A year ago tonight was our last night of innocence. A hurricane called Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, but there had been so many close calls in recent years that your average TV viewer could be forgiven for growing cynical about reporters poised by water's edge, their stylish clothes blowing in the wind. So much of our world now is mediated. We "know" what we know about most things through the filter of media, and none has shaped our national consciousness more than TV.
But this was a monster storm that was swirling through the shallow warm waters of the Gulf, and veteran hurricane watchers developed a very bad feeling about Katrina. By a year ago tonight, even the shallowest of the on-air correspondents realized that this one was the real deal, so they fled inward alongside the local population. Anyone who could get away did.
Those who were left were about to experience a nightmare beyond description, which has not stopped many writers (including me) from trying. The next morning, Katrina did things no one could have imagined. Offshore the storm pushed an entire island toward the coast. Next, it smashed headlong into the massive barges serving as casinos anchored offshore.
Now, as it twisted ashore, the power of the surge reached its terrible peak. It lifted these huge barges and carried them like balsa wood models forward toward East Biloxi. The jagged center of the storm, ripping through whatever it encountered like a buzz saw, leveled the coastal village of Waveland. It also took out everything all along the coast for many miles on either side. Down went Pass Christian, down went a chunk of Gulfport, as well as Bay St. Louis, and other towns here and there.
At Biloxi, the giant barges now were hurtling toward town on the shoulders of a 30-foot wave. The people too poor or old or sick or otherwise compromised to get out of the way huddled in their attics or on their roofs, helpless in the face of God's certain fury.
When I spoke with both survivors and the volunteers who had tried to help them three months later, the sense of trauma, among the victims and the volunteers, was palpable. People tended to repeat their stories over and over, sometimes glancing anxiously over their shoulder at the Gulf nearby as if nervous they might reignite its anger.
No one in the path of the barges survived. I met people who suspected their friends were still flattened underneath these twisted hulks where they came to rest a half mile inland. Given the smell of death that surrounded them, I suppose they were right.
But even early this year, there were reports that at least 200 unidentified bodies were still being held in refrigerator trucks in Mississippi. The truth is that nobody knows how many died and how many disappeared, because like anywhere in the U.S., the poor, the illegal, the undocumented, the messed-up are not counted well.
Some people swam to their survival. Some had tied themselves to trees, cars, houses, anything that might hold, and were able to avoid drowning as the giant wave washed over them. But for many, the killing blow came from the other direction -- Back Bay -- where the storm viciously had them surrounded. Here, another 30-foot wave rushed in from the opposite direction of the Gulf surge. The two killer waves met over East Biloxi, exploding every structure at their epicenter.
Nothing I could write could adequately describe the aftermath of this explosive event. By the time I got there, everything was dead and everything was flattened. Everything was splattered and everything was quiet. Everything was muddied and everything was moldy. Everything smelled of death. No birds flew there and no children laughed there anymore.
A community had been turned inside out, rendered naked, everybody's possessions strewn about like trash. Shreds of paper, wood, steel, plastic, tile, brick, cement, cloth, flesh and bone stuck out of the mud like tombstones. Scavengers turned up. We met a man excited to have found gold and other jewelry along the beachfront, a dirty, shameless man, with furtive eyes and a guilty manner. I couldn't help thinking about Les Miserables and the scene under Paris when the bodies are picked over. My companion told the man his lucky find might well be the life treasure of a lonely old woman living in a tent nearby. He moved away quickly, glancing over his shoulder as if she might call the cops on him. She would do no such thing; tragedies are tragedies, and there is always somebody ready to benefit.
She knows only too well how badly people act in these awful moments. Although she would never describe herself as an idealist, she keeps hoping that saying something matters.
Tomorrow morning, she and others will be marching in Biloxi, apparently without a permit. They may well be arrested, a bunch of poor people, mainly black, and a few volunteers, mainly white, as they protest the plans to rebuild the coast with casinos and resorts. Those left behind under this plan will be the same people who felt the direct hit of Katrina a year ago tomorrow.
All they can do is march. All we can do is listen, and recognize that a new civil rights movement may be emerging post-Katrina. If so, we have to hold our politicians accountable.
After all, this is an election year...
As readers of this blog know, Katrina did more than rip a hole in the southeastern corner of this country; it also tore many lives apart, including, indirectly, mine. I lost my lover to Katrina. And a long time later, she lost me as well. I've moved on, something I often felt I couldn't do. I have accepted that she is gone from me, and that she is devoted instead to those trying to regain their lives on the Gulf Coast.
Tomorrow, she will be among those marching; maybe she'll be arrested. She has my support. I honor her and all the brave volunteers. They should be all of our heroes.
***
Life goes on. I used to want to go south. Now I have decided to head north. I have some important work to do north of the border, in Canada, the home of my father as well as many of my mother's relatives. This will be my first visit to Vancouver and it's not strictly business.
Here, in San Francisco, my son and many others prepare for their own religious pilgrimage, to Burning Man.
May God, whichever one serves you, bless us all -- in Nevada, Biloxi, Vancouver, and all over this globally warming planet...
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