arlo), not to mention my backpack full of clothes and MREs. Our group had originally been slated for Slidell, Louisiana, but got Pascagoula instead. Not that I’m complaining, of course. Pascagoula hasn’t made the news like New Orleans has, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take a sizeable hit from the storm. In fact, I think places like Pascagoula stand in danger of being forgotten during the rebuilding process, thanks to the news media’s all-too-typical tunnel vision.
So how bad was it?
We began seeing signs of wind damage at least as far north as Montgomery, Alabama, mostly in blown-over trees and the occasional billboard stripped bare. As we wended our way south, those billboards had begun to lack large portions of their plywood backing, and the remains of highway signs were scattered in the median or along the edges of the interstate. Strangely, traffic flowed much as it always does on an interstate, even though the FEMA shelters being towed or hauled south were not among the usual traffic one would see. I was reminded of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, in which the narrator remarks that life in London was back to normal the day after the first cylinder landed. However, once we made Pascagoula, even in the dark we could see the piles of debris in front of gutted houses and businesses. We would soon see that our destination, the LDS chapel in Pascagoula, had been hit pretty hard, and had by our arrival been stripped of seawater-soaked drywall and carpet, hosed out, and filled with relief supplies. That was Friday.
Saturday morning found me waking up in a tent after a fairly reasonable night’s sleep, listening to the song of a solo bird in a tree nearby. I have to admit the weather was incredible, though a bit chilly thanks to a cold front that had moved in the day previous. It was then that I began to see by light of day some inkling of the destruction. Our location was about a quarter mile from the ocean, yet the church next door to us had been badly hit. Not a window remained, and its yard and parking lot was full of garbage. On the other side of the LDS building were homes, and extending down the street toward the Gulf of Mexico, one could see furniture, cabinets, no longer dry drywall, books, and children’s toys in piles in front of the remains of homes. I would be told later that the storm surge had been four feet deep where we were standing, yet a large majority of the homes I could see will be repaired, so even in the midst of devastation, those folks could consider themselves lucky.
Later in the day, after cleaning out one house, we drove down to the coast, in part because some of us had never seen the Gulf of Mexico before, but mostly because we wanted to see just how bad it was.
“Mother Nature’s wrath” doesn’t describe the picture fully. Even the term “Wrath of God” seems feeble in light of what we saw. I try valiantly not to use the name of God in vain, but as I looked upon the wreckage within sight of the ocean, it was almost impossible to avoid saying and repeating “My …… God!”
One could draw a line roughly 3-400 hundred yards in from the high tide mark that separates the “heavily damaged” from the “utterly destroyed.” What drew our eyes first was a large motor yacht sitting in someone’s back yard, almost comically hanging out over the channel it had originally rested in, still attached by its hawser to the pier across the channel, where it had been docked. Next were the stripped remains of a beachfront condo. Possibly one unit had survived well enough to be identifiable as a home, but the rest of the building had been ripped bodily from the pylons the condo had sat on. Most of the former condominium we found in the channel behind it, blocking all hopes of navigation in the near future. The swimming pool had also suffered: It was full of debris and a nasty, malodorous compound of seawater and whatever else had come to rest in it.
Not far away we found the shattered remains of a sailboat. It had been driven into a bridge by the wind and surf, and had split into at least three large pieces and innumerable small pieces of fiberglass. Even then, I can’t swear we were looking at the remains of only one boat. We would later see a much larger yacht sitting amongst the cypress trees a couple of hundred yards in, and another one about as big not far away. Close to that we saw a Jaguar XK8 that had obviously been washed from its garage (“We’ll store it in here for the storm. It’ll be safe.”), dented and sitting at an angle in the front yard. Along that same road we saw houses that had been utterly flattened, and others that had had the walls ripped out by the force of the water. Yet, even among the severe wreckage, we found a few houses that had weathered the storm rather well.
One such was a rather humble, comfortable-looking little house sitting among much newer, ritzier homes. We were to find that an elderly woman lived there, and that she’d ridden the storm out in the attic with one of her sons, who was there to help us with cleanup. You could see the ocean from her home, though that view had probably been previously blocked by houses that had been demolished either by Katrina or FEMA. I could only imagine how she must have felt when the water, after unsuccessfully battering the walls and flushing out much of what she owned, bodily lifted the house from its foundation and moved it back between five and seven feet. Yet, thanks to the absence of the ripped-out drywall, one could see that the house had been built well. The man who rode out the storm with his mother told me that they would soon have a crew out to lift the house up and put it on a new foundation. I fully expect that humble little house to be standing again.
Not far from her place was that of an obviously wealthier person, where our job was primarily to clean debris out of the yard. It was a two-story home, though this fact escaped me at first because I was concentrating on the damage at ground level. When I noticed the upper floors, I found and climbed the stairs, and in so doing moved from one definition of bizarre to another. The downstairs had been flushed out by the Gulf of Mexico. However, at the top of the stairs I found three bedrooms, exhibiting no damage at all, thanks to the fact the owner had had the foresight to nail the shutters closed. The beds still made, quietly awaiting the return of the family. The rooms were spotless, and eerily normal. I spent only a little time there, feeling an intruder, like Goldilocks, in someone’s island of normality.
And that kind of brings me to an end of this telling of my tale. In total, we all worked on four houses, two of them belonging to older folks who had ridden out Camille way back in 1969, neither of whom were guilty of what we call “conspicuous consumption.” One other belonged to a local police officer who has been, understandably, a lot busier since the storm, and who’d had little opportunity to work on his home. Last was the wealthier home. I had the privilege of finding some Polaroid pictures scattered across a lawn and the person to whom they belonged. I found myself at one point humming “The foolish man builds his house upon the sand” as I walked past the remains of fancy homes and condominiums built on the beach. I spent my time with people who were glad for all the help they could get, and nearly got into a fight with a guy who thought we were there taking jobs from locals.
The First Lady recently made a rather crass remark concerning the poor of New Orleans, but when I look back on Pascagoula, I’ve no doubt that it will be the rich who suffer more. Why is that, you may wonder? It’s simply because a lot of the folks who live on the lower end of the poverty line are more familiar with the word “survival.” They are tough folks. Some of them left town, and others rode the storm out in their attics or in their homes in chest-deep water, but they survived. Life will return to normal for them a lot sooner than it will for others.
However, one of the brethren with whom I traveled and worked for a weekend predicted that many of the ordinary people would be driven out by developers hungry for oceanfront property upon which to build yet more condominiums and houses far-too-expensive for the hoi polloi. The rich and the foolish will soon be dropping big bucks to live in apartments (I’m sorry! They are “condos!”) where they can see, hear, and even feel the ocean, and the ordinary folks, the survivors who lived in humble dwellings a bit farther back from the surf will be driven away because their homes will be considered unfashionable or even eyesores. Yes, life will return to the American definition of “normal.”
Even the squirrels and the stray cats and dogs will return.
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