So, to continue the story...
The week was moving on and question of going home, not to mention the question of there being a home to go back to, were bubbling to the surface in all of us. My mother and her fiance were gearing up to make the trip back to Pascagoula from Tallahassee, FL. Tallahassee had become a waystation for those fleeing the storm and it seemed that everyone in the hotel they met was from Louisana or the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Everyone was glued to their televisons, waiting now for a glimpse of the aftermath and hoping to see their own neighborhood.

Hoping may not be the right word. How can I explain the absolute compulsion you feel to scan the web and tv, trying to see your own house or those of your neighbor? You want to and you don't want to at the same time. You're driven to find out what you can and scared to death of what you may or may not find.

When pictures of Pascagouls finally did surface, it was grim. I found our local newspaper's website (The Mississippi Press) and there were pictures of our Beach Blvd. Looking at these pictures, the only comparison I could make was of pictures I had seen of Tokyo in 1945, after the incendiary bombing. Tokyo was made up largely of wood houses then, if my memory of contemporary history serves, and the bombing simply leveled the city. Where there were houses previously, there were piles of ash.

I've since driven down Beach Blvd., and it's a similar feeling. It's not a matter of houses that were flooded (although those are everywhere, too, including my own), but a matter of houses simply not being there anymore. They're gone, with only a foundation remaining, with roofs sitting directly on the concrete slab as if a giant hand swept away everything in between.

These are the pictures I saw first. When talking to my mom after seeing these pictures, I didn't want her to go home. I didn't want her (and soon thereafter, me) to find our little house gone. For some reason the thought of it just not being there anymore was the worst fear I had. I imagine that some people would find it a better option, almost cathartic in its totality, but I couldn't bear to think of an entire house just wiped away. Where would be the evidence that people had lived there? That life, death, love and laughter had happened there? That house is our little monument, proclaiming we had been there.

Although I don't know for sure, I suspect this was going through my mom's mind as well. They were ready to get back. The roads were not ready for them to go back, but that did not matter. There was a house to return to and family and friends with which to reconnect as soon as possible. Life had to be reestablished, so they came back west, then north, then south again to Pascagoula.

Our house had flooded, but it was still there. I'll have pictures soon from my time down in Pascagoula. We were grateful for that, but the business of getting back to "normal" was just around the corner...

The Last Post About the Radio Spot!

(probably)

Hey if you didn't catch Thomas and me on the MPB broadcast, you can download it at http://www.mpbonline.org/Blogs/index.html

Thanks again to MPB and everybody that listened (and will listen)!

-Jared

The Radio Part Two

Well, Thomas and I got to say our little blurb about the blogging and our beloved MGC (Mississippi Gulf Coast). Thanks very much to everybody at MPB for letting us share a bit about our little spot on the coast and for the plans of opening up these blogs for everybody to share!

I'll have the next post up by Friday afternoon, thank you to everybody who's posting!

Jared

Radio Appearance

Hey all, just wanted to drop a quick note to say that I'll be on the radio on Mississippi Public Broadcasting stations this coming Tuesday, March 21, at 9:00AM(CST). If you aren't within the broadcast radius of an MPB station, you can listen to it on the web by clicking HERE. If you miss it, I believe we'll have the podcast up soon thereafter. If you don't know what a podcast is, we'll walk you through it when it posts.

-Jared

Katrina From the Outside by Jared Williams

My experience with hurricane Katrina has been a little different than most. On August 29th, 2005, I was living in Southern California, attending graduate school. I watched Katrina as I had watched several hurricanes in the past couple of years, with a feeling of disconnectedness and mild concern. My mother had left our house in Pascagoula to stay in Tallahassee and wait the storm out, and as one might imagine, hurricanes do not dominate the local news of Los Angeles.
So I watched this one as I had the past few, catching what I could online or on the Weather Channel, but paying more attention to papers that had to be written and assignments that had to be completed. An odd thing happened, however, and I knew Katrina would not be like other hurricanes. In our age of computer graphics and Doppler Radar, the electronic representation of a hurricane coming in from the Atlantic, roaming around in the Gulf of Mexico and inevitably hitting shore was an all-too-familiar sight. The storms hit land and work their way up towards Tennessee or North Carolina, eventually petering out into smallish tornadoes along the way.
Katrina did not do this. She hit the coast and stopped. My family moved to Pascagoula in 1980, and I had seen enough hurricanes to know that this was a bad sign. How can I describe my feelings? To begin with, I don’t think I have ever felt so useless in my entire life. The pixilated green swirl would not leave the map. It sat and twisted incessantly on the screen in that start-stop way, each reiteration representing another house blown down, another car pushed into a ditch, another levee breached. As horrible as it was and as helpless as I felt, however, these feelings of dread were mixed with a feeling of relief as well.
You see, when it comes to hurricanes, there are “stayers” and there are “leavers”. I think only people who live through hurricane after hurricane know this. Some people will always leave, and some will simply stay and ride the storm out. My mom has been a proud stayer in her twenty-five years of Gulf Coast living. Not because she was ignorant of the storm’s potential for destruction, but because the finances have simply never been there to pack up and live in a hotel for a few days at a moment’s notice.
This year, however, mostly due to the nagging of her fiancé, she chose to leave for safer ground. We kept in phone contact as much as possible and reported the rumors we could gather about our small town. New Orleans was in trouble and the Gulfport-Biloxi area had been ransacked, but there was little news regarding Pascagoula. The only pictures shown were of our beach front, of the slabs wiped clean of their houses and the road cracked and torn.
It was a blur, a nightmarish campaign that simply had to be false. Nothing could have wreaked the amount of devastation seen in those pictures, but I had no way to blow the whistle on this conspiracy and no way to confirm that it was real. I could only comb the internet and national news for any hint of what had happened to my town, and the information seemed tabloidish at best and exploitative at worst.
My friends around the globe who hail from Mississippi and Louisiana and I pooled what knowledge we could, but the truth revealed itself to be far worse than we could have imagined. The ensuing months afforded me the opportunity to finally see it all firsthand, and to hear the stories of disaster and hope from my neighbors and friends. That, however, is a blog for another day.