Down in Mississippi: Day 463 - In The Light of Morning

Monday, July 6, 2009

Day 463 - In The Light of Morning

The light of this morning reveals a narrow door standing open before me. As I step through it in about an hour and a half, my past becomes a remembered presence. Contemplating with a little unease the challenges before me, the realization dawns that the word “return” has an uncertain meaning.

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Down In Mississippi I.

It is about a 7 hour drive to Pearlington, a small community near Lake Pontchartrain just outside Slidell, Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina made landfall about 15 months earlier, hitting Pearlington, Mississippi almost head-on. I heard even now there was still much to do there, so I decide to see for myself. My plan is to leave Chattanooga about 10AM Saturday and arrive before dark to look around and locate the Disaster Recovery Center. At the DRC I will meet four or five people in an advance work party traveling down from Knoxville’s Fountain City Presbyterian Church.

I asked some friends over for dinner tonight. We spend quite the time relaxing in my home eating and talking about my trip on Saturday, the next day. We talk late into the night in my living room high on the hill with the vista of the lights and buildings of the city through my windows. So much for an early start.

I had made my list earlier Friday while I cooked our dinner. Saturday morning, all I plan to do is pay some bills and run some errands, and of course, pack my clothes and tools. My intent is to get back before next Friday to catch up with some old friends who are coming come into town. We spent many hours indulging in fellowship and excess down in Atlanta on Virginia Avenue during my days in grad school.

Naturally when Saturday rolls around I cannot find my saber saw, and spend probably thirty to forty-five minutes going up and down the hill from my shop to my furnace room where my tools are spread about in my paroxysm remodeling. I have to wash some clothes. Finally with the clock pressing me I make a management decision. Sleeping bag, pillow, band-aids, my meds, 3 pairs of jeans, sweat shirt, work boots, sufficient socks and underwear and a fresh shirt to get me through to Thursday is all I need.

I fill my truck with diesel at the station as I leave town, figuring to make it down on one tank and still get back to Picayune for more if there isn’t any fuel in Pearlington. I depart town about 11:30AM figuring with the time change I’ll still get there before dark, but just barely.

It is a wonderfully sunny November day. Driving through north Alabama, absolutely beautiful color in the leaves of the trees decorate the side of Lookout Mountain and the low hills beyond all the way to Birmingham. With cruise control on 75 mph, all I have to do is watch the road and the hills, and push the “seek” button on the radio trying to find a good FM station and enjoy the view. There is a lot of not too interesting church stations. I listen to 88.1 out of Chattanooga until it fades in static, then an NPR station out of Birmingham. On one sweep through the FM spectrum, I find the Auburn game and listen to that until the signal fades. I stop and pick up an Alabama map at a rest stop near Birmingham, and then back on the road find the Alabama game on the radio. Luckily my late departure causes me to miss the horrendous traffic jam in Tuscaloosa from that game. I hear a few final scores later but as I near Mississippi, the only station is out of Meridian carrying the Old Miss game. Only the trees entertain.

I stop every two hours or so, for once I heed my doctor’s advice not to sit in the car too long. When I get to the Mississippi state line, I stop at the first rest area before Meridian and pick up a Mississippi map and a complimentary Diet Coke. I am getting excited, next comes Hattiesburg, then Picayune, then I-10/12 where I go back east eight to twelve miles to MS Rte 607, then south on MS 604 a couple of miles to Pearlington. I think I still may make it there before dark.

From the map I got at the rest stop near Meridian I try to get an idea of how far north of the Gulf I am. It cannot be more than 100 miles, maybe 75 as the crow flies.

For the whole way the trees have been so pretty coming down and I continually watch them as I drove further south. I hardly ever take the time to enjoy Fall, yet it has such a beauty, ever anticipating a green Spring.

Somewhere between Meridian and Hattiesburg a perception grows that something is not right about the trees. I realize the bare pines and small oaks have a decided tilt, leaning more or less north or northwest and many of the limbs seemed stripped. As I near Hattiesburg, maybe 50-60 miles due North of the gulf, I begin to see a few dead pines snapped off six to ten feet from the ground. Beyond Hattiesburg there are large gaps along I-59 where only sparse stands of trees remain with occasional large piles of collected stumps. Quite soon thereafter uprooted oaks lying on the ground in the midst of the woods appear. Near mile post 100 from LA state line I see a blown out road sign. By mile post 85 the frequency of broken pines on the ground has significantly increased. By milepost 55 there are large treeless gaps in the median. The highway crews have been landscaping from massive piles of woodchips of ground up trees. Around mile post 43, I find a whole field of trailer homes, stacked shoulder to shoulder. There are hundreds if not thousands of them totally covering an open field, still pristine and clean as new. I learn later they are FEMA trailers, sent there for hurricane survivors. Between the Fed’s not allowing trailers in “flood zones” and the depopulation of this area, they just sit empty and unused.

At milepost 35 near the Wolf River between Poplarville and Lumberton, A steel radio tower is twisted and bent around and over. There are downed trees still in the median from here on in. By the time I reach to Picayune, 462 miles from Chattanooga, I am averaging about seventy. It is five in the afternoon and still light. I decide with all the uncertainty of my observations it is time to fill up the truck. I have no idea of what I’ll find in Pearlington.

By the time I make Interstate 10 about two miles from Slidell, LA and turn to head east the sun is down and it is dark. The near-full moon rose not long after leaving Picayune, almost like a star in the sky leading me towards Pearlington. Shortly after crossing the Pearl River I find MS 607 and exit, then reach to Rte. 604 and turn to drive into Pearlington. Only the moon heralds my entry, otherwise, it was dark. With no streetlights and few houses, I am lost.

When I drive on into more or less what I am sure is the community, I decide to turn into a road where a young man in a car sits ready to turn onto Rte 604. I lower my window and wave at him until he lowers his. Having his attention, I ask him,

“Do you know where the Disaster Recovery Center is?”

He gives me a blank look.

“It used to be an elementary school.”

Even though it was dark, I can see the big smile as he realizes where I want to go.

“Follow me!”

He makes a U-turn and leads me down some twisting road that ended up at a 90-degree turn where a military mess tent stands to the right. I see a couple of signs and two buildings on the left beyond a tall chain link fence. One sign says “Pearl Mart” and the other says “Charles B. Murphy Elementary School.” The school itself sits on the other side of the large parking lot beyond the gate. So, this is the Disaster Recovery Center.

I turn into the parking lot, wave good bye to the young man and drive to the school building at the far side of the lot where a few cars and a Ford 4x4 are parked. The Ford and the rest of the cars belong to the people from Fountain City Presbyterian Church.

These guys and their friends have traveled here to work six times in the last twelve months. They have built a really good relationship with a few key local people who point them towards folks that really need help.

Even with the bright moon, I cannot see anything else. I drive up to the school whose front obviously had been windows, but now is comprised four 4x8 sheets of plywood bearing a complicated painted mural I cannot not fully read. I enter the door walking into a large room containing maybe thirty or so cots with blankets, and a back wall window space similar to the front, four 4x8 sheets of plywood again, except these hold two air conditioners. I introduce myself to the first person I see. He is Bob and introduces me to the rest of the five people from FCPC. They have waited on me before they depart for dinner at Turtle’s over on US90 not far east of 604 and the bridge over the Pearl River to Slidell beside Lake Pontchartrain.

Bob said they have the best catfish around. I gladly go along because they tell me there is no other place around to eat or buy groceries; you have to drive to the new WalMart in Bay St. Louis or Slidell for that. Turtle’s is the only place to eat for miles.

The hurricane and surge wiped out Turtle’s, but it was one of the first places re-established. They pitched a tent on the side of the building for a kitchen, found some portable stoves and salvaged the beer in the locker within the washed out building. Turtle’s with its alligator pond out back was back in business at ground zero as fast as the Wal-Mart Store. The catfish is greasy but the beer is cold and it tastes great to an growling stomach.

I sit listening to my new friends’ stories of how people survived in Hancock County. It generates a great anxiety about what awaits discovery in the light of Sunday morning and the week beyond. I think that my plans on getting back to Chattanooga on Friday to see my old friends probably aren’t going to happen. What have I gotten myself into?

Down In Mississippi II.

Lizzie’s Place
Day 2

Sunday morning I have tossed on my cot awake since 4AM. At 5AM, I go outside and find the full moon setting in a clear sky as the sun rises in the opposing horizon. Fifteen months after Katrina hit, yet devastation is still all around me here in Pearlington. I survey the parking lot. There are eight or ten portable bathrooms, two 250 gallon containers of water for washing hands but not drinking, containers of donated bottled water for drinking, construction supplies, the Pearl Mart that was the school’s old gym converted to a warehouse for free supplies of toiletries and other necessities for the local population, the mess tent, showers and temporary tent housing for volunteers a hundred yards away, all of it surrounded by broken and stripped pines, or bare ground. According to Bob, today we meet Lizzie. Her home is the first on our list and we will get there early Sunday morning and survey what needs to be done at her place, leave three of our crew there to work while Bob and I go over to find and check out the next home on our list, Mr. Bougee’s house over near the Disaster Recovery Center.

Bob told me part of her story last evening. Lizzie is a survivor. Her husband was a trucker and I believe he was out on the road when Katrina hit. I do not know where Lizzie waited out the storm but it completely scrubbed her home down to its concrete slab leaving behind only a few shrubs and live oaks that survived the salt water. Her husband came back to more than a little stressful time. Four months later he died of a heart attack. Lizzie is still jobless and his tractor rig still sits in the driveway. Every few days she goes out and cranks it.

About six months ago she decided to rebuild. She started with the old slab that now is to be her patio. Her house is almost completed, a 3 bedroom, 2 bath plan with a nice living room and dining room/kitchen. She is going to get through this disaster with a new home, but it will take a large push to get it done by the end of February when FEMA plans to pull all the trailers.

Her electrical work and much of the drywall is completed. There are a few problems with the ceiling. Someone had put up a piece of drywall with a gap and vertical offset. It needs to come down. Our job is the two bathrooms, the hall, utility room, the window insets and two closets. Today our goal is to complete as much of the drywall work as we can before the rest of our group arrives sometime later today. On Monday and perhaps Tuesday our “mud maidens” whose friendship with Lizzie has deepened over the last year will mud everything. They had helped her on earlier trips and now will have the chance to talk to her again as they finish the drywall.

I begin helping the guys remove and again hang the drywall for the ceiling but it looks like they need help cutting the drywall for the walls to keep the pace with their effort. While they start work on the hall way I go out to cut 4x8 sheets to size. On the first sheet, I mark the cut, but make the strategic mistake to keep the drywall knife in my left hand while I steady the square on the pencil mark on far side of the sheet. I bring my right hand down to take the knife to make the cut. I rake my right hand across the blade, slicing the fleshy part of the back of my thumb, bleeding like a stuck pig. I go over to my truck, get some bottled water and wash my hand, then some paper towels for a compress, but my hand bleeds on anyway.

This is exactly what Dr. Bob did not want to see happen. He comes out, takes a look at my hand and heads for his truck where he keeps a stocked dispensary box. Luckily the cut is relatively shallow except at the end where the blade dug in a bit as it last left my thumb. We get the bleeding mostly stopped, and the cut is such that skin tension keeps it closed. Some antibiotic, a couple of band-aids and a little surgical tape do the trick. I decide I’ll wear my gloves the rest of the week. Not more than 5 minutes later one of the guys comes out, he’s stabbed his finger with his knife. He and I are the first walking-wounded, kindred spirits.

We almost finish Lizzie’s today and only have a couple of pieces of drywall in the utility closet remaining for early tomorrow, and then the mudding starts. The rest of us think about heading over to Mr. Bougee’s house Monday, he is our next project.

Lizzie is so excited with her home, she insists on fixing our lunch the following Tuesday. There was no way we are going to argue with her. So, on Tuesday, we take our mid-day break from Mr. Bougee’s and return to Lizzie’s to eat her lunch with us all. She ends up buying three roasted chickens, some baked beans, potato salad and tea.

Lizzie is a very happy woman with all this work on her home. She is so excited she brought over a couple of her girl friends to show off our work on her home. There is nothing as rewarding as seeing a smile over a job well done.

Down In Mississippi III.

Out of Chaos, Hope – Mr. Bougie’s House Day 2 & 3

It’s mid-afternoon Sunday and we are moving along with Lizzie’s home. Bob and I decide to take a short break and go find Mr. Bougee’s house over near the Disaster Recovery Center to find out what we have in store there. On the way over Bob tells me Mr. Bougee is 84 years old and lives alone. He has managed to acquire some drywall through the network of friends and neighbors and needs some help with the installation. That is all we know except his house is not supposed to be hard to find since there are so few left on Route 604. Nevertheless we have to stop and ask at two places before at last we see a low brick ranch-style house that matches the description.

We pull up into the driveway in my truck far enough into the yard to get past the large mud puddles but avoiding the littered broken glass. Five dogs in the yard rush my truck barking with a show of hostile intent but a couple of hounds among them are tentatively waving friendly tails. A big brown female chow sits in stony silence as two of the black dogs that look to be her offspring bark with fur bristled. One of the black dogs hops on three good legs. One rear leg is badly crippled. I am particularly wary of his menacing demeanor. I take a gamble on the hounds that have come up to the door of my truck and crack it open enough to let the pregnant one get a good smell of my hand while I talk to her gently. She gives me a friendly look and lets me scratch her head. I tell Bob in spite of the barking they won’t bite. I step out onto the muddy ground into a haze of mosquitoes that seem the size of black houseflies.

Amidst the mosquitoes and the barking dogs, Bob hails,

“Mr. Bougee! Anybody home?”

After a couple of minutes an old man hobbles towards us from the short concrete driveway to the attached double garage on the right side of his house. He stops for a few seconds and leans on the hood of a late model Toyota in the driveway at the garage door. He gives a loud shout to the crippled black dog to shut up. All the dogs more or less stop their barking and the crippled one sulks over to the front door of the house and sits uneasily in the grimy, muddy dirt.

I notice the hood of the Toyota is popped open and rests on its latch. All manner of debris, old bottles, broken glass, roof sheathing, limbs, and broken religious icons litter the yard. White PVC sewer pipe runs across the width of the front yard of the house from the left to the right and descends into the ground. Nothing is connected to the pipe now but at one time a trailer must have parked to the left of the house. On the right beyond the garage sits another small white FEMA trailer. The same type of PVC pipe runs out into a tee on the other pipe in the front yard.

Mr. Bougee wears an old flannel shirt and worn, tan kaki pants held up by a thin belt. His pants’ zipper is broken. His forlorn and defeated form shows no hint of a smile at our appearance, just a flicker of light in his eyes as a candle flame on the verge of burning out the last of its wick. In fact, there is hardly a sign of emotion at all in his empty face. The air of despair hangs so thick I almost can feel it. He looks as if he just waits for final release to end it all, fully inured to this misery.

“Mr. Bougee, we are here to check out the job to hang the sheet rock on your ceilings and walls in a couple of days. We would like to see what the job looks so we can plan our work week.”

The doubt in his eyes tells us he’s heard this before.

“Well, I’ll try to show you. Come on in with me but you’ll have to forgive my slow walk, my legs are about to lock up on me.”

We get his story in bits and pieces. He tells us part of it as we enter the garage. The mystery of the Toyota resolves. He tells us that he had bought it for his daughter after the flood but she had let it run out of water and overheat. The engine seized on the way back from Slidell. Money out the window.

We notice that the walls of the garage have been repaired with some paneling and the whole garage is filled with construction materials and the accumulated damaged items and treasures of forty years of family life. Mr. Bougee apologizes for the look of the walls and windows of the garage.

“It used to be real nice but the water destroyed the walls. The guys who did my ceiling inside at least got these windows and some paneling back again.”

More of his story slips out as we walk into the house.

“I built the house in 1964 and raised my family here. My boys are gone and my wife passed away a few years back. I’m here by myself now.”

We follow him through his kitchen that is still under repair and stop just inside the adjoining dining room on the front of the house to survey. The interior is utterly devastated. The dogs have been living with him in the house since Katrina hit. The chaos before us, the smell of animals and dog urine daunts me. The state of the house does not appear to disturb Bob, but this is his sixth trip to do this work. Since fall a year ago, I guess he has seen something like this on every trip.

Walking into the living room I realize we are standing on a terrazzo floor. I can tell it is wonderfully done and must have been beautiful in its previous splendor. Now it is filthy with the debris of the flood-damaged interior and accumulation of recent dirt. The house has sat empty for over a year.

Every wall and most of the ceilings are stripped down to the bare studs and rafters. Besides the sand, dirt and all sorts of filth Katrina’s salt-water surge soaked the insulation and primed it for mold. After that baptism the mold and mildew explode behind the walls and ceiling in this hot, humid, swampland. Everything that was wet by the water had to be stripped from the houses as soon as possible. From Gulfport to New Orleans virtually every house between the Gulf and Interstate 10 and suffered this or a worse fate.

We walk further into Mr. Bougee’s home. The front room stretches almost a third the length of the house and has a really nice brick fireplace with a hearth about 18 inches above the floor. The hearth is covered with broken parts of wooden chairs, rusty tools, vases, trinkets and water damaged pictures than must have hung on the walls. They are all gritty black. None of it is salvageable. I notice a furry mass on the left side of the hearth amongst this debris. I give it a closer look and realize it is a decomposed body of a drowned large rat or squirrel, its skeleton lying in a perfect repose as one might find an old fossil in stone.

Our survey reveals that rather than drywall someone had screwed quarter inch Luan panels onto the ceiling in the foyer, the hall and two front bedrooms on the far side of the house.

Bob wonders aloud.

“Mr. Bougee, what in the world does the installer intend to do next?”

“I paid a contractor $22,000 to drywall the ceilings and re-panel the walls of my home. After the fellow put up the Luan, his helper fell for a waitress at Turtle’s and the two took off for parts unknown. After his helper disappeared, the fellow left for West Texas with what was left of my $22,000 and has not been seen since. I don’t have anything left to buy materials or pay someone to help.”

I ask him not altogether joking if he’d rather we went and found the contractor in West Texas than do his ceilings. But even in my anger I know that is a quixotic idea.

We continue on our walk through the home. The further into the home we go the more our estimate of the time to put in the sheet rock grows. At least someone has run new wiring. Sixty-watt bulbs hang loose from the living room ceiling in temporary sockets.

“I have an electrician I’m lettin’ stay in my upstairs room and he wired the house for rent. Nobody is supposed to be living in the house though.”

Then the question comes that is always expected and awaited, if not demanded. It’s a question everyone seems compelled to ask, and one you sense the residents want you to ask. Perhaps it is a natural urge to find catharsis for the survivors and to learn a lesson in perseverance and hope for the helpers. Bob asks it.

“Mr. Bougee, how did you wait out the flood?”

“I spent the time right here in the house. I went upstairs with five of my ten dogs. The ones you saw outside. The others got washed away and I haven’t seen them since.”

“How high did the water rise?”

He went to the front door and pointed up over the eaves of the porch.

“The water went right up to there, over the eaves. I went upstairs with the dogs as the water rose. It came up over the ceiling downstairs and into the flooring of my room upstairs where it finally stopped rising.”

Speechless and a little embarrassed for loss of words to say next, we keep walking into his home towards the far bathroom.

“If you can, would you please do the bathroom ceiling and walls in the bathroom beyond the foyer?”

We look into the bathroom. It’s a worse disaster than the other part of the house, disconnected plumbing and the toilet sits in the middle of the room. More debris, dirt, sand, mildew, mold, broken glass, and twigs litter the floor. What must have been the door of the bathtub enclosure lies broken inside the tub with all the grime and maybe ten or so dead cockroaches. They are far larger than my thumb; bigger than any I’d ever seen. It is just a God-awful mess.

I just want to sit down and cry over this terrible misery. This is such a deep hole for Mr. Bougee to climb from. But by this time just our presence and conversation have eased Mr. Bougee’s despair.

We find fifteen or so pieces of 4x8 drywall covered with plastic on the front porch, so the basic supplies are all here for us to use. We can use the money we brought for that for someone else.

“Mr. Bougee, we will be back, some time on Monday after we finish working on Lizzie’s home. We’ll get started then but it might take us two days to get it all done.”

Mr. Bougee gives us an anxious look.

“But, I won’t be back here until about one in the afternoon Monday. I’m the Quartermaster of the VFW post and have to be at the meeting to reimburse everybody for the beer and food. I don’t know what I’ll do if you come early. ”

“Monday after lunch is ok because the first thing Monday morning we want to finish Lizzie’s drywall. Our crew is at work on Lizzie’s house now. If the rest of our fourteen people coming in later today go directly to her place Monday morning we might get done with all her drywall by noon and be over to your place after lunch. I think it will work out just fine.”

Mr. Bougee just stands there in his foyer without speaking, just listening to us with a face full of doubt and a crestfallen expression growing in his face. By the look in his eyes as we drive away, I don’t think he expects to see us again. On the way back to Lizzie’s Bob talks some more about all this.

“These people have been subjected even by well-intended people to all the scams, fraud and bad construction repairs that you can imagine. We’ve seen it all. We rebuilt a house in Bay St. Louis and found out it was a rental property and the owner sold it for a tidy profit a week later. The people in Pearlington have homes here and are desperate for the help. This is where we are going to work.”

***

We do come back Monday afternoon, eight-strong. We set up and start working as fast as we can. Later in the day when I pull the Luan plywood off the ceiling I see the watermark about an inch short of the flooring of the second story room. Sure enough, Mr. Bougee was right about the surge.

By the end of the day we have finished all Mr. Bougee’s drywall and his bathroom. We now have two houses down and are a full day ahead of our anticipated schedule. Mr. Bougee had spent the little time when he wasn’t in the doorway of his kitchen observing our progress at his kitchen table working crossword puzzles from a stack of Picayune newspapers.

We leave about 5:30 in the afternoon as evening darkness approaches and tell Mr. Bougee that our people will come by and mud out the drywall and finish it all on Tuesday. Mr. Bougee stands at his front door in clean clothes and almost, but not quite prepared to risk beaming as he waves us a good bye.

God is good.

Down In Mississippi IV.

Ask, Seek, and Knock at the Narrow Gate Day 4

Monday Bob and I forgo lunch and drive our trucks down 7th Street looking for the turn to Mrs. Watters’ place, our third home. This will be Tuesday’s job. At the end of the street Bob turns left onto a muddy red clay road with a stand of small pines on both sides of the road. The road dead-ends into someone’s yard a hundred yards after the turn.

Two FEMA trailers stand just past the turn on the right next to a doublewide placed about 3 feet up on piers of concrete block. The blocks are not cemented and all the blocks in each pier parallel the ones in the other piers. Another strong storm from the right direction might topple them all.

Bob pulls into the sandy front yard of the double wide with me in tow. We get out and walk around. Again litter of the same kind is scattered about the yard; broken furniture, a hairbrush, pieces of plastic floral arrangements, toiletry items washed out of houses by the water. I see a large pile of wood chips in the front left corner of the yard. I think the chips are used to keep down the mud from all the standing water in the yard.

Several plastic bags of trash sit on the roadside out front. A shallow ditch dug into the sandy soil runs from the side of the FEMA trailer to the ditch in the front yard. The doublewide has a big POSTED sign on the front window and an official-looking paper sign in the window that warns against inhabiting the under-construction building.

I find out from Bob that her original house took seven or eight feet of water. Josephine says she was told everything in it was ruined by mold. I guess they razed it. We conclude this doublewide is to be Josephine Watters' new home. It is a natural thing to call it the ‘doublewide;’ however, we are careful and respectful not to call it that. For us this is Josephine’s hoped-for new home.

We look for someone in the two FEMA trailers to find out more about what we are to do here. A young pit bull pup strains on a short lease tied to the steps of one trailer and another slightly older, friendly pup is running around the yard eying us. I step over the shallow ditch and walk to door of the trailer with the dog out front. A green slime floats on a little water in the ditch. I know immediately what it is but do not want to think about it now. The sound of rap music plays inside the trailer. I knock on the door.

“Anybody home? Hello!”

After some shuffling in the trailer, a tall boy of fourteen or fifteen opens the door and looks at me with a small hint of suspicion. I introduce myself, “Hi! I’m Henry.”

“I’m Joshua.”

I surmise he is Josephine’s son and wonder to myself, “No school today?”

“We are looking for Mrs. Watters. Do you know where she is? We are here to do some work on her new home that she is moving into.”

The young man corrects me.

“You mean the home she’s trying to move into.”

"Is it ok for us to look into the house to see what we need to do?’

“Yeah, sure.”

So Bob and I climb the steps to her home. Someone has been here before us. The bottom 30 inches of drywall is stripped and that needs to be replaced. I am puzzled though why this trailer only has 30 inches of damage. The kitchen ceiling and walls are already stripped and dry walled. When we enter the kitchen I notice brown water stains streak the ceiling of the adjacent dining room. The storm must have damaged the roof and allowed water onto the ceiling.

In the master bath, the drywall is gone and the bare studs stand exposed. The flooring has been stripped down to the plywood underlay and a new shower stall waits in the middle of the room to be installed. This looks to be a fairly fast job.

Outside we survey the rear of the trailer. There is a rusty V-8 automobile engine and five or ten corroded alternators on the ground on the left side, all probably damaged beyond repair by the salty water. Water stands maybe twenty feet back to the rear of the home at the edge of the swamp. The mosquitoes are really bad. They bite through the shirt.

In the rear, Katrina ripped off part of the vinyl siding. Both ends of the trailer are bare to the wood or to old loosely hanging, weathered tarpaper. The soffit is damaged. From the outside, the edge of the new drywall ceiling of the rear bathroom is visible through the side of the trailer. If this isn’t fixed, the house will sustain more damage from the rain. I remember there’s some siding at the recovery center. We could use that to repair the wall. But there is a problem that probably explains the water damage to the ceiling of the dining room. The front half the house is displaced or scissored laterally about two inches relative to the rear. This trailer must have been sustained damage by the flood and been brought here from higher ground elsewhere after Katrina. Since the front half and rear half are no longer exactly square but have an awkward bump in both side walls it makes the siding a hard problem to solve. Besides, vinyl siding is not in our plans. We will leave that for the next crew.

We arrive in force Tuesday morning as a well-oiled machine and tackle the drywall. By 3:30 in the afternoon we finish all the drywall and stand around swatting mosquitoes and debating what to do about the siding on the ends of the trailer. Bob and Tom listen to a woodpecker out in a tall pine a block away. One of the two thinks they hear another one in the tree in front of us. I chuckle when a mockingbird flies out.

Bill decides to locate some tar paper at the Recovery Center. The least we can do is redo the tar paper so we keep the water out. We decide we will just put up the new paper and the next crew can install the siding. We use our limited scaffolding and several ladders. Several of the guys tackle and strip the old tarpaper. Someone in our group decides we can pull some of the remaining siding from the side to make a good patch on the rear where a few strips are absent.

We all realize the obvious at the same time: We are going to fix the siding. Although it is not exactly a perfect match, the donated siding at the Recovery Center will work and hardly be noticed on the ends, if at all. Several of us stay and get the new tarpaper up while the rest go back and retrieve the siding at the DRC.

We are all thinking so much for finishing Mrs. Watters' today and staying on our schedule.

When the guys return we split and go to both ends. One crew works low on one end while the other uses the scaffolding and ladders to work high on the other side. We even repair the soffits. When we finish it is well after dark at the time when the bugs really bite with vicious intensity. I’m covered in 100% DEET but one mosquito still draws blood on my arm. We end up quite late for dinner, but we have given Josephine new siding, drywall, installed her shower enclosure and the house is ready for mudding.

Josephine works as a dietary LPN at a home for elderly and disabled a good drive away from Pearlington. We never see her while we work on her new home. We finally meet her in the DRC mess tent at the special Thursday dinner for everyone whose home’s we’d worked and for all the volunteers, not just us.

Mrs. Watters tells us all about Pearlington, especially the Recovery Center.

“Hundreds of people in Pearlington depend on the relief center here at Charles Murphy Elementary School for all their necessities, from washing their clothes to picking up groceries. This (place) is very important to me and everybody in Pearlington. People have a place to come get food, clothing, and the medical center over there. A few months after Katrina hit the local school board tried to close the DRC. They had already closed the school. We raised enough of a ruckus that they relented after razing two of the school buildings. They left only the gym where the ‘Pearl Mart’ is and the library and old classrooms where you all stay.”

At dinner that Thursday, Josephine cannot stop bragging about her two boys or the Recovery Center. She’s a tough woman facing a rocky road to a new home, but she smiles the whole time we talk.

Down In Mississippi V.

Fight the Good Fight – Second Wind Day 5

Our group has an energy and enthusiasm that feeds us all. Bill and Bob had already decided Tuesday that we’d go far beyond three homes on this trip and have already talked to Brice Langdon about more work. But by Wednesday’s dawn today, the effort at Lizzie’s, Mr. Bougee’s and then Josephine’s working on her siding until well after dark has taken its toll, physically and emotionally.

Last evening I was just too tired to walk over to the showers. After we ate, I sat around talking for a while and soon found myself again on my cot under my sleeping bag in dirty work clothes drifting to sleep while listening to fragments of conversation around me. I was still getting up about 5:30AM, not to watch the sunrise but to take a shower, get into clean clothes and make a few notes about the previous day while I waited on the coffee.

Though I am tiring, I am grateful for my earlier days running long distance. I ran for maybe 20-25 years until my feet and knees decided biking is a worthy alternative. To run well you have to learn one thing. Focus. You can’t focus on how badly your diaphragm hurts or how the broken blister on your toe screams in pain with the rub of each footfall. If you are going to finish a race running, you focus only on getting to the finish line, counting down each mile to the end. Your keep your eye on the prize, the finish of this race. Here, our focus is to get to the fourth house, size it up and work until our task is done. That focus on the task at hand begins to distract my perception about what is going on with the people we are helping.

Today after our communal breakfast our mudders first go to finish Josephine’s home. The rest of us drive to Aline and Pat’s home in a small subdivision on the seaward side of US 90. I was told her given name is Adeline but she’s always gone by the familiar French form, Aline. It means “noble.” It is a pleasant neighborhood close to the Gulf. Three others on or list live here also. This neighborhood took Katrina’s surge big time.

Aline meets us at the door. She is a young woman with a child in elementary school. At the door, her joy at seeing old friends is obvious but she isn’t joyfully bubbling. I can see the weariness in her eyes. They are a little red around the edges as if she’d been crying recently. Yet she is so happy to see us and she puts up such a brave front.

Aline and her family lived in a FEMA trailer out in the front yard until our crew refinished the first floor last May. She told me the first thing she did after she moved back into her home was go out and buy a new stove and have it installed upstairs so she could cook for her family while the downstairs was redone.

That’s real perseverance. The Fountain City folks finished out all the drywall on first floor that has since been painted and finished out nicely. Now, Aline has a real kitchen downstairs. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why she is so appreciative of the help of the Fountain City people and why she wants to do so much to pay back with food and other things. Folks regularly have to slow her down some, lest she break.

We are going to work the drywall of her second floor. An open staircase runs upstairs on the right rear of her dining area. A door opens at the foot of the stairs into the rear of the garage. We decide to enter through the garage and go up the staircase because we prefer not to track dirt all through her house from the front door.

I go back out to my truck for my tools and when I come back through the garage to the rear door into the house, I see a child’s white lace dress embroidered with sequins hanging on the garage wall by the door. It is obviously an expensive dress, but it is soiled beyond cleaning, tinged grayish-black by Katrina’s dirty water. I guess when Aline came back to check out everything after the water receded she found it and put it there. Maybe it is Aline’s symbol that she is not going to be defeated by this flood.

We go up the stairs to the master bedroom and two other bedrooms. A sheet for privacy is draped across one bedroom door. I go into the master bedroom. There is a new bed but everything is jammed into the middle of the room or piled on the bed. The master bath has a shower, sink and commode, and it all really needs help. The drywall on the whole upstairs has been stripped to about 40 or so inches from the floor to stop the mold.

I thought, Good Grief, this neighborhood is flat as a pancake, what force could raise water so high from the sea a mile or so way? What did Aline do when the water came?

Two of us begin to strip the bedroom walls to 48 inches for the drywall sheet. One of us begins to strip the rest of the bathroom walls, and I start in to pull the commode. The other guys work on the other bedrooms. It takes me close to an hour to get the corroded bolts loose on the commode so I can pull it and remove the drywall behind the tank. Aline says to leave the commode in the middle of the bathroom because the plumbing has some serious problems that must be fixed.

Aline insists on fixing us “lunch,” an obvious understatement. She has prepared the most delicious jambalaya I’ve ever tasted. It is loaded with fat sausage, lots of shrimp, and more seafood. A big pot of yellow rice and hot sauce stand on the side. It tastes heavenly and its aroma fills the house. All fifteen of us sit around her dining table and in chairs around the living room talking and eating. I feel a little out of place with the unspoken familiarity between the Fountain City people and Aline. Her thankfulness is beyond words and everyone understands it. I am a little embarrassed as if I am eavesdropping on a private conversation.

I watch Aline the rest of the day when I can. I worry about her. I can tell she is not feeling very well. She has a bit of a cold but I think mostly it is the weight of the last fifteen months. Living in the cramped uncertainty of trailer housing and looking at your home every day not knowing when, or if, it would ever be near the way it was has to really weigh on her young heart.

I talk to her a little later in the day as we finish up. I go ahead and ask the question I had thought earlier.

“Well, I went up upstairs with my child but the water kept rising. It came up over my knees. We climbed out my bedroom window onto the roof where we move higher. For nine hours we waited out the surge and prayed the water would stop rising.”

The water did stop rising. God spared Aline and her child from it, but she’s suffered since. I imagine she relives each day the fear she felt on her roof with her child. It’s likely more than once since she wanted to give up but she has kept the good fight.

I hope I can do the same.

Down In Mississippi VI.

Mr. Jerry's Shop Class Day 6

By the end of the day at Aline’s we realize the rest of the week is problematic. We have two more homes on our list, plus an unexpected situation we will not ignore. Brice Langdon has worked unflaggingly with CODRA (Coalition of Disaster Relief Agencies) since the day of the flood. He works with all the church groups to identify worthy projects. Finally, now he has asked for help, more or less. I don’t think he asked outright, he wouldn’t. But someone mentioned to someone that if we had some time maybe we could help with a little drywall in the front room of his home. It is still undone with these other things going on. The imperative for us is to give him the help he needs. The question is: how to finish three homes in two days and still make Jimmy and Robin’s big send-off dinner Friday evening?

Mr. Swanson, whose home is next, seemed one of the more fortunate. Although flooded like the rest, Mr. Swanson has made a lot of progress on his house and it is almost completed. The house is rewired and awaiting the breaker box. There is a crow’s nest of new wire in the garage where the breaker box would be placed. Most rooms are finished out. The ceilings and walls of the garage and laundry room are the main jobs that remain undone.

A really nice Harley sits against a garage wall blocking our access to the wiring and ceiling. It will have to move. Three of us can barely roll it. The salt water of the flood wasted it.

Still, Mr. Swanson’s house should go fast. We might get started at Lonnie and Cara’s today (our next project), but we are uncertain about making it to Brice’s tomorrow, not to mention Friday’s dinner.

Bob and Bill decide that Bob and a small crew will deal with the garage ceiling, and four of us would tackle the laundry room. We will try to get the laundry room done in the morning. In the afternoon we will leave one drywall jack at Mr. Swanson’s with Bob and the others to finish the garage and head for Lonnie’s with the other jack.

As soon as we start the laundry room we run into problems. The old copper plumbing with its faucet heads is still in the walls. Chris cannot find a cutoff valve to remove the faucet heads so he decides to piece the drywall around the faucets being careful not to drive drywall screws into the plumbing.

Mike and I, and soon Tony and Joe Ben concentrate on the other walls. The water heater blocks our access to a corner of the room. We struggle with drywall, working pieces around and over the water heater to get to the ceiling and walls. After about 30 minutes of jimmying wallboard, one of us bumps the heater and it rocks. We both feel like dummies. The heater isn’t hooked up. We only have to slide it out of the way.

We make quick work and finish the rest about the time that Chris finishes his wall. Then we head for the garage to help there but too many people are in the way. Our mudders have caught up to us from Aline’s and are trying to mud the garage behind the guys hanging sheetrock. We are slowing down, or our mud mavens are getting faster.

Mike, Chris, Tony, Joe Ben I then decide it is time to take a quick break for lunch and then head over to Lonnie and Cara’s. We might get it all done yet.

As we leave I find Mr. Swanson has come by and is on the walk by the garage talking to one of our crew. I speak to him only a few words because I have Lonnie and Cara, Brice and so little time left on my mind. I’m embarrassed but it is the only time I meet Mr. Swanson. I don’t learn his story.

We drive over to Lonnie’s home. Walking up the driveway to the house I notice the brick veneer on the leeward side of the house is displaced about 6 inches outward from the frame of the house. I am surprised it hasn’t fallen. Though Lonnie has not decided what to do about it, there is only one answer.

Lonnie is in the house hanging drywall and putting up trim. As usual, all the walls and ceilings are stripped down to the studs and new wiring, plumbing, fixtures installed. Lonnie has dry walled the front bedroom and its bath but the living/dining area which run the depth of the house, the kitchen and back bedrooms await us. He and his wife face a lot of work to move back in. We set up the drywall jack and start in on the ceiling working from the stack of drywall sheet on a trailer in his driveway.

The mosquitoes are really something here even with DEET and Skin So Soft. At Lizzie’s they were only a mild nuisance but at Josephine’s, Mr. Bougee’s and Lonnie’s they have been a horrendous distraction as the day wears on. I guess we are complaining too much about the mosquitoes because the next thing I know, Lonnie is outside with a fogger, working the ditches and tall grass all around the house. I am a little subdued for my complaining but since Lonnie has the fogger they obviously bother him as well as us.

Talking to Lonnie standing on the ladder screwing the ceiling drywall, we learn he’s had 3 vertebrae in his neck fused about 6 months ago. There is no way he ought to be on a ladder leaning over backwards like that. We insist he get down and just help us by marking out where in the rear hall he wants us to stop.

Around an hour later Lonnie’s father-in-law, “Mr. Jerry,” shows up. He is a big man with a real coastal dialect, talking as one might with pebbles in the mouth. He takes a look at our jack and exclaims he’d hardly even seen, much less used a thing like that.

“That’s not the way to put up drywall on a ceiling! You use your head to hold it up. Let me show you, get that piece of drywall and hand me one end.”

He climbs the scaffolding, puts the end of a sheet on his head and motions for one of us to get up on the scaffold with him and hold up the other end up. Mr. Jerry asks for a drill and he proceeds to screw in his end of the drywall, all the while lecturing us about the technique.

We get a kick out of his lectures and learn something from them, but we keep asking him to just let us do it, not him. Finally he gets down but then he is all over the place, ordering Tom to set aside that small drywall scrap and use another because he could use the first to piece around a window. Then he demonstrates how to cut out the holes for fixtures, and to piece out the windows and repair cutting mistakes with other drywall scraps.

Lonnie lets on that Mr. Jerry had a heart attack about a month ago, but nobody can keep him off the work. Mr. Jerry scoffs at all this, said a guy had hired him once just to supervise a crew putting up drywall. The man had threatened to fire him if he didn’t stop getting in there and doing the work himself because all he wanted Mr. Jerry to do was supervise. We, of course, are far more concerned about him having a second heart attack.

About mid-afternoon our mud maidens catch us again and begin here. They gave Mr. Jerry a new focus. The women aren’t mudding the joints his way.

“I’ve never had to sand a drywall joint in my life. Give me your trowel and board and let me show you how it’s done.”

He proceeds to show the technique.

“Wipe just a little mud in the joint on the forward stroke and wipe it off on the back stroke, dabbing just enough mud on the knife to fill the gap.”

He looks like an “old master” at work on the ceiling as if it were his canvas. We manage again to get him off the scaffold; however, both crews work with a bit more skill and aplomb than before.

By now we are good friends with Mr. Jerry, Lonnie and Cara, and have finished about two-thirds of the work. Late in the day Mr. Jerry loads up his truck as we all leave a smiling Lonnie and Cara standing on the front walk. It looks like we can split our crew again tomorrow, Friday. Half will head over to Brice’s while the rest of us finish Lonnie’s and then end up at Brice’s.

I can hardly believe tomorrow is our last day. We are almost done with seven homes. It looks like that Friday evening dinner and good bye at Jimmy and Robin’s may still be on.

Down In Mississippi ViI.

The Last Supper and Long Goodbye - Karaoke in the Bayou Day 7

I awake Friday morning at about the same time, 5AM. After lying in my cot a while, I quietly get up and tip toe to the front door with shoes in hand. I open the door outside and look out east towards the gulf and behold the most spectacular sunrise I’ve ever seen. Nearby clouds hang high in the sky over the coast. The low sun in the horizon lights their underside, them giving them a most intense bloody red hue and intricate texture. This vista is painted in the sky behind a very tall dead pine across the playing field at the far side of the school yard.

I hurry to my truck and get my camera, shooting several images. I go inside immediately and tell one of the others now awake that they are missing a great sunrise. In the few minutes it takes to get back outside, the sun has moved just high enough that the whole painting is gone save my first photographs. I think back on the full moon that heralded me into Pearlington, leaving on this day of a beautiful sunrise and about all I’d seen the last six days. Would these experiences fade as old memories, as those clouds in this sunrise? What a way to begin my last day here!

Today we have to complete Mr. Swanson’s job and get over to Brice’s. After breakfast more than half of us head over to Mr. Swanson’s, the rest to Brice’s home. We finish up Mr. Swanson’s drywall by lunch and headed for the Recovery Center to get a sandwich so we can move on to Brice’s work and get it done before dinner.

When I drive into Brice’s yard, someone behind the rear of the house is swinging a sledge. It is Brice moving the rear wall more closely back into plumb on its concrete pad. Bob and the crew have mostly completed the front bedroom. Most of what remains is a narrow backroom runs the length of the bedroom at its rear. Its outside wall was the object of Brice’s attention with the sledge. Katrina really skewed this room. It is narrower at one end and the walls and ceiling aren’t square. The guys are going to have to carefully measure and hand cut every piece of drywall.

Our problem is how to finish the front room within the time we have allowed to make dinner tonight. I don’t see how we can finish it all and do it well. I jump into the fray and start working on the front bedroom. By 3:00 we have all the drywall set in the front room.

Our mudders have come to Brice’s from Mr. Swanson’s and are encouraging us to get out of the way so they can work in the front room. Brice and his wife hover about, but soon she leaves. We started hand-piecing the back room. Bob and Tim work the walls from one end and we start the ceiling from the other end.

We finish the ceiling and get out of Tim and Bob’s way. I decide I’ll quit now and head back to clean up before dinner at Robin and Jimmy’s. Again, I’m in the way. But as I leave the house Brice’s wife drives up. She gets out of the truck with a 12-pack and their black lab leading the way. The old dog comes over and I work on its ears gently as Brice’s wife walks up.

“Want to share a beer with us? You guys have been working so hard.”

Frankly, at 5PM, I all I want to do is head back to the Recovery Center and clean up but how can I resist her offer without insulting both her and the dog. I take a beer, go back to my truck and get my camera. Brice and his wife are standing besides the folks still working in the front room. She glows with happiness over our work and offers beer to anyone who’ll take one. I shoot a few pictures and talk a while, and then I take my leave to head back to the Recovery Center.

As I finish my shower at the DRC, most of the folks are coming in from Brice’s. By the time everybody cleans up it is almost six thirty. We head over to Jimmy and Robin’s in the van and a couple of cars, thirty minutes late.

Jimmy and Robin’s home is a cool location. They sit at the head of a bayou and can get in their bateau and make it all the way out to the Gulf to drop some crab traps or fish with Jimmy’s friend Jack whenever they want, and have a neat nature trip at the same time.

Jimmy managed to board up the house and head out ahead of the surge. He waited it out at the hospital in Bay St. Louis where he works. When the flood hit Jimmy stood at the windows on an upper floor of the hospital and watched Katrina drown Bay St. Louis block by block. Robin had taken her daughter and son to Iowa to wait it out. Jimmy made it back to Pearlington and home as fast as possible after the surge receded. The house still stood but was totally ravaged. The barn suffered no serious structural damage. What he worried about the most was would he have that job, and what was he going to do about the house. Almost no one had water, electricity or shelter. For weeks everybody cooked outside and slept wherever they could find shelter, tents, just out in the open or in shells of houses.

While Jimmy stands over the pot in the barn boiling some more crab I talk to him about the flood. He tells me he got back to his house ahead of the search crews, thankfully. He drove into the yard and looked upward towards a faint cry. In a pine 10 or so feet up was “cat woman,” a 75-year-old neighbor with her dog clinging to a limb that she had managed to hold onto after her, her dog and home washed away.

Jimmy coordinated disaster recovery goods and supplies for 6 months, worked 6AM to midnight, non-stop. He quit 4 times only to be convinced to stay on in spite of the stress and his stent and pacemaker. Fountain City spent a lot of time the first few trips repairing Jimmy and Robin’s home, thus the unbreakable bond between them.

We find ourselves after dark on this warm Fall Friday evening standing on the rough hewn oak floors of Jimmy’s barn with Katrina’s watermark 10 feet up on the wall. Brice Langdon and his wife, Aline and Pat, Jimmy and Robin, her daughter, son, numerous relatives, and folks helped in the past are here. A CD player fills the room with loud music. A table holds steamed crabs piled high. Another holds special beverages. Gumbo simmers on the stove in the house. Lizzie scurries about setting up speakers, amplifier and placing her karaoke catalogs on another table. And of course, she solicits singers with her smile. Tonight, you’d never know of their suffered grief from Katrina. This is their “thank you” to us.

Towards mid-evening people warm up to the karaoke. Robin’s young daughter and friend sing their favorites, several times. Lizzie works everyone in the crowd to sing. Brice in a deep bass voice does a great performance. I think it is Merle Haggard and then Johnny Cash. I close my eyes and imagine Haggard and Cash are right here singing. Some of us sit around egging others to sing. Bill and Angela from Fountain City finally succumb to the crowd’s encouragement and do the duet, “I got you Babe” with goodhearted laughter all around. Robin’s son then sings “Proud to be an American,” ending on his knees with arms out raised to a great crescendo of applause.

I just sit back in a chair in the background of all this, nursing a beer, soaking up all this scene of fellowship and thinking that this isn’t your typical karaoke bar scene. Here with friends we share thanksgiving, graciousness and plain speaking honesty. I have more than a little regret and worry that tomorrow by this time I’ll be back in Chattanooga. Late in the evening, we all leave Jimmy’s place and return to the Recovery Center to pack and hit the sack.

Saturday morning at 7:00AM our team has our long goodbye. We gather out front of the Recovery Center, suitcases and bags long packed and stowed, food stored, given away or disposed. We linger. Several of us pose the group for a last photograph out front of the Recovery Center but that is not really needed as a remembrance. Bill asks me to offer a prayer of thanksgiving and guidance. Afterwards, we shake hands, exchange warm embraces and leave one-by-one in our cars and trucks. For the whole eight hours’ drive back, I keep thinking, Home, exactly where is it? Pearlington surely seems like home to me.

Down in Mississippi

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