Not knowing the intimate details of the damage left behind from Hurricane Katrina, I assumed I’d seen the worst of it in Ocean Springs. Everyone talks about how bad New Orleans is, but from the little television and Internet coverage I saw before making this journey, buildings were still standing in New Orleans, so this had to be the worst scenes of devastation, right?
I drove through the town of Ocean Springs, right down a main street in the original part of town. Traffic was heavy, so I had time to read all the signs that announced “We’re Open for Business” and “We’re NOT Going Out of Business!” While some of the old brick and wood structures were standing proud, the plague of blue tarp syndrome dotted their roofs. A big banner announcing the Fall Arts Festival happening this past weekend was hung between two oak trees that withstood the 150 plus mile an hour winds with nary a broken branch. Amazing to think that not two or three blocks away, a trash heap represented what remained of five or six homes.
Before leaving the area, I needed some lunch. I’d brought food just in case, but I’d spotted the remnants of a Wendy’s burger joint not far down Highway 90 on my way in, and they were open. Curiousity more than nutrition sent me there for lunch.
Nothing remained of the bright red Wendy’s sign on metal posts high above the building, but the Wendy’s brand marketing of uniform architecture was a tell tale sign that this was indeed a Wendy’s. With all the hard work Wendy’s owner, Dave Thomas, did on behave of adoption, himself being an adopted child, and his work with children, I’m sure that he would be proud of his Wendy’s employees who jumped to work to get the restaurants back up and running fast, even in spite of the devastation to their community. Having met him briefly many years ago, I also know that he would have been right there leading the pack with support, donations, and help for Katrina victims. So I felt I honored his life somewhat by having lunch with him, at least in spirit.
Inside, the place was clean and functioning, and packed with workers. Construction workers, roofers, people of every ethnicity, as well as every clothing style and stink. Whether they’d bathed that morning or ten days ago, some of them needed a bath anyway. But such is the labor to restore a community.
Everyone was chatting and smiling and many of the patrons knew the workers behind the counter. I heard one man say, “You know you’d miss me if I didn’t stop in every day” and a few minutes later, another man told a young girl, “You know I just come in here for your smile.” There was a sense of comradery and fun that was exciting to see.
I got my lunch to go and headed back out on the road. Since the Highway 90 bridge crossing from Ocean Springs to Biloxi was broken in pieces, I was forced to head up to Interstate 10 to continue my journey.
The further I moved away from the shore, the less mass damage I saw, but I still saw damage. Blue tarped roofs everywhere. Trees crushing buildings. Whole walls ripped off like a ragged fingernail. Cars overturned. Trash everywhere. Few other fast food restaurants were open like the Wendy’s, but those that were worked under tarped roofs and within patched walls, accommodating the massive clientel either living in the area or brought to the area for the work of reconstruction and rebuilding.
As I near the highway, I see a mountain of white through the trees. Thinking it was a water park with big white painted slides, I wondered what kind of damage would such a recreational site suffer. After all, the higher the slide, the more fun and terriffying the path down through the water. Water parks dot the Gulf Coast all the way to Florida, offering children and adults a day of fun in the sun and water with a bit of the circus thrown in.
As I got closer, I realized that I wasn’t seeing a water park but a giant mountain of refrigerators. I pulled off the road and drove in closer.
Indeed, there were thousands upon thousands of refridgerators piled so high, the mountain of metal stretched above the tall pine trees. Most of them were white, with the ocassional black or avocado tossed here and there. Here and there I spotted a box freezer, an oven, dish washer, and washer and dryer, but the majority of the mountain slope was made up of refridgerators. Continue reading
Leaving Mobile, Alabama, a town still struggling to pick up the pieces, I drove on Highway 90 towards New Orleans. I’d been told by several of the insurance agents, roofers, and construction workers that the highway was open all the way along the Gulf Coast from Alabama, through Mississippi, to Louisiana and New Orleans.
Whole subdivision neighborhoods were dressed in blue tarp covered roofs. The blue tarp manufacturing business is making a killing this year. Some roofs were only partially covered, a patch or two of blue. Others were fully draped, long 1×2 boards nailed down like vertical railings along the roof to hold down the plastic tarp.
As I moved on towards the beach between Pascagoula and Gautier to find more signs of destruction, I spotted vacant gas stations and grocery stores covered with cardboard boxes and clothing scattered across the parking lots. At first I thought this was left over debris from the storm, but then I saw huge handwritten signs requesting “No Dumping of Clothing” and “No More Clothes! Stop!” I could only assume that these were from boxes of donated clothes brought in by rescue services for those with nothing left and after two months of being picked through, this is what remains. A big mess. It looked worse than the annual sell everything sale at Nordstrom’s Outlets. 
Years ago, a co-worker of Brent’s awoke in the night to a terrible cackling sound. He got up to find the lights turning on and off and on and off. The cackling happened between the lights going on and off. Puzzled, but suspiciously aware of the source of the sound, he stepped outside of his bedroom into the stairway landing which was built around the huge cage in which his giant parrot normally slept through the night. They’d finished remodeling the house not long before.
He held up the mold test petri dish and sure enough, two patches of white mold and a big spread of black yuck had formed in the clear plastic dish. 
And we got up early the next morning and spent all day cleaning out the cupboards.”
Last week, I came into the trailer after hours spent working in the sweaty heat helping some folks deal with the latest crisis preparing for the arrival Hurricane Rita. The smell just about knocked me on my ass. Something was rotting.
As you may remember, we’ve had massive trouble with leaks after returning back to the states and our home on the road. While we seemed to have repaired the worst of the leak damage in our slide out, we also know that the whole back side of the trailer also has water damage. We’re just waiting for cooler temperatures to tackle that horrendous job. 
I crawled up on the bed and fought back the tears. Brent crawled in next to me.
Like millions of people all over the Gulf Coast of the United States, depression is bounding on the walls of our lives.
Blue, brown, black, and silver tarps cover homes on every block. You can’t turn in a circle without seeing quilted roofs everywhere. Signs are blown out, over, or down. Cars and trucks that met with trees coming at them instead of them coming at trees, sit by the road or in people’s yards, their fragile skulls crushed and eyes cracked or shattered.
The pile of tree debris that was once as high as a motor home along the road, obstacles to clear traffic views to the right and the left, has dried out with the overwhelming heat and drought that hit the area after Hurricane Katrina. As the single story high debris piles dried, they sank down, so at least the view up and down the street from my tall truck is a little easier. But each of these dried out piles of trees, branches, scrubs, roof materials, mattresses, furniture, toys, and appliances is a tinder pile waiting for a carelessly tossed cigarette to ignite it and go up into flames.
They continue to come back with stories that are worse than the pictures you see on television. Homes totally destroyed, wiped right off their foundation, not a stick in sight. Others find homes crushed into pickup sticks. Still more find homes and businesses that either fell off their stilts or were pushed right off their foundation to sit atop their neighbor’s home or the nearby street. Huge trucks wrapped around trees, shoved against them with the storm surge and floods. Dead animals, deer, boars, dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, and even the occasional alligator, are found lying alongside the roads and in backyards and places where you don’t expect to see such animals.
I have been spending early hours at the campground office, helping people get their bill paid, fix their RV, figure out how to dump their sewer tanks, hook up cable, adjust their satellite dishes, figure out their laundry, get their computers connected via modem or WIFI, and listen to their stories. During the day, I’d check in with various residents in the campground, especially Lester and his father,