Wrapping up... Last post from Blogger Jared Williams

I’ve been talking to Thomas, the MPB Webmaster, for a couple of weeks about doing a follow-up blog for my whole experience. It’s not exactly for the whole “anniversary of Katrina” hoopla, but it has just worked out that way, so I’ll take this opportunity to look back and review a bit.

First of all, let me give you a personal update. I have moved to Philadelphia, PA, and am celebrating my one week anniversary here today. When I moved back to the South from California, I was living in Baton Rouge. After the storm, the population of Baton Rouge doubled and the job market is fierce to say the least. I have a Master’s degree and a roommate who works at LSU, but found myself applying for entry-level jobs and competing with dozens of other candidates who also had MA’s or even PhD’s and connections as well. I found a temp-job at a large bank doing data entry for not a lot of money and was pretty miserable. I write this to give you a personal example of what the region affected by Katrina is like one year later.

It is frustrating.
It is frustrating almost to the point of defeat.

When I finally was able to return to Pascagoula and see my family’s progress, I had an immediate jumble of mixed emotions. Our house is making progress and should be livable in a couple of months, but you would not know this from the outside. My neighborhood is still filled with FEMA trailers and life there is still stunted at best.

The progress is internal and slow, this is true of both Pascagoula as a city and as a people. The work of rebuilding houses and lives is moving on, but it doesn’t look like much is going on. The Coast is still in a liminal, or “in-between” stage, and its people are bearing enormous stress and pressure. It’s not completely broken, but it’s still dysfunctional. People have developed new routes to work or routines to just get around, but there seems to be almost no direct path from point A to point B.

I don’t mean this simply as obstructions to streets, I mean that every trip requires mental calculation before and afterward. Part of the fun of driving a car or writing or any learned activity is when you reach that point of doing it but not thinking about it. You shift gears, stop, put on your blinker, fiddle with the radio, but you don’t really “think” about it, you just do it. Your mind can take on the task of thinking about other things, like going over that time in second grade you told all the kids about Santa because your mom never wanted to lie to you, but it just made you socially awkward for that week, and probably for the rest of your life.

I digress, but that’s my point. We’re built to dream and daydream, to wonder about life, about what is past and what is future, but that’s been gone from the Gulf Coast for a while. The formerly simple business of living takes all of one’s attention today. There’s no time to daydream when you have to wonder if the store will have everything you need. Is the store even there any more? Will you need to make another trip? Will you have to take the forty-five minute drive out to Mobile? Do you have a backup plan? A truck? Do they deliver to your area anymore? Should you just stay home and take a nap and avoid this altogether?

This is the life of post Katrina areas. Frustrating.

I’m spreading the word up here in Philly about how much help is still needed, so I’m asking you to do the same. It doesn’t have to be anything huge, just don’t let people think it’s a situation that will solve itself. Most of the coverage I’ve seen is doing a good job at reminding people of the need, but we need to understand that the entire infrastructure was wiped away, not just a house here and there. A year later, things are progressing, but it’s slow and precarious to say the least. The people are working to rebuild, but they need as much encouragement as they do physical help. Let’s not forget to call, to send what we can and to remind them that hope is ever-present, even when not ever-visible.

Take the time...
by Jared Williams

If you’ve been affected by these storms, let me ask you a question. Have you taken time to grieve and to breathe, to just sit back from it all? You’ve lost a lot. The whole nation has lost a part of itself, in fact.

A lot of people don’t know about the Gulf Coast, so I’m not sure they know exactly what’s been taken from them just yet. The Mississippi Gulf Coast (MGC, as we say) has always had an odd relationship with the rest of the state (they call us “coast trash,” for example, and we seem to have more in common with Mobile, AL, and Slidell, LA than we do even with Hattiesburg, just ninety minutes up the road).

But here’s what I learned growing up there: nobody’s too important and nobody’s too insignificant, either. There’s a sense of the egalitarian there that I think comes from the racial mix, among other things (being left to your own devices, for the most part, helps out a lot, too, by the way). My high school was roughly 50/50 Caucasian and African-American, so one of the first things one learns there is how to get along with people who aren’t exactly like you.

The normal cliques were there, but they just had a different vibe to them. No door was completely closed, and no group offered “protection”. In other words, nobody was too good to avoid getting the piss taken out of them, as they say, at a moment’s notice. Nothing too violent, just an array of those words that are supposedly less dangerous than sticks and stones.

Some of my friends from Pascagoula are the funniest people I know, but that humor is born from the knowledge that each day would be filled with funny stories that you would have to top or jeers you would have to answer.

Much of that life is gone now.

In the same way New Orleans gave the country a place to relax. A sort of laid back Vegas with more of an “Old World” appeal. You don’t have to build a fake Eiffel Tower there when you’ve got still got residents who primarily speak French. You don’t need casinos (although they have them) with glitz and fancy chefs when any New Orleanian kitchen will regale you with food and laughter like nowhere else.

A lot of that is gone now, too.

Remnants remain, but even now, seven months later, it’s just not the same. It’s one thing to “rough it”, to go somewhere “quaint” where each delay is accepted knowingly, if not gladly. It’s as if this extra time is somehow sweeter. We visit these places to slow down, but we usually don’t stay there.

In my town, over half of the houses are now unlivable. City Hall was relocated to a series of trailers and any public space that avoided the flooding is being used. Life there is broken. Life there is slow. The simplest of tasks have become journeys worthy of family-legends and dinner table tales for years to come.

This is what must be mourned and grieved over. Ways of life have been set back several decades, but the demands of life have not. Living in a trailer in your front lawn is not living in your house. Just because you may have more than you thought you would when “THE BIG ONE” hit, or even if you avoided the storm altogether, that does not mean you should neglect to cry over what has been lost.

The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s a season for everything, and now is the season to mourn if you haven’t already. To cry out to whomever you will that life as you know it has been stripped away.

Weep, shout, get mad, do it all. Then return to building your new life with the knowledge that your neighbors far and wide mourn with you and will join you in the dream of something better.

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.