November 30, 2005
Hello Everyone—
Here’s an update on the efforts we’ve been making to help the horses and people affected by Hurricane Katrina.
There were a few complications this time trying to get our trip together. A few days before we were scheduled to be in Mississippi my back went out and I spent a Saturday night in the ER. On the following Monday my chiropractor told me “no driving, no sitting at your computer.” I said, “Can I ride?” She looked at me like my mother used to when I was 10, staying home sick from school, asking the same question. “Not until you can walk,” she said. Darn. I called Kelley—Kenny Ray’s daughter—to tell her I was grounded. “I’ll try to get there as soon as I can,” I told her. She said she would tell Kenny Ray.
One miserable week and three more chiropractic adjustments later, Pete and I decided we could make the trip. We both had bad colds, but, we were so tired of being laid up sick, we decided a change of scene would do us good. Just about that time Laurie Kelly called to say she had collected donations for feed, so we made arrangements to pick up 65 bags of feed and a ton of hay in DeFuniak Springs. We went out and bought more grass seed and fencing, and I called Kelley to tell her we were coming. “That’s good,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re doing for feed. I think they’ve been out for a while.”
It’s funny. Even though I go to Mississippi every two weeks and see first hand the complete devastation and the slow pace of recovery, I still forget when I’m not there how it is. I half expected Kelley to tell me they had feed—no problem, no real need of assistance. But I could tell by the tone of her voice how relieved she was to hear we were coming. It almost seemed like she was expecting us to fade away at this point—make another excuse and not come. It seems there’s a lot of disappointment right now in Lakeshore over the way the federal help is going (i.e., literally leaving town), and also a lot of policy-holders angry over their insurance settlements. I was glad to be giving her a little good news.
Pete and I got the trailer loaded on Wednesday morning and got rolling. After three weeks I was eager to see what progress had been made. Going in, we saw new billboard signs the casinos had posted in Mississippi—no doubt a good sign for the local economy. One casino had put up a series of big blue banners: We will rise above—together. We will become stronger—together. We will rebuild our community—together. We will become stronger—together. We will support each other—together. We will lead the way—and then the casino name. Even in Gulfport things looked a little more organized—not as much debris in the roads. There are still a lot of tent villages behind filling stations at the I-10 interchanges, but now the signature FEMA trailers are everywhere. Lots, filled with them, waiting to be delivered. Country fields filled to the brim with them, their power poles and septic pipes in place, forming new little cities that have sprung up to house people displaced by the storm or coming into the area to work. In Waveland, the WalMart is finally back open for business. Its parking lot was full of shoppers. But, I was sad to see that the Waveland Free Café with its big geodesic tent and tie-dyed flags was gone without a trace. I’m having to learn my way around all over again as the landmarks come and go.
The big shock came, however, when we pulled into Ladner’s Feed. Gone are the Alabama tent boys. Gone is the old feed store—it has, at long last, been torn down. But gone also is the riding arena where the horses were able to go out and enjoy the sunshine. Kenny Ray’s property has been turned into a FEMA trailer park. He had told us more than a month ago that FEMA had approached him about setting up his grounds as a trailer park. Like so many other possibilities that were discussed along the way, it seemed likely that this one too might come to nothing. Now, here they were, row after row, standing amid the bulldozers and the rubble of the old feed store. Amid the debris I saw three shiny trophies gleaming in the late afternoon sun—reminders of Kelley’s earlier glory days.
Trophies and a cash register are some of the last reminders
of days gone by. Ladner’s Feed Store, Lakeshore, MS, 2005.
Still, the feed store was a bustle of activity. We met Carlos Ladner and his son DeWayne. Carlos is a weather-beaten man with a warm smile. DeWayne is a polite, handsome young man, about 30, with two turquoise earrings. Both speak with that Cajun lilt we’ve come to expect from Lakeshore natives. Pete greeted Kenny Ray with a wave at the trailers and said, “So you’re finally going to be a rich man.” Kenny replied, “The Super’s coming to shut ‘em down.” Before we could get another word, Kenny Ray’s cell phone rang. “That thing’s growing outta’ his head these days,” Carlos said. He told us the County Supervisor was on his way over to “pull the plug” on the FEMA trailer park. A vote had been taken at a town meeting the night before. People were against the trailers.
DeWayne, whose job takes him all over the country, shook his head. “This is a tight-knit little community,” he said. “They’re afraid of strangers coming in.” DeWayne works for a company that organizes conventions around the country. He told us that when he’s not traveling in his work, he helps area residents get their cars working again. “I don't need the money,” he said. “I just want to help out.”
Half-way through unloading, the County Supervisor, David Yarborough drove up in a new SRV. Right off the bat, Carlos cornered him: “Where are all the people living in tents going to sleep if you take away these trailers? Winter’s coming.”
“Ain’t none of our people in tents,” Yarborough fired back. Kenny Ray appeared and whisked
Yarborough aside for a little talk.
“That's one of the people who shut down the free cafe up on 463 (The Waveland Free Café),” DeWayne told us, nodding at the Supervisor. “It was run by a group of organic farmers from up in Oregon and Washington. Every year they go on a retreat together—go somewhere nice and cook and camp. This year just as they were trying to decide where to go, Katrina hit. They voted to come down here and cook for the people here—all free. But some of the good citizens of Waveland didn’t like those hippies coming in here helping people out.”
As we finished unloading, we kept an eye on Kenny Ray and Yarborough, whose animated conversation was punctuated with frequent gesticulations. At one point we overheard Yarborough saying adamantly, “Kenny Ray, you know I had to do it. I had to do it to make them listen!” Kenny Ray’s reply was spoken too softly for us to hear, but within a few minutes we heard Yarborough on his cell phone saying, “Last night we voted to shut it down. Now I’m turning it around. We got it worked out.”
Carlos was nodding his head. “You think about the people who don’t own land,” he said, “who were living in apartments and condos that got wiped out. They don’t have any place to pitch a tent or set up a trailer. Their homes are gone. Some of those people are staying with people who really don’t have room for them. It’s too hard like that.”
We finally got a chance to visit with Kenny Ray. He told us that Kelley, the weekend before, had taken 4th place at the State barrel racing contest with 129 entrants. The next day, in the ladies’ championship class, she took 4th again. “She ran a second slower than the day before,” Kenny said. “If she’d kept her same time, she would’ve won the championship.” Kelley’s son Eddie also rode, in a more novice division. “Bubba Ed (as Grandpa calls him) also took 4th in his class,” Kenny Ray said, chuckling. “They were just tickled to death.”
“You took down your arena,” I said to him. “Now where are your horses going to go out?” He grinned at me and jutted his chin north. “We gonna turn ‘em in the pasture up the street. Lots of riding over there. Just about to get the fence up.”
“I don’t know how you’re doing it all Kenny Ray,” I said. “Are you still working the night shift?” (Kenny recently started a job as night watchman at the collection site, where all the debris from the storm is being hauled.)
“Yep,” he replied. “If you can call that working.”
After unloading the trailer, Carlos offered to take us on a tour of the coastline—an area that had been closed off by the National Guard when I first started coming into Mississippi. Pete, DeWayne, and I climbed into Carlos’ car and headed south towards the neighborhoods that were the hardest-hit during Katrina. Carlos knows these neighborhoods intimately, is old friends with many of the former residents, and has kinfolk all through the area. The places he showed us have suffered total devastation that cannot be adequately described. The city of Clermont Harbor looked like it had been put through a blender, with everything—trees, homes, signs, buildings—shredded into a huge mulch pile. He showed us the site of his grandmother’s house, built in the 19th Century. There was nothing left but rubble.
As we rode, DeWayne told us about the day the storm hit. He was home with his two boys and two dogs when the water started coming in. They swam out to his grandfather’s house through waves that were higher than his head and helped rescue his grandfather, who is wheelchair-bound. I listened to the story in a trance. Only later, as we were driving home, did I come back to thinking about it. I said to Pete, “I wish I’d thought to ask him more about it. I was just so astonished as he was telling it, I didn’t think to ask how far they had to go to safety, or how long they were in the water. I’m so horrified when I hear these stories, my mind just freezes.”
Carlos showed us the Waveland town hall—what’s left of it. It was completely gone except for the front steps leading up to it. A lovely tile mural placed against the front steps was still intact, offering a surreal glimpse of normality. We saw the beautiful wooden arch supports of a Catholic Church with nothing else left of the building.
“There’s the railroad tracks,” Carlos said as we passed over them. “They’ve fixed them up pretty good now, but after the storm they looked like a ‘snek’.” He wiggled his arm in a slithering motion.
Street after street, as we drove past the shattered buildings, Carlos told us the stories. When there’s anything left of a house, you see the ubiquitous FEMA code in orange spray-paint, indicating the date the house was checked and the number of any occupants/survivors. Most of the properties have the owners’ hand-painted signs on a gate or wall, giving the owners name, the property address, and any other notes, such as where the family has gone during the evacuation. It feels like a cemetery—this seemingly endless series of boards and bricks sticking up from the ground with a family name crookedly lettered: Murphy, Hoover, Necaise, Ladner. I couldn’t repress a shudder. No wonder Carlos broke down several times during the tour. “I haven’t been down here to look at it all since the storm,” he said. “It’s hard to stand it.”
We drove to Bay St. Louis to drop off DeWayne. His house took in six feet of water even though it sits on the highest point on the entire gulf coast. I asked him if the insurance paid up. He smiled and shook his head. “I had hurricane insurance and natural disaster insurance,” he said, “but they said I had to have flood insurance. Seems like natural disaster or hurricane should have covered it. They gave me $3800 to fix the roof.” We saw the house and it was damaged beyond repair. He told us he probably wouldn't rebuild there. He liked it better “out in the county,” he said, referring to the more rural Lakeshore area. In front of his house stood two flooded and useless cars. Carlos pointed to a white one and said, “Day after the flood, someone came by and stole one of the doors off that car.” He shook his head.
Sailboat in the trees. Lakeshore, MS, 2005.
Carlos is one of the few people we’ve met who actually evacuated during Katrina. He evacuated, but he didn’t escape from her tragic impact. All four of his horses—a Paso Fino and three quarter horses—drowned. “I beat myself up every day,” he tells us. “I should have taken them. But I had four horses and only a two-horse trailer. I couldn’t make up my mind to carry two and leave two behind.” We are quiet for a moment. I want to say something to this man who is clearly suffering so terribly. I open my mouth, not knowing what there is to say. “You know, Carlos, I grew up on the Gulf Coast—down in Panama City. We never evacuated our horses. We saw hurricanes every year. We never saw anything like this. You just wouldn’t expect this.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he says. “It’s easy to criticize people in hindsight. People complain about this politician doing this or that, for this decision or that. But when you have to decide something in real time, and you have to weigh everything out in a hurry, not knowing what’s coming—well, that changes your thinking.” He is having difficulty controlling his voice. “I know this much though,” he says. “I won’t ever go off again and leave another living thing that is depending on me. I know someday I’ll have some horses. But I’ll only have two. And whether it’s a dog or a chicken or whatever it is, if I go, it’s going with me.”
When Carlos returned to Waveland the day after Katrina, he found his home destroyed. His black van had floated on top of his pickup truck and pinned it there. He immediately began searching for animals in need of rescue. He told us more stories about people coming in from outside, taking horses out—horses that have not been traced or returned. This reminded me of the fear and anger I encountered when I first came in to help. “One lady was in here driving around with a trailer. She told me she was trying to find horses so she could take them out to a safe place. I asked her, ‘What right do you have to come in here and take other people’s animals?’” She said she was affiliated with a national humane organization. “I told her if she messed with other people’s horses, she would find herself in big trouble—and I didn’t mean from the law either.”
I can’t tell the extent to which horses and other animals were actually removed from the area and then assimilated into the “rescuer’s” personal property when the real owners couldn’t locate them or otherwise failed to claim them. But the overwhelming perception among the people here is that this was a very real danger. To this day, many of the people still looking for horses lost in the storm are haunted by the fear that they will never see their horses again, not because they were killed in the storm, but because they were—for all practical purposes—stolen. It is one more sad page in this miserable saga.
Carlos tells us about three Arabian horses that his brother, Tommy, bought in Louisiana a few weeks before Katrina. “They were starving,” Carlos says. “The one mare was so skinny, you could throw a hat and it would hang on any part of her it hit.” A week after Tommy bought them, Carlos got a call from his brother. “Guess what I found out in the field,” he said. “That skinny mare had a foal last night—a nice colt.” When Katrina hit, six of Tommy’s ten horses were drowned. But the mare and foal survived. “They stayed together through that storm,” Carlos says, his voice cracking. “I don’t know how they did it, but they lived.”
We made one last stop on the tour. Carlos wanted to show us a local phenomenon—the Virgin Mary with bleeding hands. He explained that when the church was inundated with water, the statue of the Virgin was flooded. When the water receded her hands were stained red.
As we were leaving—it was dark already again—I noticed that there are more lights now. Not just in the homes, but on the streets as well. Before, the dark streets of Lakeshore and Waveland had reminded me of times in my childhood, riding in the car through a dark city, in a time before street lights proliferated. Now, to judge from the lights, we are almost back to the present.
Pete and I drove the familiar miles, talking occasionally about the things we had seen that day. I told him I didn’t have it all figured out yet, but there is something about doing this work in Mississippi that’s sad and haunting, and yet somehow clarifying. Time has stopped there—or slowed to such a pace as we rarely experience anymore in the revved up lives we call ourselves living. I remember experiencing it during one other period of my life—when my mother was dying of cancer. It is Grief Time, when the relentless, driving normality of life is suspended, and you feel that nothing can ever again move you from this still, sad place. No fresh breeze will come, no wind of change could touch you. Only the people standing by you, with the same stark light in their eyes, seem real. And, through them, you find your way back to what matters. So that one day you look up and discover time flowing away again in that river of normality that has carried you past your trauma.
As we were saying good-bye to Carlos he told me to come to his house on our next trip. “I’m gonna cook you the best creole you ever ate,” he said, his dark eyes shining. “I love to cook.” And I thought, things are a little better in Mississippi tonight. . . .
Thanks to you who have donated so generously: Bernita Broome and the South Georgia Trail Riders, Monica Colquett, Laurie Kelly, Jane Nopanen, Tammy Key, Mary Sprinkles, Joanne Shular, Jim Picardi, James Dixon, June Coles, Darlene Raim, Grada Lara-Navarro, the Northwest Florida Chapter of Deep South Dressage and Combined Training Association, Kerrie Townley, Sallie Ausley, and Sandra Horn.
I continue to be amazed by the kindness and compassion of our community. I’ve always thought of “horse people” as my first family, and—for the most part—that’s always made me proud. But lately, as I see all of you reaching out to help, I feel even more privileged and grateful to be part of the tribe. Hundreds of years ago, the French horse-master Pluvinel told the King (probably in an effort to get funds for hay, or maybe to justify his job) that teaching young noblemen to ride was the best possible training for leadership in battle. He pointed out that a rider had to be able to think clearly and act decisively in the midst of danger and confusion, and that developing these skills prepared young men to deal with the conditions of war and disaster. I’m thinking of proposing a new riding school—a national training center for FEMA officials and anyone who wants to run for office. But I know I’d feel too sorry for the horses.
Everyone be safe through the holidays, and all the best in ’06.
Cheers!
Sara Warner