Trying to balance the bad with the good....

I mentioned my friend Tessi as one of the bright spots in the days following the storm, and I wanted to tell a little more about her. Tess and her husband had moved to the Coast not long before the storm struck. They had used all the money they had just too get down here and were not able to do a lot of stocking up before the storm. After the storm struck, Tessi had to venture out as soon as possible to find supplies for her family. Every time she would find a source for food or water, she would go around and tell all of the other neighbors where to find it, and also offer anything that she had to anyone who needed it. She proved so resourceful in finding supplies, that she started asking the church, or wherever she had found supplies, if she could get some extra things for others. Then she and her husband would drive down into the hardest hit areas, and give the items away to the people that were unable to drive to find stuff. She also started picking up sheets of metal that people were dragging out to the road with the other debris to be picked up. She was able to sell the metal to a recycling center that she found, and make money to help her family. Her husband works up North and had been unable to fly up to his job since the storm, therefore they had no money coming in.
After my husband left and I discovered that I had more damage to my roof than we knew about before, she offered to climb up on the top of my very steep 12 pitch roof and patch the new area for me. I would not let her do it, but she was absolutely ready. Professional roofers charge a lot of extra money to work on my roof since it is so steep.

Another neighbor found herself standing in a Red Cross line and was told the wait was over 6 hours. She walked up to the front of the line and told the workers there that she wanted to be trained to help them fill out the forms to get people what they needed. She was told to she had to get "others" to take take the training class with her because they would not just teach one person. She went to her work and brought back 10 people to take the class. The Red Cross was surprised to see her and then stated that when they said "others", they meant more than 10. She asked how many, and they said 50. She went back and managed to get 50 people to sign up and then took them all to the Red Cross. They gave them the class and then she and all of the others took the forms and instead of sitting in the center to wait for people to somehow find them, they went out to the people and filled out the forms.

I have already told you how my neighbors brought us the pizza one night, but there were many other gestures like that from people all over. Ice was very hard to come by and I had just gotten used to drinking warm water and soda. Calvin hated drinking the warm drinks and one day he was feeling really bummed out about it. Sometimes it is the smallest things that are depressing. Anyway, out of the blue, this man comes up to us in a parking lot and ask if we wanted a bag of ice. This is equal to someone coming up to you in the parking lot of Wal-mart and asking if you want a bag of gold. We looked at him wide eyed, but said we could not possibly take the ice. He insisted and said he had more than he needed. He tossed the bag to Calvin. I can't even begin to describe how important these small things meant to me. They really made an impression on my son too. He will never forget the ice and the pizza, even those were two very small incidents during a really rough time.

If you are not familiar with people down here on the coast, you may be surprised to see how many of us laugh when something like Katrina happens. We will cry when we need to, but we love to find something funny in the most awful situations, and laugh about it. Tessi showed me a video tape that a friend of hers had made during and after the storm. He had set the movie to some twangy music that sounded like something from "Deliverance". The video tape showed how the guy drove over to his sisters house as soon as the winds died down, and found her house completely destroyed, but his sister was fine. He had put some outrageous "Batman" like captions describing how she lost everything but they had managed to salvage a lot of her clothes and wash them for her. It was sad, of course, but it was also hysterically funny. This was not done to blow off his sisters loss....it was simply done in order to find the humor in a situation where you could do nothing else.

Another funny moment came when Tessi's Mother saw on the news about the looting and crime and disease down here, and how we could not get any food or supplies. She tried to get somebody to drive down here with her, but nobody could take off work. She was worried sick about Tessi, so she made up a "dummy" with a cowboy hat and some stuffed clothes and put in in the passenger seat for protection. At a time when truck drivers were refusing to drive supplies in here because they were afraid, "Mom" gathered up a generator, a bunch of food and water and she and the cowboy drove over 14 hours straight through to get here. She was the one who had gotten an email through to Brad for me when he first went to Chicago, and she had been worried about me even though we had only met once, briefly. When she and the cowboy got here, this crazy woman pulled out, among other things, a blender, some ice and some stuff to make Margaritas. You can imagine what a surreal moment it was for me to open my door late one night to find a tall frozen Margarita along with an invitation to come meet "Mom". As I listened to her story, I laughed harder and harder until tears were running down my face. I have kids and there is no doubt in my mind that the 14 hour trip was a pure agony for Tessi's Mother, yet she told the story in such a funny way that my sides hurt from laughing. (The margaritas may have helped a bit too!)

Moments of horror

When I first started talking to people outside of the hurricane damaged area, I tried to censor the bad things from what I told people. Brad and I both thought that the news was focusing only on the bad things, and overlooking the positive things. We made the decision to focus on the good and uplifting stories that came from within the storm area so people would understand there were two sides of the story. Well, I have been doing that, but to be honest, this journal is a form of therapy for me, and there are just some things that are not good or positive, but I need to talk about them and get them out of my system. If you do not want to read about them, stop right here.

About 4 or 5 days after the storm, Calvin and I were driving down to the bank on our daily quest for messages from Brad. As we pulled up into the parking area, we noticed 4 large tractor trailors sitting there with their refridgerators running. I pointed them out to Calvin and said, "Look at that, the bank must have gotten a bunch of food and supplies in, maybe we can get some." Then, I suddenly realized that the trucks were actually parked in the lot next door to the bank, which was the funeral home. The larger refridgerator trucks were temporary morgues that they had brought in to handle the overflow of bodies. We would park beside the trailors each day when we drove to the bank, and we just tried to not notice when they added new trailors.

Two friends of mine had gone to another friend's house right before the storm and more or less forcibly evacuated her from her home. The woman's home was right off the beach and in danger from storm surge. Well, she was very lucky my friends had rescued her, because her house was destroyed. The lady not only found herself suddenly homeless, but she had left without taking two prescriptions medicines that she needed for anxiety and depression. She needed those medications now more than ever, but there was nowhere to get them. The small number of medical professionals that were trying to help out of tents by the hospital, were overwhelmed with life threatening injuries and could not address people with mental illness. The woman could not get out of the area to get help for several days, and I saw her condition deteriorate fast. She finally disappeared from my friends home, and the last thing that they heard about her was that she was completely out of it and wondering the streets.

I talked to another friend of mine and asked her how she did during the storm. She said she had the same damage as most.......roof damage, and water in her home. Then she went on to tell me how her husband, who had not had a drink in over 10 years, started drinking after the storm. He had not sobered up over a month after the storm. She had also had to have her Mother committed. Her Mother was another one who had already suffered from depression, but the storm just put her over the edge. My dear friend had lost two family members to Katrina, even through she had no deaths in her family.

This aspect of Katrina is something that people don't hear about. I have seen dozens of people that turned to alcohol after the storm, and have heard of many that turned to drugs. The meth problem we already had on the Coast got much much bigger. People who already had some emotional problems were overcome after the storm, and people who never had any problems, suffered from depression or shock.

I have been having nightmares almost every single night. Oddly enough, a lot of my nightmares are about being trapped in a flood. Often, in the dream, I am trapped against the ceiling of my home as the water rises up slowly to drown me. I also frequently dream that we are in a Nazi/Holocaust type death camp or that the United States is occupied by hostile forces. Many people who I talked to are having the exact same dreams. I find it odd that so many of us who did not suffer from storm surge, and did not have any access to the images on the news about it, were having those flood dreams.

I was able to hear some of the 911 calls to Biloxi Police Dept from during the storm. I understand that later on, the tapes were taken out of public access and I can understand why. The horror of those phone calls is indescribable. One was from an elderly lady. She called the police dept during the height of the storm and begged for help as the water rose in her home higher and higher. There was absolutely nothing that the police could do for her. The dispatchers stated that they answered the phones out of habit, but if they had known what they would hear, they never would have answered.
A little boy called up begging for help as his house flooded. The dispatcher kept telling him over and over that it would be OK, his Daddy would help him. But of course, there was no help. The dispather cried as she listened to the tape and I cried as I listened. I used to be a dispatcher and I know the agony these women must have felt as they listened to people die over the telephone.

WLOX reported the story of a family in Hancock County that barely got out of their house as the flood waters were rising. In the middle of the storm, they climbed from their roof to the roof of a business and clung their as the storm raged. There was a woman in a travel trailor right next to them and as the waters flooded the trailor, they watched as the woman tried to squeeze her way out of an air vent in top of the trailor. She became stuck and they had to watch as the water came up over her head and she drowned. The body stayed stuck in the trailor like that for 3 days.



There are other bad things that are less horrific on the surface. The schools are all closed and there are tons of kids on the streets. I have my teenager at home and that is hard enough during normal times, but now, there are many teenagers roaming around at all hours. Parents who are already stressed, don't have time or energy to watch their kids. My son is fighting against me because he wants to roam free like so many others. I had to fight with him to come inside almost every night. Late one night he and a few girls went swimming in what was left of our pool. The pool was dark green from bacteria already. It was filled with debris like large pieces of torn metal, broken shingles, nails and tree limbs. Our fence was down and there was no way to keep kids out. For my son to go swimming in the dark under these conditions is just completely irresponsible. The liner of the pool was already torn from the metal in it, but the next day I made my son go out into it and cut the rest of the liner away to let the water out. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt.
The traffic is a nightmare. Part of the reason is that so many roads are completely destroyed and all of the cars have to cram onto the remaining roads. The other reason is that there are tons of people down here helping. National guard, police and firemen from all over. Power companies and clean up crews and of course, the "Looky-Lou's" who just drive down to look around at the damage. It takes an hour just to get to the bank which should be a 10 minute drive. On top of all this, there is no gas. Later on, when a few gas stations finally opened, the lines were miles long. Many people had to push their cars forward for hours in line.
As a few other businesses opened, the lines were the same. Even the rumor of somewhere that was going to open would bring long lines of people at 2 or 3 AM . One of my neighbors slept in her car one night because someone had told her that a gas station was going to be open the next day. They did open but even though she was there overnight, she was still so far back in line that they ran out of gas before she got any.

Another one of those "unspoken" problems is the huge amount of survivors guilt that we all have. Even the people who lost everything, express gratitude, because they know or have heard of someone who lost even more. I have learned that the standard answer when asked "So, how did you fare?" .....is to simply say "Good". Early on, before I realized this, I had responded to someone asking me that question, by givng a list of complaints. Roof damage, water inside almost every room, lost shed, fence, pool, insurance will not cover a lot of it, $2300. hurricane deductible, my husband was sent away and can't help out.......whine whine whine. When I finally stopped my list of complaints, I asked the person how he did. He replied, "Well, we lost the house and everything in it. My parents were trapped by flooding inside of their home and were only rescued when a diver came to the house and got them out." Lesson learned. I know I am way luckier than many many people on the coast. Almost every home on the entire coast had at least the amount of damage that I have, and so many people lost much more. Their homes, their lives their families. Those of us who did OK, feel ashamed that for some reason we were spared and others were not. The odd thing is, although the people who did lose everything, do not resent those of us who didn't...............a lot (not all or even most, just a lot) of people who are down here to help, do seem to resent us. I had a young man from FEMA telling me a story of a woman who was crying because she had roof damage and water in her home and the house was quickly filling with mold. He proudly told me how he had told her to "Get over it". He pointed out the obvious to her, that other people had lost more. He then went on to tell me how he was angry at people like her, who were upset over their loss. I have had other people say similar things. They have been down here and have seen the horrific damage and they want us to know that we are lucky. Well, we already know this. Those people with the horrific damage are our family members, our friends and our neighbors. We drive past their ruined homes and their possessions piled up high by the road, every single day. We already know we are lucky and we already feel as guilty as we can possibly feel. We also know that we can not speak of our damage, so we just keep on giving that standard answer. "Everything is good, how 'bout you?"

OK, that is enough bad stuff for today. I needed to get it all off my chest, but it is hard rehashing it all.