Part 2: Katrina Journal
VIII. Bellingrath Estates a.k.a. 'The Compound'
If you're looking for Veterans for Peace in Mobile, Alabama, you should have no problem finding them. Just take exit 15a off I-10 and head south. After a couple of miles, past one of the two Waffle Houses which sit like bookends on both the North and South bound exits of I-10, past a shopping center or three, past a billboard requesting Tsunami relief, you will see on your left a billboard rise out of the strip like a horticultural Disney.
"After you've been driving a couple miles you'll see a billboard on the left for Bellingrath Estates. Take a left there," Lee, SOS Katrina's mild mannered phone jockey, had directed us earlier that day. We see the billboard Lee's talking about. It's hard to miss the lurid colors as they've been pumped through Photoshop's popular 'watercolor' filter. The hoarding shows, set alone among immeasurable shrubbery in innumerable colors, a stately home of grand post-1998 American proportions. The lush growth around the mega-structure is either the work of gardeners who have been landscaping for a generations or the work of a commercial illustator who's making bank on outright deception. Rebecca wonders aloud what both of us are thinking, "Are some rich people putting up the Veterans?"
We take a left as directed. It's nighttime and through the tunnel of darkness we see the outline of an ostentatious steeple-sporting, welcome-to-my-gated-world building brightly lit, perhaps 100-150 yards ahead denoting the beginning of something vast, something landscaped, something developed. Just over the railroad tracks, and...hard right onto Smith Street. And suddenly its...they're...abandoned. Houses are abandoned. Single level ranches everywhere. Beyond modest. The roads are dirt. It's becoming clear we aren't headed to some kind of Xanadu of the South.
IX. Elmo Street: Pay Dirt
The driveway is a lateral piece of lawn stretched across the length of property. A wide array of vehicles are parked along it. We find a place and pull in, finally at rest. Two buildings set on the property, one of them occupied with a crowd of about 12 under an awning. The time is 10 o'clock. We've been pushing along for more than 9 hours since Memphis.
It's ALL about Mississippi around the Gulf Coast. You can go here, you can go there, but wherever you are going YOU ARE GOING THROUGH MISSISSIPPI. That's just how it is. So we're trying to shake our Mississippi off before heading into what looks like a night gathering on porch or patio. It takes about 10 minutes just to exit, as the Colon Crusher – as the Galant has now been dubbed – has done a good job crushing my colon.
I step out of the car and immediately run into a guy with a Moxie shirt, Maine's notorious mouth-numbing soda. "Nice shirt," I tell him. I'm wearing my Dysarts sweatshirt, the Bangor truckstop and trucking company. His name is Iggy and it turns out he's from Portland, Maine. The first guy I meet in Mobile, Alabama is from Maine. I'll be damned, things might turn out alright. Judging from the crowd, most people strike me as secular – another source of immediate relief. I don't know what I'd do if I stepped out of a hellish trip through Mississippi and into a throng who are all staring at exactly the same bright, unyielding light of wholesomeness.
Introductions are quick and a bit of a blur. Clearly some have been expecting us, while others seem surprised we ever made it from Memphis. We had phoned the day before to Lee about our car trouble. But no matter, Warm greetings all around and Here, have a beer. I introduce myself to a guy named Don. "I won't remember your name," he replies. "I just call everyone Babe." That's fair enough when you've lived on a campground in Covington, in a church somewhere inland in Louisiana, and now on Elmo Street in Mobile, Alabama, all in the past month. Add a rotating cast of at least 60 characters who have come and gone volunteering for SOS Katrina and Veterans for Peace and you have a reasonable excuse to call everyone Babe.
It appears we've arrived during a nightly tradition. Whoever feels like it sits outside and shares stories, plays music, drinks wine. It's cozy, but my body is still vibrating in a forward direction from the catapulting it's taken in Mississippi. I sleep off my motion sickness and hold off on getting my bearings until the morning.
X. Tuesday Morning, October 18: The Real Quest is for a Real Map
Thankfully the Veterans for Peace corps do not run their outfit like the military. After pitching the tent outside in some beautifully mild fall weather, we were able to sleep past 9am as a slight antidote to our building state of exhaustion. These small moments of respite being rare, we learned to cherish them and give thanks for take-it-at-your-own-pace attitude embraced at The Compound and SOS Katrina alike.
We finally make it to SOS Katrina's supply warehouse in northwest Mobile at 11am, a well-organized operation.
Here, Katie and Lee are slinging the phones in the modest office area. .
Katie is seated on one of the ubiquitous wheelchairs, found at both warehouse and Elmo StreetOf course we were curious to know what our assignment would be. Exactly what supplies would we be running, exactly where would we be going? We knew we were in the Colon Crusher for the day. We knew we'd be traveling. Where we were going was to be determined by Vivian, SOS Katrina Gulf Coast Regional Director. What we were taking was to be determined by a vague "Need Assessment Sheet," our own judgment based on that information, and the stock available to the SOS warehouse supply operator, Erlene.
We familiarize ourselves with the warehouse, fill out the obligatory paperwork and patiently determine we must simply wait for our assignment while the office staff integrates us into a fairly strict daily routine.
Erlene [left] stands for a picture with two other volunteers in the cargo bay of the Northeast Mobile SOS Katrina warehouse.
Our first assignment is Bogalusa, Mississippi. Vivian, not pictured and freqently too busy to track down, has printed us a map pulled off Yahoo! maps or MapQuest to take with us. It takes me awhile to process the undesigned illegibility of the condensed online map. Actually it takes me half the day, which is good, since the map directs us straight back to the heart of Mississippi.
Why? You ask. How? You wonder. Here's how it works: Bogalusa, Mississippi does not exist. Bogalusa, Louisiana is right on the border of Mississippi and whoever filled out the Emergency Need form accidentally dubbed it Bogalusa, Mississippi. These things happen. And when this things happen and you involve a computer brain without the blessing of intuition, this is what happens next: You request directions to this destination from the digital mapping entity which has NO idea what you are talking aboutl, in this case because it does not exist. Despite all this, I did not notice the map title: "100 S. Bessemer Ave, Mobile AL 33610 to Mississippi."
Rather than inform you it does not know what it's talking about, the computer forges ahead with its mistake and selects the center of the state you entered and provides you a route there, to the center of the wrong state. Luckily, despite being armed with a map to the center of the Wrong State [pictured], we were also armed with The 2004 Rand McNally Road Atlas, the one truckers like my brother who suggested I buy it last year, rely on.
I set aside the errant map, which was so incomprehensible it took me several hours to realize it was wrong, and took up Rand McNally to see what story it would tell us. This is what it said, "You are driving clear across the entire southern piece of the State of Mississippi and back today. You will be driving minimum 120 miles each way." Which is the same thing it said the next day when we went to New Orleans. The Colon Crusher was well on its way to making its reputation and then some.
XI. Benefits in Bogalusa
Brisket. Maw and Paw bathrooms. Toothpick pine trees. Tree down. House. Lumber. Rooster across a dirt road.
That pretty much accounts for 120 miles of inland driving on or about Route 26 in Mississippi. We arrive in Bogalusa, Louisiana with supplies for cleaning after a flood. Whoops, that was New Orleans. We're in Bogalusa, a mill town not unlike Lincoln, Maine, about 40 miles north of where I grew up. Blue FEMA tarps cover roofs all over the area and the town. Who needs bleach and mops? How do we find them? Who knows? Let's go to the gas station!
Let it here be said mistakes were made and I am responsible for all of them.
We're checking out at the counter of the Bogalusa gas station, finishing our 140+ miles of driving, getting ready for the next excessive round of mileage, and I'm determined to deliver something. I ask the old man merchant behind the counter if he knows anyone in town who needs cleaning supplies, that I am in town on a supply mission for SOS Katrina and so on. The blankness and confusion of his single blink stare is profound. Rebecca informs me later he'd probably be happy to sell it if we wanted to give it to him.
Before he can say a word along those lines, "I do," projects from a strong but quiet voice coming from behind me. "I need cleaning supplies." I look around and spy a short, somewhat shriveled, savvy-eyed, lady of about 40-50 years asserting her claim on our Katrina supplies. I've always been of a mind to reward those who make their needs known, so I proceed thus: "That's what we're here to do. We're here to find people who need cleaning supplies." "I most surely could use them she says." "OK. I'll meet you in the parking lot outside."
Time passes slowly in Bogalusa, so I manage to loiter long enough to read backwards FEMA's announcement of it's "Blue Roof" program as it's posted on the glass door. Long enough for the hill country lady, chauferred by her son in a pickup, to buy her two packs of Marlboros and head out to meet us. Another minute later we're engaged in a supply-transfer rendezvous in a Bogalusa parking lot.
The son pulls up in his truck. Everything gets dropped into the flatbed. "You need some bleach?" She gets some bleach. "You need a bucket?" She gets a couple of buckets. "Mop?" She gets a mop. "Sure you'll use it?" "I'll use it alright." "OK. Good then, as long as you can use it!" "Oh, thank you kindly."
"These supplies are for people who need them." We're back in the car. Rebecca's voicing her reservations. "The bleach is for people who've been hit by flooding. Who are battling mold. That lady just wants cleaning supplies. Who doesn't want cleaning supplies? If someone walked up to me and offered me free cleaning supplies, I'd say sure! No one wants to buy cleaning supplies!"
Rebecca is speaking the truth, again. I'm confused. I just want to deliver supplies to Bogalusa. "We don't have the right supplies for this run. These are supplies they need in New Orleans, not here." As we say in Maine, she's sharp. And she's an angel for not busting loose on me in the middle of a bogus Bogalusa parking lot transaction. I always had the feeling everything could go worse for us at anytime in Bogalusa, like making it here was a miracle.
And then it's water under the damn. This relief stuff is confusing. Give us a break. Its our first day and we're supposed to construct a relationship with a benevolent Church-like entity in a town and region that by all appearances is functioning normally? It takes practice figuring out what to do when the hurricane's been forgotten by the people your supposed to be helping. At least it looks like Rebecca's gonna role with it. After brief decompression in a parking lot [pictured]
we're back on the road. Whatever the reason we are here, sticking around is not an option.
Just in time to break the tension we drive downwind of the Bogalusa mill, and the paper product product reminds us what it's like when all humanity farts in concert, to make its drawings and print out it's bogus-lusa MapQuest directions.
________________________________________________________
VIII. Bellingrath Estates a.k.a. 'The Compound'
If you're looking for Veterans for Peace in Mobile, Alabama, you should have no problem finding them. Just take exit 15a off I-10 and head south. After a couple of miles, past one of the two Waffle Houses which sit like bookends on both the North and South bound exits of I-10, past a shopping center or three, past a billboard requesting Tsunami relief, you will see on your left a billboard rise out of the strip like a horticultural Disney.
"After you've been driving a couple miles you'll see a billboard on the left for Bellingrath Estates. Take a left there," Lee, SOS Katrina's mild mannered phone jockey, had directed us earlier that day. We see the billboard Lee's talking about. It's hard to miss the lurid colors as they've been pumped through Photoshop's popular 'watercolor' filter. The hoarding shows, set alone among immeasurable shrubbery in innumerable colors, a stately home of grand post-1998 American proportions. The lush growth around the mega-structure is either the work of gardeners who have been landscaping for a generations or the work of a commercial illustator who's making bank on outright deception. Rebecca wonders aloud what both of us are thinking, "Are some rich people putting up the Veterans?"
We take a left as directed. It's nighttime and through the tunnel of darkness we see the outline of an ostentatious steeple-sporting, welcome-to-my-gated-world building brightly lit, perhaps 100-150 yards ahead denoting the beginning of something vast, something landscaped, something developed. Just over the railroad tracks, and...hard right onto Smith Street. And suddenly its...they're...abandoned. Houses are abandoned. Single level ranches everywhere. Beyond modest. The roads are dirt. It's becoming clear we aren't headed to some kind of Xanadu of the South.
IX. Elmo Street: Pay Dirt
The driveway is a lateral piece of lawn stretched across the length of property. A wide array of vehicles are parked along it. We find a place and pull in, finally at rest. Two buildings set on the property, one of them occupied with a crowd of about 12 under an awning. The time is 10 o'clock. We've been pushing along for more than 9 hours since Memphis.
It's ALL about Mississippi around the Gulf Coast. You can go here, you can go there, but wherever you are going YOU ARE GOING THROUGH MISSISSIPPI. That's just how it is. So we're trying to shake our Mississippi off before heading into what looks like a night gathering on porch or patio. It takes about 10 minutes just to exit, as the Colon Crusher – as the Galant has now been dubbed – has done a good job crushing my colon.
I step out of the car and immediately run into a guy with a Moxie shirt, Maine's notorious mouth-numbing soda. "Nice shirt," I tell him. I'm wearing my Dysarts sweatshirt, the Bangor truckstop and trucking company. His name is Iggy and it turns out he's from Portland, Maine. The first guy I meet in Mobile, Alabama is from Maine. I'll be damned, things might turn out alright. Judging from the crowd, most people strike me as secular – another source of immediate relief. I don't know what I'd do if I stepped out of a hellish trip through Mississippi and into a throng who are all staring at exactly the same bright, unyielding light of wholesomeness.
Introductions are quick and a bit of a blur. Clearly some have been expecting us, while others seem surprised we ever made it from Memphis. We had phoned the day before to Lee about our car trouble. But no matter, Warm greetings all around and Here, have a beer. I introduce myself to a guy named Don. "I won't remember your name," he replies. "I just call everyone Babe." That's fair enough when you've lived on a campground in Covington, in a church somewhere inland in Louisiana, and now on Elmo Street in Mobile, Alabama, all in the past month. Add a rotating cast of at least 60 characters who have come and gone volunteering for SOS Katrina and Veterans for Peace and you have a reasonable excuse to call everyone Babe.
It appears we've arrived during a nightly tradition. Whoever feels like it sits outside and shares stories, plays music, drinks wine. It's cozy, but my body is still vibrating in a forward direction from the catapulting it's taken in Mississippi. I sleep off my motion sickness and hold off on getting my bearings until the morning.
X. Tuesday Morning, October 18: The Real Quest is for a Real Map
Thankfully the Veterans for Peace corps do not run their outfit like the military. After pitching the tent outside in some beautifully mild fall weather, we were able to sleep past 9am as a slight antidote to our building state of exhaustion. These small moments of respite being rare, we learned to cherish them and give thanks for take-it-at-your-own-pace attitude embraced at The Compound and SOS Katrina alike.
We finally make it to SOS Katrina's supply warehouse in northwest Mobile at 11am, a well-organized operation.
Here, Katie and Lee are slinging the phones in the modest office area. .
Katie is seated on one of the ubiquitous wheelchairs, found at both warehouse and Elmo StreetOf course we were curious to know what our assignment would be. Exactly what supplies would we be running, exactly where would we be going? We knew we were in the Colon Crusher for the day. We knew we'd be traveling. Where we were going was to be determined by Vivian, SOS Katrina Gulf Coast Regional Director. What we were taking was to be determined by a vague "Need Assessment Sheet," our own judgment based on that information, and the stock available to the SOS warehouse supply operator, Erlene.
We familiarize ourselves with the warehouse, fill out the obligatory paperwork and patiently determine we must simply wait for our assignment while the office staff integrates us into a fairly strict daily routine. Erlene [left] stands for a picture with two other volunteers in the cargo bay of the Northeast Mobile SOS Katrina warehouse.
Our first assignment is Bogalusa, Mississippi. Vivian, not pictured and freqently too busy to track down, has printed us a map pulled off Yahoo! maps or MapQuest to take with us. It takes me awhile to process the undesigned illegibility of the condensed online map. Actually it takes me half the day, which is good, since the map directs us straight back to the heart of Mississippi.
Why? You ask. How? You wonder. Here's how it works: Bogalusa, Mississippi does not exist. Bogalusa, Louisiana is right on the border of Mississippi and whoever filled out the Emergency Need form accidentally dubbed it Bogalusa, Mississippi. These things happen. And when this things happen and you involve a computer brain without the blessing of intuition, this is what happens next: You request directions to this destination from the digital mapping entity which has NO idea what you are talking aboutl, in this case because it does not exist. Despite all this, I did not notice the map title: "100 S. Bessemer Ave, Mobile AL 33610 to Mississippi."
Rather than inform you it does not know what it's talking about, the computer forges ahead with its mistake and selects the center of the state you entered and provides you a route there, to the center of the wrong state. Luckily, despite being armed with a map to the center of the Wrong State [pictured], we were also armed with The 2004 Rand McNally Road Atlas, the one truckers like my brother who suggested I buy it last year, rely on.
I set aside the errant map, which was so incomprehensible it took me several hours to realize it was wrong, and took up Rand McNally to see what story it would tell us. This is what it said, "You are driving clear across the entire southern piece of the State of Mississippi and back today. You will be driving minimum 120 miles each way." Which is the same thing it said the next day when we went to New Orleans. The Colon Crusher was well on its way to making its reputation and then some.
XI. Benefits in Bogalusa
Brisket. Maw and Paw bathrooms. Toothpick pine trees. Tree down. House. Lumber. Rooster across a dirt road.
That pretty much accounts for 120 miles of inland driving on or about Route 26 in Mississippi. We arrive in Bogalusa, Louisiana with supplies for cleaning after a flood. Whoops, that was New Orleans. We're in Bogalusa, a mill town not unlike Lincoln, Maine, about 40 miles north of where I grew up. Blue FEMA tarps cover roofs all over the area and the town. Who needs bleach and mops? How do we find them? Who knows? Let's go to the gas station!
Let it here be said mistakes were made and I am responsible for all of them.
We're checking out at the counter of the Bogalusa gas station, finishing our 140+ miles of driving, getting ready for the next excessive round of mileage, and I'm determined to deliver something. I ask the old man merchant behind the counter if he knows anyone in town who needs cleaning supplies, that I am in town on a supply mission for SOS Katrina and so on. The blankness and confusion of his single blink stare is profound. Rebecca informs me later he'd probably be happy to sell it if we wanted to give it to him.
Before he can say a word along those lines, "I do," projects from a strong but quiet voice coming from behind me. "I need cleaning supplies." I look around and spy a short, somewhat shriveled, savvy-eyed, lady of about 40-50 years asserting her claim on our Katrina supplies. I've always been of a mind to reward those who make their needs known, so I proceed thus: "That's what we're here to do. We're here to find people who need cleaning supplies." "I most surely could use them she says." "OK. I'll meet you in the parking lot outside."
Time passes slowly in Bogalusa, so I manage to loiter long enough to read backwards FEMA's announcement of it's "Blue Roof" program as it's posted on the glass door. Long enough for the hill country lady, chauferred by her son in a pickup, to buy her two packs of Marlboros and head out to meet us. Another minute later we're engaged in a supply-transfer rendezvous in a Bogalusa parking lot.
The son pulls up in his truck. Everything gets dropped into the flatbed. "You need some bleach?" She gets some bleach. "You need a bucket?" She gets a couple of buckets. "Mop?" She gets a mop. "Sure you'll use it?" "I'll use it alright." "OK. Good then, as long as you can use it!" "Oh, thank you kindly."
"These supplies are for people who need them." We're back in the car. Rebecca's voicing her reservations. "The bleach is for people who've been hit by flooding. Who are battling mold. That lady just wants cleaning supplies. Who doesn't want cleaning supplies? If someone walked up to me and offered me free cleaning supplies, I'd say sure! No one wants to buy cleaning supplies!"
Rebecca is speaking the truth, again. I'm confused. I just want to deliver supplies to Bogalusa. "We don't have the right supplies for this run. These are supplies they need in New Orleans, not here." As we say in Maine, she's sharp. And she's an angel for not busting loose on me in the middle of a bogus Bogalusa parking lot transaction. I always had the feeling everything could go worse for us at anytime in Bogalusa, like making it here was a miracle.
And then it's water under the damn. This relief stuff is confusing. Give us a break. Its our first day and we're supposed to construct a relationship with a benevolent Church-like entity in a town and region that by all appearances is functioning normally? It takes practice figuring out what to do when the hurricane's been forgotten by the people your supposed to be helping. At least it looks like Rebecca's gonna role with it. After brief decompression in a parking lot [pictured]
we're back on the road. Whatever the reason we are here, sticking around is not an option.
Just in time to break the tension we drive downwind of the Bogalusa mill, and the paper product product reminds us what it's like when all humanity farts in concert, to make its drawings and print out it's bogus-lusa MapQuest directions.
________________________________________________________
posted by tobin at 10:03 PM
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