Hello Everyone—
Here’s an update on the efforts we’ve been making to help the horses and people affected by Hurricane Katrina.
First, I have some good news to share from Dana, who wrote to ask for help locating her Grandparents’ goats, which were missing from the Pearlington area after the storm. She writes:
Sara,
Just thought I would let you know that the Grandparents' missing six have been found! They had other goats as well that did not survive the storm and all had been accounted for except the missing 6 which we were told were picked up by someone from Florida. Someone in the Kiln area who has an exotic farm had them. The grandparents were called to come identify the goats but when they got there and the goats heard their voices, they came running and identified the grandparents instead. Thanks for your help and we'll be praying for everyone there as Wilma nears.
Dana
Thanks Dana. It’s so nice to hear news of happy reunions!
The trip this week started with a visit to Florida Farm and Feed, where Jimmy Young continues to organize Katrina relief donations for our effort. [Thank you so much, Jimmy, for your help and continued support.] Jimmy and Tom loaded the trailer with feed, hay, and wormer, and Tuesday morning Pete and I headed for Lakeshore.
Hurricane Wilma had come across southern Florida the day before, and, as we headed west on I-10, we saw many emergency vehicles going east: Red Cross vans, Asplundh trucks, and the dump trailers that have become synonymous with hurricane clean-up. Most of these trailers have been custom made with towering plywood sides braced onto a flat-bed to make them fit for carrying huge loads of debris. In some parts of the Katrina disaster area they make up well more than half of the vehicles on the road. As we watched the long caravans of these vehicles heading the other way, I couldn’t help wondering what this portends for the folks in Mississippi still trying to dig themselves out from under mountains of rubble. And I can’t imagine how thinly stretched the resources must be at this point, with a seemingly endless series of crises crying for response.
My friend Danny, who runs our local feed store in Grand Ridge has been working in Mississippi, hauling debris to the dump sites. He told me this weekend that he was coming home. “I haven’t seen even half of the money they owed me for the first two weeks I worked,” he said. “And I’ve got over a month of time in I haven’t seen a dime for.” I asked him what the hold up is on his money. “It’s all subcontracted down to so many levels, and every person who gets his hands on the money slows down the trickle, til when it gets to the bottom there’s nothing left. They tell you you’ll have to wait til the next pay-out. But the guys on top—they’re getting theirs.”
This scenario is sounding way too familiar. I have a vague recollection that as an idealistic kid I would have called this way of doing business corrupt, which, back then, would have amounted to a real indictment, instead of a simple acknowledgment of the status quo.
Still, there’s lots of work going on in Mississippi. Huge piles of debris line I-10, and machines with big claws load the piles onto trailers headed for the dump. I keep wondering what black hole they’re pouring all this stuff into. Somewhere around Gulfport the driving becomes pretty hazardous. With all the stuff blowing and falling off these home-made trailers, the roads are full of litter—clothes, trash, tree limbs, tv antennae, couches. Weaving my truck and trailer through the maze, I think about the fun I had as a kid practicing pole bending on my horse. I learned what it was to have a partner—two heads are better than one—and a horse is a real good partner to have. I love my truck, but it doesn’t cover my mistakes like a horse would. Thank goodness Pete watches the road like a hawk—or a good horse.
When we turned south off of I-10, I told Pete, shoot some pictures of the ditches, so people at home can see how things look. In my last report, I described the difficulty people were facing getting feed and hay (among other things, like groceries and jobs) because of losing their vehicles. Here you can see a few of the many casualties.
October, 2005. In the photos below, cars and trucks line the ditches of Highway 603, after Hurricane Katrina flooded the area with a 24’ storm surge in September 2005.
So, I was excited when we got to Lakeshore and saw four new horses turned out in the arena. Kenny Ray was trying to get an air compressor working. “One last hope,” he said as he hauled it out to the power box. “Maybe it’s drawing too much current for that line at the garage. It keeps kicking off. I’m going to plug her straight in here and see if she’ll go.” I was struck again by the energy he has for the day to day grind of this recovery. He seems just like a man enjoying himself. When he throws the switch the compressor fires, catches, makes a tentative stroke or two. Kenny’s face lights up and his arms start up in a victory sweep. But then the motor dies. “Well, that’s that,” he almost grins, arms folding down. “It got flooded,” he explains. “The motor’s shot.”
Kenny Ray, testing an air compressor damaged in the flood. In the background is the Fortrane shed.
“I see you got some new horses,” I said to him. And he stopped working and told us about them. “I’d been seeing the skinny one, but never when I could go and get him. But I got a call about some horses that kept turning up. So I hooked up (my trailer) and went over there to see if I could bring them in, and that little one was running with them. They were ready to come in. Folks’ll be here in a little while to see if it’s their horses.”
Pete, talking to rescued horses in Lakeshore, Mississippi. October 2005.
We started unloading the trailer, and Kelley’s husband, Eddie, turned up to help us. He told us the Army Corps of Engineers was up in the Pearl River picking up boats that were stranded on top of a levee and setting them out for repairs. Eddie’s boat is one of them. “It’s got a big bulge in the hull,” he says. “If I could get about four hours up on blocks—or maybe six—I think I could fix it.” He and Kenny begin telling us stories of feed trucks being “hijacked.” “Some people in Hattiesburg stopped a feed truck and got the whole load,” Kenny says. “They didn’t even get their grass ruined up there. One jockey from the racetrack took 150 bales of hay from the Kiln repository. People abuse this,” he says disgustedly. Then Eddie tells us about finding some rye grass seed in Kenny’s feed store. “It was in waterproof packaging,” he says. He got excited about planting the seed for his horses. But when he brought his truck to get it, somebody had beat him to it. “It sat there all that time, and I no sooner saw it, than it was gone.”
I ask Kenny about the two elderly ladies still living in tents—one of them, Miss May, struggling with the effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. “They’re still in tents,” Kenny says. “It’s the damndest thing I ever saw, why they can’t get those ladies into a trailer.” We sit down with cold drinks and Kenny tells us about Miss May dying. “She died, and they brought her back,” he says. “But she didn’t want her sister to know. She told me not to tell her sister—it would worry her so much.”
A truck pulls into the drive and a man calls out, “Got any steel-chops?” Eddie calls back, “We just got some. Came all the way from Florida.”
“What’s he asking for? Steel-chops?” I ask.
“Cracked corn—chicken feed,” Kenny Ray explains.
The man comes in and introduces himself to us. He is Judge Lee Kline, and he needs food for his birds. He tells us he had over 160 species of birds before the storm. He’s trying to get them to come back. Kenny says people have been putting out food trying to get the doves to come away from a place down on Lower Bay where people are shooting them. “The animals have been through enough,” he says. “They need a rest. Squirrel season opened yesterday, but I believe anybody that shot a squirrel around here would get arrested.”
Judge Kline tells us about his mulberry tree that made a second crop after the storm. “It’s the stress makes ‘em bear again. But the fruit is almost too sweet to eat.” Pete argues it isn’t possible for mulberries to be too sweet to eat. These are Pete’s personal favorite, and he and the Judge swap stories of eating mulberries. These are tales of man in paradise, head back, mouth open, feeding on manna from heaven—or at least the fruit of a mulberry tree. Judge Kline begins telling us funny stories about a young bobcat that has taken up with him since the storm. Before long we are all doubled up laughing, as the Judge acts out the bobcat’s part of things. I keep thinking about this moment, about the power of stories and laughter, and what they indicate or, maybe incite would be a better word. I can’t help feeling that sitting there in that barn aisle, drinking cold drinks and swapping funny stories, something of the authentic life is returning to Kenny’s neighborhood. These kinds of visits are the touchstone of barn life the world over. It’s part of what binds us together, makes us like kind.
The talk turns back to a shed sitting in Kenny’s yard that he showed us earlier. It had floated away in the storm. This week, Kenny took two tractors and drug the shed home. “Sometimes the tractor tires were spinning,” he says, grinning, “but that shed held together. We graded the road real nice too,” he says, chuckling. “The old man who built that shed, name was Fortrane, he couldn’t read or write. He couldn’t even read the tape. He’d mark his measurements on the tape with a pencil. But he did some pretty carpentry. He lived in that shed while he built his house. It’s been through a lot, and it’s still in one piece.” I look at Kenny Ray and nod, thinking the same could be said of him.
Pete and I get ready for the long drive home. We talk to Kenny a little about rebuilding the store. The Army Corps hasn’t shown up yet to see about dozing down the old store. We’ll keep it on the back burner, we say. The time will come. When we’re getting in the truck, Kenny steps up to me and takes my hand. “Thank you, baby” he says with a sparkle in his eye. I drive away marveling at the dazzling power of cajun charm.
Driving back through Waveland, Pete and I decide to stop at the Waveland Café and Free Market and see whazzup. The café is fronted by a huge geodesic dome tent, but it fills up most of a parking lot with booths and tables, more tents, brightly painted busses, tie-dyed flags, shopping carts, wares of all kinds. It looks like a rock festival from the 60s. We walk through the conglomeration, watching people rolling out dough, flouring okra, pounding squid. They’re preparing the free meal that will be served in a few hours. My mouth is watering. Several youngsters are working/playing at computers in the internet café just outside the kitchen. Several other people are constructing another big tent. As we wander out we read the signboard. One message says, “Welcome, we love you.” Another reads, “It’s not charity, it’s’ solidarity.”
This tent city strikes me as the whisper of a different way. When life ground to a halt for these people, or washed away on a storm tide, they made this. It’s almost like the end of the world came to Waveland, and then this new world was formed, a new tribe from people with many differences but one grounding truth—we pull together. It reminds me of something Kenny said right after the flood—“We’re all equal now.” I think of Danny’s story, not getting paid for the work he’s done, and of Miss May trying to live in a tent while fighting cancer, and, I know what Kenny meant in those days right after the storm when everything was leveled. But the truth is we’re never all equal. That’s why the measure of those with health and strength and wherewithal is whether it matters to them what happens to those who are “less equal.” And maybe that’s the gift of these troubled times: that it’s become so clear who measures up. I look at these tent cities and I know they won’t last too much longer. But I hope the community that began here turns out to be like old Mr. Fortrane’s shed—still in one piece a long time from now.
Thanks to Sandy Filippi, Kim Walstead, Kelly Unglaub, Elizabeth Ralstin, Jan Faircloth, Julie Picardi, Linda Zeigler, Martha Little, Cleo LeForge, Linda Knetsch, Megan Gardiner, Jimmy Young, and Patti Brantley for keeping the hay train running.
Next week Laurie Kelly is meeting me at the Hardees with feed, and I’m buying a load of hay to take in. If anybody has the wherewithal at this point to purchase some rye grass seed, I’ll take Eddie a few bags. We could even plant some in Lakeshore and see if it’ll come up.
Cheers!
Sara Warner
