just like i always do.
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005I am standing on a roof in Long Beach, Mississippi. I won’t pretend that I’m not scared. Clouds that are part of Hurricane Rita keep swirling overhead, and they’ve beat intermittently with rain. For the time being, that rain has subsided, but those swirling clouds bring with them wind, and that wind is blowing harder than I would rather it blow while I am on this roof. Such is par for the course on a weekend spent in the aftermath of a hurricane.
To describe the scenes from Mississippi would be impossible. No words can capture the power of a storm surge, the destruction that is its wake, the smell of its destruction, the sounds of the desolation. Even if that were possible, I’m not sure that the excercise would result in anything more than a kind of pornography, revelling in the shock for its own sake. For the sake of the people who live among the devistation, I will try to avoid turning their losses into any sort of pornography.
Long Beach is split into two sections by a line of railroad tracks, running east to west. We enter the town north of the tracks, and north of the destruction. The scene along the railroad tracks is not one that belongs in America. Strung along their length are two coils of razor wire, quarantining the area south of the railroad tracks. Set up at (what appears to be) random intervals are military check-points. We have whatever it is we need to pass through those check-points and proceed into the quarantined area of town. Here, the problems are more prominent. Trees are down with much more frequency than they were north of tracks. Though we have not yet seen the worst, it is worse than it was before.
Arriving at the first house of the day, the work is simple enough. One tree must be removed from the roof so that FEMA can “blueroof” the house. Blueroofing has entered everyone’s lexicon in Long Beach, since FEMA has plastered hundreds of houses with blue tarps to prevent leaks. Though tiring, the work is straightforward enough, chop, saw, carry, repeat. The wall of limbs and logs piled by the road would have been enough to thrwart all but the most determined invaders.
The downtime after lunch involved an opportunity to “take a walk” down toward the beach, closer to the area where the storm surge had hit. What we found there was nothing short of indescribable. Houses has been flattened, and their remains were strewn everywhere. As far as we could see, “stuff” littered the ground and the streets. To our left was a limousine, washed into a front yard. To our right, a Lexus covered in trees in debris.
The mass of stuff was so overwhelming that at first, individual things were indeterminable. It was just a mess of wood, metal, plastic, trees, bricks. But like focusing on a picture, eventually, small parts of the rubble became clear. The most telling was a plasma tv that lay by the side of the road, its screen shattered beyond all repair. The scene made it all too clear. This is all of our stuff. This is all we chase after and all we long for, and it has all been reduced to a pile of rubble by an act of nature beyond our control. And we are gone, this is what it will all look like — a pile of garbage that we can’t even begin to clean up. This is it. This is our striving. These are our hours of overtime. This is all we have worked for all of our lives, and it amounts to nothing more than a pile of trash. I could’ve sat on that street all day and thought about that. But there was more work to be done.
The afternoon continued much like the morning — moving limbs from one pile to another. Eventually, we found our reprive in another job — nailing plastic sheets to a roof. It was a dream scenario — ladders, a slanted roof, high winds and long plastic sheets, and hammers. It was my chance to prove that, “there were a few normal kid things I kinda missed.” The climb up the ladder was easy enough. The climb down the ladder was harrowing. The plastic’s suddenly sail-like quality was frustrating. The 45 degree angled nails I drove were just comical. We finised quickly enough, and called it a day. We had done good work.
Day 2:
Some lessons you can only learn after the fact. For example, it is true that nature makes a pecan tree much more efficiently than Chevy makes a radiator hose. The plan was well concieved enough. A tow chain and rope looped around a sizeable tree trunk and tied to a trailer hitch would provide the necessary pull to keep the log from falling on the small storage shed that had been built in 1934 as a house for a hired “colored lady.” The execution, however, was lacking.
As we chainsawed at the supporting limbs of the tree with surgical precision, we failed to notice that the truck had been floored, in 3rd gear, for something like a long time. That may have been okay, if a girlfriends picture had not been obsucring the heat gague of the truck. The only way the result can be describe is a loud pop preceeding billows of steam, the strong stench of burning anti-freezing and the strange combination of horror and laughter that only incidents like this could provoke. That the truck and the shed survived is a feat attributable only to divine intervention.
Though we only spent 2 days in Long Beach, (and 2 more on the road), there are no shortage of stories to tell, both those involving first person pronouns and those involving third person pronouns. It was, no doubt, a weekend of stories. It would be easy enough to leave ready to be patted on the back for being willing to go to the Gulf Coast and lend a weekend of help. That’s not what I want. I won’t play the game of false humility — we did good work. However, what we did was insignificant when compared to the big picture. What we did was probably bred out of all the wrong motivations. That I took the time to write this in a space where people read it probably reflects that. However, there was, as there always is, a story to tell.