Becoming a Stranger
My good friend Jim and I decided to drive from each of our sleepy adulthoods in northern California to Biloxi, Mississippi. It was January of 2006, we were both fishing for where next to cast our lives, and Hurricane Katrina had been on both of our minds. The media painted the aftermath, at that point only 4 months deep, as a wasteland of lawless chaos. Noting the action dramas that the news is wont to sculpt of reality, I had my doubts. All I knew for sure was that there was still a shitload of people who needed help, and they weren’t getting it. Jim had some friends who were volunteering in Biloxi, and he was going to join them for a bit. I can still remember sitting with him at a bar downtown, asking if I could tag along. He told me that he and his dog Allie would love the company.
After about two weeks on the road (misadventuring in skateparks, campsites and watering holes), we arrived in Biloxi at night. We watched the artifacts of Katrina’s epilogue in the span of our headlights like phantoms from the highway. Passing through Gulfport on our way to the church where we would be staying, it made me think of a model play-set that had been charged through by a pack of angry kids.
We met Jim’s friends at their trailer inside the compound and they told us they’d show us around the next day, after work. They took us inside the church where we slept in a loft, and the next morning learned about the group we would be staying and working with. Founded by Dave Campbell, Hands on USA (eventually becoming All Hands and Hearts) was a volunteer group that would do whatever was necessary to help the gulf coast find its heartbeat. Dave had been there since the week of the storm, finding a place to set up and call for volunteers. Which, we were quick to realize, was done with infinitely more heart and purpose than FEMA would show the whole time we were there.
That first day of work will forever be etched in my memory. It took my breath away. I signed up to do interiors, gutting out a house that had been flooded up to its ceiling; after piling the home’s dilapidated fragments on the sidewalk out front for pick-up, we had to get it down to the joists so that the mold remediation could move in thereafter. I remember standing in the middle of that street and feeling like I was seeing a photograph of a deserted and forgotten warzone.
At lunch, we drove by a giant cargo ship that had been pitched from the gulf waters to the other side of the highway. We then went to where we’d be spending lunch just about every day. We sat in front of Biloxi Bay Bridge, lifted off its foundation, coerced about 15 feet to the side, and dropped back down, collapsing at every stilt and left to look like a fallen set of dominoes that faded out into the sea.
Jim and I had gone to Biloxi as part of an exploration, expecting to stay maybe 2 or 3 weeks before wandering elsewhere. We ended up becoming part of a family that every day would drudge body and mind, hearing the stories painted by survivors as we helped make their home base feel like something they could once again recognize.
We did all we could, trying to get the houses that were still standing to be inhabitable; clearing debris from empty lots that were neighborhoods, now flushed elsewhere; walking some of the countless dogs who had been recovered after the storm; helping tutor at the one school where every child in the district had been transferred because it was the only campus that still had sturdy walls; clearing trees that looked to teeter one breath away from collapsing onto the trailer that FEMA had set up beneath; scraping the mold from every imaginable nook of a home’s interior. Just to name some examples.
We ended up staying longer than 3 months and even then, I only left because I was out of money, not to mention wearing thin on emotional strength. Every night after dinner long-term volunteers would sit at a campfire at the back of the churchyard, beside an abandoned golf course, and drink beers, play STUMP, sing songs (“He-eeey, mama rock me”), share stories, laugh, bitch, and smile and ready ourselves for whatever we would face tomorrow. Some of the folks I met in Biloxi are still dear friends, as we fostered a bond that was unlike anything we had ever experienced, before or since.
I wrote every night when I was at Hands on USA, stories and poems and journalistic diatribes about what I had seen that day. I feel that this helped cement the memories in my mind, so that I could later write more about what I had experienced. Here’s a poem I wrote a little while ago about my time with Katrina.
The news had its sights on New Orleans. But there were many towns, people, worlds with new identities. Waiting in the shadows of mold and wreckage and strangers was Biloxi, a photo cut into puzzle pieces and scattered to a spiraling wind. We tried to build a sense of logic. As no one recognized their town’s face any longer. Finding themselves lost for the first time. Roaming streets like the blind exploring curvatures of someone they’d never met, someone who was dotted with miss-styled placings:
A cargo ship,
fifty feet tall, like a glared vision on the side of the highway;
A car,
new to its grave three stories above the ground, wedged between two buildings;
A living room,
with scratches on the ceiling from two dogs who had been left behind when the water rose;
Island staircases that lead to nowhere;
Miles of cement foundations looking for something to hold.
There were hands that couldn’t be grasped. A voice had forgotten its song, and seemed to be clinging to drifting syllables. It was impossible to tell how this story, as it rippled through the skeletons of homes and lives, was going to end.
Or if it already had.
Check out Sean’s awesome website and book “A Manbaby’s Requiem” by clicking the link below!
