February 7, 2006
Hello Everyone—
Here’s an update on the efforts we’ve been making to help the horses and people affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Driving home from class the other night, I came upon the scene of an accident on I-10—not an unusual occurrence when you travel the interstate regularly. But this one got my attention because a truck pulling a FEMA trailer westbound had piled into a guard rail and gone over an embankment, leaving the trailer smashed against the rail like a crunched up soda can. I’ve been thinking about how long this recovery is taking and how tired everyone gets, and how hard they push on.
In the news this week the Congressional investigation into the handling of the so-called “aftermath of Katrina” found failure at every level. People did not have the tools, the training, or the authority to act. Well-intentioned emergency workers were frozen, overwhelmed by the lack of a cohesive response plan. The states had insufficient safeguards in place. The Whitehouse was slow, muddled in its communications. As a result, the report said, lives were lost and much suffering was caused.
But, a man in New Orleans, interviewed about the report, said: “The problems we are having in the Gulf Coast are now. We need help to be able to come home, get a trailer, rebuild our houses, get our lives back. The help we need still has not come, and they’re looking at what happened way last fall.”
The need is just phenomenal, and the pace of recovery is so slow, many people are on the verge of despair. But there are always some signs of progress, and some amazing people who just hitch it up every morning and plow on.
This trip, on I-10, we saw rows of new billboard towers where previously there had been mostly wrecked ones. I hate billboards cluttering up the landscape, so it’s a measure of how weird I’ve become that I look on this pristine row of monuments as progress. We noticed, also however, how clean the road berms looked. I always loved clean road berms.
Disaster Relief trailers roll towards Louisiana.
Whole houses, beyond salvage, are now being bulldozed.
Even the foundations are getting “kicked to the curb” on many ruined homes.
In Lakeshore, we found everything around the feed store tidy and organized and brand new gates standing stacked against the wall. Kenny Ray was on his tractor, moving construction debris. A new roof gleamed on the 100’ shed row that runs along the back of his main barn.
“You ever gonna take a break?” I asked him.
He was grinning as he climbed down. “Oh, I got me some boys to help out,” he said. He promptly put them to work unloading feed from our trailer. Ah, luxury! A crew to unload!
I went to use the porta-potty and got a new surprise. The porta-potties that had stood along the street outside Kenny Ray’s house were gone. Another sign of progress I hope. Everyone on the block’s got indoor facilities again. Either that, or the funding for toilet paper gave out! I hope it’s the former and not the latter.
About that time, we noticed we had a flat tire on the trailer. Before I could even groan, the “Alabama Boys” were on it. I have to say, I thought everybody changed a tire pretty much the same way. But, you learn something new every day. Those “Boys” had a different way than I’d ever seen to tighten the lugs back on the tire. One of them held the lug wrench steady on the lug while another one rotated the tire. Four hundred miles later, I’m happy to say, it seems to work just fine.
As we were spectating the changing of the tire, we heard tires squeal and a near accident out on the highway. Teresa began telling us about all the accidents that happen at their intersection. In one, a friend had gotten ribs broken. Pete joked to me that it sounded as dangerous as DeeDee, a horse I used to ride that frequently made sport of me. I told Teresa I’d had to stop riding him. “I ran out of ribs to break, and besides, he was making me too nervous to ride my other horses.”
She told me that after Kelly got shot in the head, it was awhile before she was up to riding again.
Pete and I both looked at her, aghast. Kelly got shot in the head? we asked in unison.
Teresa said, yes, when she was fourteen or fifteen, she went off fishin’ with some of her cousins and they took a gun with them in case there might be some alligators. At one point, one of the boys hit the gun on the side rail of the stairs and it went off and the bullet hit Kelly right in the back of the head. “We had a three-day horse show here that weekend. She didn’t have to ride that day, so she was out fishin’. They couldn’t get us of course because we were at the horse show and not by a phone so they called somebody else and they went and got Kenny Ray’s mother. . . . Thank god it hit a part of the brain she didn’t need.”
Pete and I were amazed all over again. “So after it went in her skull it hit her brain?” Pete asked.
“Yeah,” Teresa said. “A good friend of ours, she was an X-ray tech. She told us after she went to the hospital, “Oh don’t worry, it just hit her conscience.”
We all laughed.
“It takes a good friend to say that,” I observed.
“This was later, when she was out of the woods,” Teresa said.
We went over to the trailer to have a cold drink with Teresa and Kenny Ray. Teresa said there had been a storm a few days earlier, and we commented that we’d noticed the puddles coming in. “We got some heavy winds and there were tornado warnings,” she said. “The trailer was shaking. I was so scared! Just when you think it can’t get worse, then it can.”
They told us Kenny Ray had been sick. “Workin’ that night watch, and you know, we had some weather, and I got wet getting out of the truck—got rained on.” After a few days of high temperatures, he finally went to the hospital. “I just needed a rest,” he said. No surprises there. Then he told me I needed to take his picture. I looked at him and he grinned. “I haven’t had a chaw since I was sick,” he said proudly. “I thought you’d want to get my picture without a chaw.” Unfortunately, our camera card was full and we had neglected to bring our other one. I told him I’d take that picture next time. “That’ll give you some incentive to stick with it,” I teased him.
He told me he’d paid nearly full price for some feed, then had to discount it for his customers to be able to afford it. “I was operatin’ in the red,” he said, laughing ruefully, as if there was any other way to operate these days. He said he was still waiting for his rent money from FEMA for the trailer park. “I haven’t seen the $40,000 insurance money yet either.” Oh well. One fine day, I guess. It made me very glad we were still bringing in regular loads of feed and hay.
Teresa was kidding about Kenny Ray’s wardrobe. “He’s got more clothes than me,” she said. “Even before the storm, he had two closets and I only had one!”
“I work harder than she does,” Kenny Ray said, and we all laughed. I’m not sure who it would be who does work harder than Kenny Ray.
We headed home, but made a stop in Waveland at the Chinese restaurant, where a wonderful surprise awaited us. Real Chinese mustard! As soon as I saw it in the little jars on the tables, I knew it was the real thing. I hadn’t seen it for years, and Pete and I had often talked about how the mustard had been “dumbed down” for mass market consumption. That stuff you get in the packets is about as hot as a snowball at the north pole. When my eyes stopped tearing after my first bite of mustard-slathered egg roll, I took a moment to savor a deep breath through my entire sinus system. Then I told Pete happily, “Chinese mustard comes to Waveland!”
We’d gotten an early start, but as darkness came over us, we discovered a new problem: the trailer’s running lights weren’t lighting. We fiddled and faddled. Finally I determined that if I ran with my emergency flashers on, we were at least visible to other drivers. And, we made it home safe with only two more chores to add to the list: get the flat tire fixed and get the trailer lights working.
A friend of mine wrote me this week: Sara, I just got around to reading your 1/17 update and was in tears. Things still look so horrific, but when you've seen what you have, the slow yet constant improvement, I am sure it is encouraging.
Well, from moment to moment, I’m never sure. I look around at the things I have and think of how many years it has taken to build this farm, to breed and train these horses. To think that a storm could blow through and wipe it all out in a few hours is incredibly depressing. And, to judge from some ancient literature—say Ecclesiasties, for example—people have thought long and hard about this conundrum ever since they began wondering what is worthwhile.
So, I ask myself this old question: What is worthwhile? Interesting that the Biblical meditation (which begins with the question, “What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?”) should be titled “Ecclesiasties,” which is based in the word Ecclesia: a calling out, an assembly of called out ones. The word also has a political aspect—it means an assembly of citizens, specifically citizens called out from the generality of the world to some particular awareness.
So there is some link here, all the way into ancient thinking. The plight of human endeavor is that we may see torn down all the fruit of our efforts—the comforts of home, the stability of our trade, the love of our families and our way of life. But within this ebb and flow is posed the action of citizens, called into some awareness, answering in some way the question “what profit?” after all is said and done. I guess those citizens are what we call friends, working together. So, thank you, citizens.
To Grace Jaye, Margaret Richey, Jean Stippich, and all of you who send encouragement and donations to keep the hay train rolling—thanks for your awareness and friendship. I’m very proud of the work we do.
Cheers!
Sara Warner
Please donate for feed and hay by sending checks to Sara Warner at 1939 Sand Basin Road, Grand Ridge, FL 32442, or email me if you would like me to pick up items.
Houses ruined by Katrina await demolition and clearing. Lakeshore,
MS. February 2006.
