This is an email I sent to my family, four days after the storm that changed life here in Mussuppy forever.
The worst is over...we have survived, and the power is back on at our house...have not been able to get hold of Dad since Monday, has anyone heard from him?!?
A few quick personal notes: A 50 foot sturdy-looking Poplar tree fell in the back yard, while the eye was still somewhere near the coast...missed the house by less than a foot....meanwhile, out front there are two big wobbly old pines, one has a broken branch that teeters with the slightest of breeze, I have been waiting for it to fall for years...the tree, and the branch are still there...go figure..anyone need any firewood? Anyone know how to chop up several thousand board-feet of tree in a confined space? My neighbors china-berry tree, a tree I have never been fond, blew back and forth with enough violence to remove all the paint off of the facia of the house, but didn't lose many limbs, some limbs do not appear to be broken, but sag down on top of my power lines...A kind soul had recently donated a few tons of nice berber carpet to my carport (to replace all the carpet ruined after untold thousands of dollars and several crooked roofing contracted have still yet to fix my leaky roof) ...I could not get it in the house, or find a way to move it to the storage lot I rented when wifey moved out...Hurricanes do nasty things to large piles of nice berber carpet...anyone want some slightly damp carpet?
Strange things:
1. No bugs...tried to sleep out in the car last night, it was cooler than the house, not a sign of a mosquito...I guess all of ours are now in Nebraska somewhere.
2. Trees. An amazing number of trees were down in folks' yard, yet few actually found a house. Some of the larger trees fell on power lines (they had no trouble finding these targets of opportunity), snapping the utility poles off just below the transformer, so you would drive up and see a little piece of a pole, with the lines still attached to the transformer, laying in the street. Seems the lines were stronger than the poles...All over town you find downed oaks and other hardwoods, but few pines, I had always assume the pines would go first...
I went out in fruitless search of water, ice, or D-cell batteries (Will forever after have large stocks of these clogging the closets without a doubt), had to take a small side street I never use to avoid downed trees/lines, after finally giving up, that same street was blocked by a downed tree.
3. On the larger street which comes off the interstate to go to my neighborhood, a convenience store I stop at every day for coffee never lost power, three lots down on the same side of the street, a large Chinese restaurant leans, the entire east wall, 150 feet of brick, gone.
4. All the traffic lights on this major artery are out. Hanging over the street is a blinking yellow light warning you to slow to 15MPH when school is letting out. This one works, blinking yellow at you at 1AM, and the schools days away from holding classes...
5. Tried to play head-ball (be smart guy) and stock up on stuff before the storm hit. Went out Monday morning, bought lots of bottled water and charcoal, food that would keep easy in an ice chest, all the D-cell batteries were long gone even then. Went to cook the first post-storm meal, only to discover an unknown leak in the storage room that dripped water directly onto my bag of precious charcoal, picked up the bag and all the bricks dumped onto the wet carport.
6. There was a tourist trap type place on the coast, within a stones throw of the ocean selling trinkets and doo-dads to commemorate the 1969 Camille Hurricane. Sitting out front is a shrimp boat pushed up there by the old storm and never moved. 150 year old buildings are now bare slabs, Jefferson Davis' mansion which suffered none from Camille is now a naked shell, the remains of huge casinos sit on the other side of the highway, complete barren emptiness for block upon block, nothing standing from the shore to the rail lines nearly half a mile away, 2-ton rolls of paper hurled from the docks through unsuspecting neighborhoods like wrecking balls, but there sits the shrimp boat budged not an inch, the souvenir shop and everything around it a fond memory not seen.
Things you might not know:
Jackson is 150 miles from the coast, but was hit by a category 3 hurricane, still holding an eye 30 miles wide and a circular band pattern. This was an extremely bad boy. I lost power at 10:30 AM, and the full fury did not hit until 5PM. It was close to midnight before things began to noticeably let up. I was completely unaware of what was happening. By 7PM 97% of electric customers were without power, and I consider myself very lucky to have it this early, some are weeks away. No one knows when the poor souls on the coast will ever get power or hope. This was a sneaky bastard...it went all too quickly from a squall, to another problem to pester Florida, to something that might put New Orleans at risk. Overnight it went from a possible category 2 to a 5, and the MS coast never knew what hit it, it happened too fast even with all the marvels of modern technology. Entire nieighborhoods which went unscathed by Camille, another Cat-5 storm that actually hit the MS coast, are no more...bare slabs swept clean and piles of debris far away. Camille is remembered for unbelievable wind speeds (a good friend of mine who grew up in the ex-city of Poplarville 45 miles from the coast saw wind-meters which had become stuck at 210mph), but Camille did not push a wall of water 28 feet tall through Pascagoula and Biloxi. A wall of water that pushed anything and everything in its path (except for the tourist shrimp boat) for nearly half a mile inland, and then receded, leaving no flood or other sign that water had been there before. This was what led many to assume things they should not have assumed, to their own peril, they did not factor in the surge tide. All the fear was about what might happen to New Orleans. Hattiesburg, a fairly large city 75 miles from the coast, was pounded unmercifully...they have had to close thier hospital due to lack of water or power. They are weeks and weeks away from any glimmer of electricity. Forrest County MS had thier entire sewer system disappear. If you have ever seen old newspapers from the days in the early 1900's when yellow fever wiped out these same areas, entire pages were devoted to listing the dead. The first newspaper to come out on the coast today listed those searching for loved ones not found, searching for hope perhaps not to be fround. Please pray for these sad souls, who have already suffered too much...
People are a lot of work:
Could not sleep in the car, too much activity out in the street in front of the house. Despite the curfew (8PM-8AM) at midnight there was an endless conga-line of boisterous teenagers traipsing up and down the street, apparently the only word in their vocabulary was "WHOOOO!". The teenagers were in constant peril of being run over by the car traffic...for those of you who do not know, I live on a residential street that goes nowhere except to other residential streets...no businesses were open, nowhere to go, and no gas available anywhere, but the cars were a veritable pestilence of shoddy mufflers and fender-rattling rap music upon the land. I had to go back in the overheated house. Apparently these people had no AC in their house, so they drove aimlessly about in the car, and were probably the same ones causing such a rukus at the gas stations that did manage to open. Over 200 of the 350 traffic lights in Jackson were out, which means you are supposed to treat intersections as a 4-way stop, except for every other car which blew thru at 50 mph. A mother angrily, noisily, and fruitlessly tried to stop her sons from romping down the street on a bicycle, using the familys' only flashlight and its precious cargo of D-cell batteries as a headlight for their romp. She asked me if I had seen them, and which way they had gone...there was only one way they could have gone, and she had been chasing them...I gave her no answer, my silent rebuke for causing such a rumpus in the dead of the night while I was trying to sleep...
Rays of hope:
The fabric of humanity has been stretched, the stitching strains at times, but it seems that the quilt will hold. Color of skin seems a minor thing these days in Mississippi, people hold doors for those under burden of supplies, advice is offerd by those with full gas tanks where others might go to find the gold (this is a fleeting thing, 4,000 gallons of gas disappear within 2 hours, if you are not in line when the truck comes in you get nothing), neighbors watch out for each other that previously never had time to speak.
A personal item here to shed some light: Sharon was out in the car while I went in to a convenience store, part of the circular vagabonds who know that supplies come in to places you have allready failed before...a man and wife were at the cashier, and the husband became cross at the clerk at bad news about ice or batteries, he turned to her and said "Come on let's go home!" She looked up at him and said, "We don't have a home to go to." He looked sheepishly back at the clerk to apologize. I did not even realize that I was in tears at this point, and found the hand of an old black man on my shoulders in solace and common travail...somehow he knew that it had struck me that I had become upset at knowing I needed the same things as the man at the counter, but that I should be thankful that I did have a home to go to, my loved ones safe...I might not know if I would eat tomorrow, or what the future might hold, but I was better off than the man at the counter and had no reason for anger at the harried clerk...
Today, just as I was beginning to despair at the radio report that it would be 96 degrees today and air conditioning a dreamed-of luxury not to be found, the skies clouded over and a light drizzle began to fall, cooling things off...my boss called in to say that power had been restored at the plant and they badly needed some parts to be made...suddenly the hot factory that I dreaded was an oasis, it might be hot, but there was a fan to be had...and I cam home to find the power on and a cool house!
Things to seriously consider:
The things you today hold near and dear may one day soon become fleeting and flimsy memory, of a sudden not so important. The things you take for granted luxury forgotten. The boy scouts are a beleagured society, but the motto is strong: Be Prepared! Think canned hams...they last forever, like luggage. There should be a mathematical formula that goes something like this: Your desire for survival should be directly proportional to storage capacity, financial ability, and careful planning. If this current disaster had struck New York, it would be unimaginable. There is something inherently dangerous to a wandering life, you will always be at the whim of short fortune, and perhaps far removed from firm support. For those of you who think man to be the supreme master of all he surveys, consider the finger of God when it rests upon the land. It is easy to ignore God in times of plenty, and blame Him in times of want, but there are no athiests in the face of a hurricane. Waiting for a hurricane is too late a time for reconciliation. Times will come when money gets you nothing, Fort Knox can not feed you if the restaurants are closed and the stores looted. When the trucks stop rolling, the shelves are quickly bare. Those who plan least are most surprised. Even those who try to plan well can be overcome by circumstance. Life itself is a fleeting ghost, all too soon to flee, one should not hasten the departure by careless grip upon this tenuous soil. When the weatherman tells you to get, think about it some. When the locals tell you they never got hurt before, pack. When the govt tells you to get, put the bags in the car. When the radio goes out, it's too late to GET!
