Hello Everyone—

        Here’s an update on the efforts we’ve been making to help the horses and people affected by Hurricane Katrina.

        Thanks to all of you who are donating your time, money, goods, and efforts to the relief project.  Some of you have said that I’m the one doing all the work, but none of this would be happening without all of us working together.  I know what it takes to stop what you’re doing during your busy day and read about the situation in Lakeshore, to send a check, or take items to the pick-up points.  Some of you have written encouraging notes, which I appreciate more than I can say.  I wish you could be there when it happens that the little bag of goodies someone sent turns out to be the very thing someone needs for their horse.  I wish you could see the faces when we pull in with the trailer loaded with feed, hay, and supplies.  Honestly, I feel like I’m the lucky one in this relationship.

        Last Monday, my friend Melinda Harrelson arranged for us to get some feed at a quarter of the normal price.  So that started our load.  Then, Laurie Kelly called and offered to make our Hardees rendezvous again with a ton of feed.  Friends in Navarre—Louise Kildow, Kathyrn Curle, and Jan Fernald—had already offered hay and feed, gas money, and care packages from their neighbors anytime we wanted to swing by and get them.  So, Wednesday morning Pete and I pointed old Cherry’s nose out the drive and headed west. I have to say, I’m going to miss these odd get-togethers when all of this is over.  I guess forevermore I’ll think of Laurie when I see that Hardees, and there are going to be indelible memories of handing feed bags from truck to trailer associated with many of your faces.  If I learn one thing from all of this, I hope it has something to do with realizing that to see my friends.

        The plan this week was to take a big load of feed to Kenny Ray in Lakeshore.  I’d spent my trip the week before checking out the situation in Harrison County, where Janet McCarrol is heading a distribution center for all the horse owners in the disaster area.  I hadn’t made it down to Lakeshore and I knew they were running out of feed.  And, I was eager to see how Kenny and Teresa were doing.  When I’d been there two weeks before it had seemed to me they were at a low point.  I also wanted to take in a big load and see if they could make it on those supplies for two weeks.  That way we could drop back to going every two weeks instead of every week.

        When we got to Lakeshore, a welcome sight greeted us:  the little Paso stallion who rode out the storm in Kenny Ray’s barn was out in the arena enjoying the beautiful fall day.  This made me very happy because every time I’d seen him previously he was in his stall, which was still pretty dank and dark.  “I see you got him out,” I greeted Kenny, nodding towards the arena.  “Yeah,” Kenny told me, “I scraped the worst of [the sludge] off so they could go out.”  He seemed in good spirits and I asked him how Teresa was doing.

        He told me they had gotten a FEMA trailer, with air conditioning.  I laughed and said, yep, now that the weather has turned cool.  But, things were obviously better: the trailer also had a small kitchen and all the conveniences.  Kenny then told me about two neighbor ladies he was worried about who were still living in tents.  “Seems like they ought to go to the head of the line and some of those ‘important people’ at the front could step aside.”  The two women are elderly, he said, and one is undergoing chemo and radiation treatments for cancer.  I had the feeling he was telling me this with the idea that maybe I knew someone who could fix this, but I later realized that’s how he networks.  He tells everyone he talks to about whatever he’s concerned about, and sooner or later he finds someone who can help.

        In fact Kenny seems to understand very well how to pull together the available resources, and people gravitate to him as a kind of elder or leader in this small community.  I know I did.  In the past I’ve seen county agents, insurance agents, and FEMA folks there talking to him.  So I wasn’t too surprised last Wednesday to meet the county supervisor David Yarborough.  He came out of the barn and shook my hand and Pete’s.  “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate what you are doing,” he said.  I explained to him that it was the people back home—horse owners, people who wanted to help—who were behind it all.  “We are all very glad to be able to help,” I said.  “Well if there’s anything I can do for ya’ll—in about a year,” he laughed, “don’t hesitate to let me know.  Anything at all. Right now there’s not much I could do, but in about a year we should be back on our feet.”  Nice to think if we get hit over our way with a big storm, we’ve got friends who’ll remember us.

        Kenny had hired a local young man, whose name I unfortunately didn’t get, to help us unload.  Kelly and Teresa also showed up at just that moment, and we made a party of it.  Kenny took me aside during a break and showed me all the things he was salvaging from his flooded barn:  a dozen big jacks he had cleaned and oiled, heavy-cut lumber he had set aside, stacked and spaced, to rebuild his back barn.  I told him the whole place was looking a lot better, and I asked him if he’d had time to think about what he wanted to do about the feed store.  We walked over to the main building—what’s left of it.  “The Army Corps is coming Monday to take it down,” he said.  “We can save the back warehouse.  Then we’ll get the new slab in—up higher this time.”  I mentioned to him that several people had indicated they’d be willing to give him a day or two to help him get the walls up quickly and the roof on, when he gets to that point.  He seemed very excited to hear it, as if it suddenly seemed much closer to a reality, a time when things would really be back to normal.

        I went back to help with the unloading and remembered the care packages people had sent that I had stashed in the front of the trailer.  I started going through them with Kelly and Teresa so they would know what was in them.  At that point, the young man, who had helped us unload, asked me if I’d brought any wormer.  His mare was really bad with worms, he said.  No, I told him.  I’d bring some next time, but I didn’t have any on the trailer.  All of us were feeling bad about this, and everybody was thinking of that mare going another two weeks without being wormed. Then Kelly pulled a tube of equimectrin out of one of the care packages and held it up triumphantly.  I know it’s a small thing, but this kind of serendipitous moment seems to happen all the time when I’m working on the relief effort, and I’ve come to think of these moments as little miracles we are privileged to witness.  Teresa explained to the young man how to worm the horse over several days, not all at once, and I told him to be sure to take her some hay.  “This feed and hay we’re bringing is for you too,” I told him.  “It’s for all the horses everywhere in this area.  You take what you need and leave the rest.”  I noticed a few minutes later that he had loaded a bale of hay on the back of his 4-wheeler.

        Some people have asked me why the folks at Lakeshore can’t go up to the distribution center at Harrison County and get their feed—why I’m still taking it in to them.  “Are you sure they’re not taking advantage of you?” one of my friends asked. I’m not going to try to answer that all at once.  But I’ll start by saying that most of the folks in Lakeshore lost their vehicles.  Not that they can’t locate them.  Most of them are right there in the yard, or lying at odd angles in the woods, or piled up in the ditches along Hwy. 603 all the way up to I-10.  But 24’ of salt water pretty much takes out a working engine even if the body of the car still holds together.  Add to that, the distribution center necessarily has to limit the amount of feed and hay any one customer can take, so it means going back frequently if you have a lot of horses to feed.  For people just getting their electricity back on, just getting the wreckage of their homes carted off, that’s probably a little more than they can put together right now.  I’m not sure how they would make one100-mile trip hauling feed and hay, let alone doing it several times a week.  I reminded my friend that, as a teacher, my “slacker-meter” stays pretty well tuned. And I don’t hear a peep out of it in Lakeshore, MS.

        Kenny and Teresa invited Pete and me to come “tour the house.”  On the way, Teresa took me in her new trailer and showed me their improved living quarters.  We took soft drinks back outside for everyone and walked through their gutted home.  Once again I had that feeling come over me—a feeling of panic I’ve come to expect when I encounter up-close the work of Katrina.  I’m not a person who panics easily, but looking at the water marks on the top plate of Teresa and Kenny’s home, I could too easily imagine that house full of water, and all their furniture, books, Teresa’s dolls, and other personal things roiling around, and the snakes coming in . . . .  Teresa showed me where the freezer had floated up and lodged against the ceiling.  Then she pointed out onto the patio.  “It’s the funniest thing,” she said, “that aluminum table didn’t move an inch.  And it’s probably the lightest thing.  But after the water went down, there it was, right where it started out.”

        We walked back outside and Kenny pointed to the street in front of the house.  “They just came a little while ago and took it all away,” he said, indicating everything he had gutted from his house. Later, Pete told me he thought that was a turning point for Kenny.  Kenny had told Pete that he’d been working from the time his feet hit the floor in the morning til about 10:30 every night trying to get all the wreckage out.  “Seeing it go down the road made things better,” Pete said.  “Now he can think about building back instead of tearing down.”

        On the way home I found myself thinking about finishing.  I started out musing about my Wednesday night bowling league and the way I was rolling the ball. (Pete got me into bowling, and I’m pretty bad at it—but actually, and unexpectedly, it’s great cross-training for dressage.)  I remembered that last Wednesday, as I delivered the ball, I kept saying to myself, “finish.”  What I was trying to address was a flaw in my delivery that I’ve been grumbling to myself about for months.  I get the ball to the line in pretty good balance, but in the last second, I hurry.  I fling the ball down the lane.  It’s kind of like rushing your transition, and causing your horse to come off the bit, or letting your half-pass flatten out before you get to the wall.  I was getting to the finish, but I wasn’t finishing.  I have a mental image of what happens when I finish the way I know I should.  My hand swings up, reaches out and releases as if in slow motion, without rushing, without tension, in a natural follow-through.  I can see it reach towards the headpin like a handshake.

        And that’s the image I’m holding in my mind for finishing this relief project.  I know we are all moving on to other things.  We are all busy people.  Other catastrophes have occurred in the world since Katrina. One of my friends wrote this week about the seemingly endless suffering the world is undergoing from such disasters as the tsunami, Katrina, Rita, Stan, and now the Pakistani earthquake—not to mention the dozens of ethnic and civil wars around the globe.  “How can we respond to so much disaster?” he wrote.  And then he answered his own question:  “The work is about keeping our hearts open in the face of unrelenting trauma.”  And, I would add, the work is about finishing. 

        We are getting close.  I guess that’s why I feel so keenly the danger of dropping the ball—all those missed bowling shots come to mind.  But here’s what I would like to see:  We keep up our support a little longer for the people in Lakeshore to take care of their horses.  I haven’t said much about the way this works to help rebuild the community, in part because I’m still in awe of the way it does work.  I never guessed that something so singular as delivering horse feed could make so much difference to the community at large, but it has.  I think partly it’s because without us sending in this feed a lot of people simply wouldn’t be able to feed their horses.  It’s hard for us to realize how it is to be so utterly wiped out, so completely without resources as many of these folks are.  The thing is, they want to take care of their horses just as much as any of us do.  But after the storm it wasn’t possible for them to do it.  They have been working hard to put their lives back together.  The difference we make is, when we show up with feed, their horses get to eat.  This is an enormous relief to these people who are already carrying too much grief for one lifetime.  Being able to feed their horses every day, finding that we come back week after week, that Kenny Ray has feed they can run over in a 4-wheeler and get—imagine it for yourself.  Little by little they come to feel they can rely on goodness again.  And I have to say, if this is the advantage these people want to take of me, they are welcome to it.

        It won’t be long before Kenny will be ready to rebuild the feed store.  By then I think a lot of these folks will have figured out a way to get back on a paying basis.  Kenny will have the space he needs to place a feed order with his old suppliers, and this community can take it from there.  I think that’s the finish we need.

        I have a little sign posted in my barn to help me keep going when I feel overwhelmed.  It reads:  “Great things take time, perseverance, and extraordinary effort.”  I’m going to add: and amazing people working together.

        Thanks to Julie Picardi, Linda Zeigler, Mary Sprinkles, Mary Martin, Bonnie Jeter, Sharon Nehrings, Lola and Gary Latson, Kerrie Townley, Judy Johnson, and Aunt Ginger for your generous donations.  Your help is what’s keeping us going.

        Please donate at Florida Farm and Feed on Weems Road in Tallahassee or send checks for feed, hay, and fuel to me at 1939 Sand Basin Road, Grand Ridge, FL 32442.  Or, you can email me if you have large items you’d like for us to pick up—hay or feed.

        I’m including an update from Lori Summers, our friend from New Orleans who helped with a feed delivery to Louisiana.  Also pictures of our Lakeshore friends below.  Everyone be well.

        Cheers!

Sara Warner

        new orleans is one big mess!  just ugly and garbage piled up everywhere. !  spent the whole week cleaning  a friend's flooded home ... it only flooded 4 inches,  so we ripped up the flooring and sprayed bleach b/c  she has no where else to live w/ her 6 dogs (she is a dog rescuer).  Housing is scarce now .hopefully she’ll be back in by the end of next week, though.   Would like to go back soon to help paint .   Everyone needs help, it seems.
        My former vet told me that several barns in the East lost all of their horses from flooding. . . very sad.  hopefully the evacuated horses from Rita will be recovered to their owners.  microchips come in handy,  I'm told....

                take care,

                lori s. 

       Enjoying the sunshine—turnout has returned!

Happy Boy

Many hands make light work

Kelly and Teressa unloading feed, Lakeshore, Mississippi

Kenny Ray Ladner and Teressa

Teressa's Dog, Sheeba, thanking Pete

4-wheeler hay-tote

Tent cities, downtown Waveland. October 2005

Major intersection, downtown Waveland, MS, October 2005

Mountain of metal roofing. Mississippi, October 2005

Kelly Ladner Erskine. Lakeshore, 2005. Note the lights are on!