For Shelter, the World

Katrina, three years on

I am writing these words on the evening of August 28th, 2008. At this moment three years ago, I was on my way to a friend's house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in advance of a Category 5 hurricane that was nine hours from landfall. Although I did not know it then, I was making the drive from the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the final time, aside from a few salvage trips made in October and November.

As it turned out, the eye of Katrina passed just to the west of the town in which I lived, bringing with it tornadoes and a thirty-five foot deep storm surge. The eastern eyewall -- the most destructive part of a hurricane's rotational system -- thus passed directly over my house. From what people who stayed there during the hurricane told me, it took twelve hours for the entire eyewall to move through. The black water storm surge, akin to a tsunami, remained onshore for five hours before receding.

I had waited until the last possible moment to leave my home in Bay St. Louis and was apprehensive about having to sit in traffic late at night with the storm approaching. The Interstate highways had been gridlocked earlier that day with people fleeing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. But because I'd waited so long, everyone else had come and gone, and I-10 was virtually abandoned.

In some ways, that was the most peaceful trip I ever made along that route. Although the Weather Channel radar had shown bands of wind and rain beginning to reach the Interstate, I didn't run into any during my drive. It was calm, eerily quiet... a pregnant, "waiting" kind of calm, as when you take in a breath and hold it before exhaling. As I reached the I-10/I-59 interchange just north of Slidell, Louisiana, I recall thinking, "the storm will be coming ashore somewhere around here."

Before I left my house, I made a couple of phone calls to people I knew were staying, to let them know I was leaving. One was to my landlord and his wife, who were in their seventies and had built their retirement home in Bay St. Louis. The other call was to a friend around my age who lived in a house inherited from her mother, located one-half block from the beach in Waveland. I did not find out for several weeks what had happened to them.

I started this blog in late September, 2005, for the purpose of recording my post-hurricane experiences as they were happening. You can read what I wrote during that time period by clicking on "Katrina Diary" in the Categories list in the blog sidebar. I also have several albums of Katrina photos published here, which can be accessed from links in the sidebar.

When I talk about Katrina with people nowadays (which isn't very often), I usually say that the hurricane did me a big favor. I was ready for some major changes in my life. I had thought the changes would come about in a little more orderly manner; for example, I was considering a move to Portland, Oregon, but had assumed that I would visit there first to make sure I liked it. Apparently, I needed to be there NOW. If that meant moving cross-country to a new area sight-unseen and bereft of all my possessions, so be it.

Katrina didn't give me just a gentle nudge in the right direction. But I suspect a gentle nudge might not have done it. Although I knew my old way of life was dying, and in fact I wanted it to, there still would have been too many reasons to delay -- taking care of my aging parents, for example. But after the hurricane, with both New Orleans (my hometown) and Bay St. Louis essentially destroyed, there was no possibility of going back. There was nothing to go back to, at least not in the form it had taken before. Although that thought may be horrifying, it was also liberating.

And now I hear Janis Joplin singing, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  How simply and exquisitely true.

When I arrived in Portland on December 11, 2005, five days before my 52nd birthday, I had been operating in full-throttle adrenaline mode for three and a half months. I was still in shock, and knew I needed to go to ground fairly quickly.

At that time, I knew only one person in Portland. With my three cats, I slept on a mattress in her living room for four weeks until I found a place to rent. During that month, I put a couple thousand miles on my car, driving around for hours, getting lost and finding my way back; becoming familiar with -- no, claiming -- my new territory. I ended up renting a small cottage on a creek in the country north of Vancouver in Washington State, across the Columbia River from Portland.

What I thought I was going to do at that point was rest, get my bearings, and then move forward in my new life. During the two years prior to the hurricane, I had done so much clearing out and preparing -- physically, emotionally, and psychically -- that I thought I was ready to do that. So I began reaching out to meet people here and getting involved in community activities. I quickly found out that it was too soon. Due to the effects of PTSD, I was not able to make any commitments of time and energy, and when I tried to do so, it created problems. I had to scale back and prioritize and give myself time to find out what the next steps were, rather than "pushing the river".

I've done a lot in the past 2 1/2 years. I now live and work in the Columbia River Gorge, an incredibly beautiful area in the Cascade Mountains that three years ago I did not know existed. I've been through two full cycles of the seasons here, and have begun learning what to do and what not to do when living in a mountainous rural area. I'm adjusting to living in a comparatively progressive, less religiously judgmental and more supportive environment, much different from the one in which I grew up and spent most of my life.

Yet it has been a long, slow process of recovery ... two steps forward, one step back, interspersed with the occasional giant leap and a lot of downtime. From talking with my friends from the Gulf Coast who relocated elsewhere, this is universal among us Katrina survivors. Some days I would walk along the Columbia River, soaking in the natural beauty of the water and cliffs and sky, and at the same time, paradoxically, it all felt so unreal. I was simultaneously intensely present and not present at all.

For most of the last 2 1/2 years, I have felt ungrounded, unsafe being in my body. Although I live surrounded by nature, I felt so unsupported by the earth that I even felt unsafe walking. As a result, I moved tentatively and unnaturally, as if the ground were shaking.

It's only been in the last six months that I've begun feeling like a normal human being again. I feel like a butterfly emerging from the cocoon, stretching and loosening up the tightened joints and muscles. I am beginning to feel confident putting demands on my body again, and I am more at ease with people. I am coming home, to myself and to my new world.

 

Wanderlust

Speaking of wanderlust, this time last year I was in the process of leaving Dallas and driving cross-country with the cats to parts unknown -- otherwise referred to as the Pacific Northwest. "Unknown", because I came here sight unseen. People often ask me how I ended up here after the hurricane, and I tell them I had anticipated moving to this area in the next few years anyway ... I had just planned to visit Portland first, to become familiar with it and make sure it was where I'd want to live. Guess I didn't need to do that. Actually, this is a such a complex place, it might have scared me off, and I really needed to live here. So it all worked out perfectly.

For anyone who does want to check Portland out before (or instead of) visiting in person, this is a great site, a wonderful collection of photographs of Portland and environs, updated daily with new pictures.

Gift to Myself

This summer has been extremely strange and challenging. I don't want to say "bad", because I know it's doors closing, once and for all, on the past, and doors opening to what's to come. A pass-through place, not a place to stay.

I started working again on August 2, doing legal consulting for a small local telecom company. So I'm in the process of adjusting my sleep schedule and getting used to working in an office again. Since I am also becoming busier doing volunteer work in Portland and also continuing other activities I began during the last eleven months, I am having to find a balance. There is so much I want to do, so many places where the energy is calling me to go, and yet not enough time in each day to do it all.

Actually, I think the transition point that the world is in right now, the doors opening and closing, is a point where the balance shifts and is therefore a highly unstable environment in general.

Symbolized, perhaps, by the Richter scale 3.9 earthquake we had here last week that woke me up at 1:39 AM on the night after my first day back at work; epicenter located 5 miles north of my house.

I have been feeling very sad the past couple of weeks, although I think that may be partly due to the fact that the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is coming up at the end of this month. This week I have had moments of despair, another round of the wanting to give up that I talked about in my previous blog entry, although fortunately I am able to get through each episode more and more quickly.

Tonight, I emailed a new friend the link to this blog, and then clicked on the link myself and re-read the entries I wrote while I was staying in Baton Rouge right after the hurricane, before leaving for the Northwest.

When I started this blog, I had no idea who would be reading it or where it would be taking me (I still don't know the latter, actually.) All I knew was that I couldn't not write it. Little did I realize that it was for me to read at a later date -- now -- to remind myself of certain truths about life that I learned, experienced, knew, writing from the edge, where I had no choice but to live my truth, raw and pure. And speak it to my future self, for a time when I would find myself in fear of becoming lost again.

Namaste

Liberation

Decay is inherent in all compound things. Work out your own enlightenment with diligence.

-- final words of the Buddha Gautama

These prisons of the senses, sorrow fraught;
Sore was my ceaseless strife!
But now,
Thou builder of this tabernacle--Thou!
I know Thee.
Never shalt Thou build again
These walls of pain,
Nor raise the roof-tree of deceits, nor lay
Fresh rafters on the clay;
Broken Thy house is, and the ridge-pole split!
Delusion fashioned it!
Safe pass I thence--deliverance to obtain.

-- Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (poetic biography of the Buddha)

Interior of my house in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi -- November 20, 2005

Random photos of debris piles in front of my house in Bay St. Louis, MS -- October-November, 2005

Transitions

When I escaped from the Gulf Coast ten hours ahead of Hurricane Katrina last fall, all I had with me were my cats, one change of clothing, and a couple of books. The first thing I bought that first week in Baton Rouge was a hair dryer. After we got my father out of New Orleans and I drove him to Dallas to stay with a family friend, the second thing I bought, at the Wal-Mart on Midway Road, was a 4-cup Mr. Coffee coffee maker. After two weeks in Dallas, the coffee maker then traveled with me (and the cats) back to Baton Rouge, where it sat on my friend's kitchen countertop for the next 2 months and got daily use as I worked on the remains of my home in Bay St. Louis and decided where I was going to go from there with my life.

Right before Thanksgiving, we made the trip back to Dallas to stay with my father for two weeks. Then the coffee maker sat in the trunk of my car all the way to Portland, Oregon, where for the next three weeks, I slept on a mattress on the living room floor of the sole person I knew here at that time, while I was looking for a place to rent and spending hours driving around Portland, getting lost and finding my way out.

When I moved into the house on the creek, on January 7, there was already a Black & Decker coffee maker here that my new landlord had bought it for me. Unfortunately, that coffee maker never did work well, and in April it up and died. So my old friend Mr. Coffee took its place on my kitchen counter. It felt like coming full circle, and it was kind of neat to remember the things we'd been through together, the places where we'd lived while I was homeless, and to have it now serving me in my own home.

Last Wednesday, I got up in the morning, put the ground coffee in the basket, poured the water in, turned it on, and went off to boot up the computer. At some point, I realized that I wasn't hearing any action in the kitchen. When I went to check on the coffee, well ... the light was on, but no one was home. Sigh.

Mr. Coffee went out with the trash on Friday and has been replaced with a plastic cone device that sits on top of a coffee mug and filters one cup at a time, which is how I made coffee for many years and is actually my preference. (You get a lot more control that way, and there's not much that can go wrong with it.)

Also on Friday, I finally got my new driver's license in my new state of residence. So I'm officially here now. When it's time, it's time.

Mayor in Short Pants

Nine months after Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast is still in bad shape. Most people are still living in FEMA campers, the physical infrastructure of most communities has yet to be reestablished, and many of the coastal cities and counties are nearing bankruptcy.

The mayor of the town I lived in, Bay St. Louis, where the hurricane's eastern eyewall made landfall, has been actively seeking to educate the American public about what is going on.

Mississippi Mayor in Short Pants

Like many of his constituents, the mayor of Bay St. Louis lost everything but the clothes he was wearing when Hurricane Katrina flattened Mississippi's Gulf Coast. [Eddie] Favre turned his misfortune into a vow: He's not shedding his Bermuda shorts until his city is back on its feet.

President Bush joked about Favre's attire when they shared a stage. Journalists gawked at his black shorts and tuxedo top when he showed up in March at the annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington.

Favre, 52, welcomes the ribbing and stares as long as it keeps a spotlight trained on his city, which, before Katrina plowed ashore Aug. 29, was known for beachfront summer homes, quaint shops and a thriving art colony. Now the city is littered with bare concrete slabs where homes once stood, boarded-up businesses and government-issued trailer homes.

"Make us whole," pleads the five-term mayor, a distant cousin of Green Bay Packers quarterback and Mississippi native Brett Favre. "Until you make us whole, I'm wearing short pants. Somebody is going to get stuck with these ugly legs."

Many of the Gulf Coast's smaller cities are scrounging for money to plug gaping budget holes and jump-start the glacial pace of Katrina recovery.

The storm demolished more than 70 percent of Bay St. Louis' homes and businesses, scattered thousands of residents, vaporized its tax base and left behind tens of millions of dollars in damage to the city's infrastructure.

[...]

Many people I know who hung on for the first several months, determined to rebuild their lives there, have started to leave. Perhaps either seeing the handwriting on the wall about the Coast's chances for recovery, or getting nervous now that the 2006 hurricane season has started.

For those who ask why did it take them so long, well ... for many of them, it's where they were born and grew up. They owned property there, ran businesses there, and their friends and relatives lived there. My landlord and his wife were New Orleans natives who, like so many others, moved to the Coast after retirement. They built a new house, became active in the community, and planned to spend the rest of their lives there. In their wildest dreams, they never expected to spend five hours in the attic of their home, in the darkness, while 135 mph sustained winds with embedded tornadoes raged outside, and not knowing how high the water was going to rise before it stopped.

Not to mention living through the aftermath and having to start over at the age of 72.

Seek not to be understood

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy.
Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled . . . as to console
To be understood . . . as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love.
For it is in giving, that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying, that we are born to eternal life.

When I was in Dallas last week, I spent some time with a friend of mine from the Gulf Coast, who, with her daughter, ended up in Dallas after Hurricane Katrina. It is such a wonderful thing to be with people who understand. You don't have to explain where you're coming from, because that's where they're coming from, too.

My friend mentioned that she had attended a support group for Katrina survivors (there are a lot of them in Dallas). The one thing all of them said they found the hardest was that no one understands. That's a difficult place to be, compounding the effects of post-trauma that tend to cause one to feel alone and isolated to begin with. It goes beyond just a lack of understanding, though ... that's understandable. After all, how could anybody understand, who hasn't been through something like this?

What's hard to bear at times is what people do because of the lack of understanding ... at the very least, the thoughtless, offhand remarks, "it's been six months, why aren't they back to normal yet? Why don't they just get over it?"

It has been very interesting, as someone who was intimately involved in living through the Katrina experience, to see what other people have done with it ... using it for political purposes; making assumptions and judgments based on a very limited and often erroneous view of the facts; getting riled up and ranting about things that have little basis in reality and, actually, that have little to do with them personally; and, unfortunately, saying hateful and mean-spirited things about their fellow human beings.

Now for my own rant: I swear, if I hear one more person make an ignorant remark about "it's their fault for not having insurance" .... That statement has little to do with the reality of the situation. Most homeowners on the Gulf Coast had hurricane insurance -- their mortgage lenders required it. However, most people did not have flood insurance because the insurance companies would not sell it to them. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was not located in a flood plain, and therefore insurers were not required by federal law to make flood insurance available. Even those who did have insurance have found getting paid difficult.

Beyond that, though ... to think that having flood insurance would have made it all better? Your house, your town, your job are wiped out overnight, your social network destroyed and friends scattered across the country, and a check will somehow magically eliminate the effects of trauma? Money can be very helpful in starting over, but I think this illustrates the warped attitude about money that we've got in this culture.

I have my own speculations about peoples' motivation, some of which I've already expressed in this blog. I think it has a lot to do with denial. Either it couldn't have been that bad or it had to have been the survivors' fault. To think otherwise would lead a person inescapably to know that something similar could happen to them, too, and that they don't have control over everything in life. And that can be a hard thing to acknowledge.

Sometimes I will hear someone here in Portland say, "why did they keep living there when they knew it was likely to get hit by a bad hurricane? They knew it was just a matter of time."

My response is, "you live forty miles from an active volcano (Mt. St. Helens), and the experts are saying it's just a matter of time until it has another major eruption. You're also living in an area on active earthquake fault lines, and the Oregon coast is at risk for a devastating tsunami. So why are you still here?"

Voice

I've been trying to remember where I got this windchime. I'm pretty sure it was given to me by a friend who was getting ready to have a garage sale, but I can't recall who it was. I do know that for the past several years, it hung on the front porch of my house in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Since the porch was screened in and we didn't have heavy winds very often there, except for passing thunderstorms, I rarely heard the chimes (couldn't even tell you what they sounded like), and for the last few years I lived there, I spent very little time on the porch.

When I went back to salvage my house after the hurricane, this windchime was therefore not exactly at the top of my list of things to look for. One day, as we were leaving, on the spur of the moment I asked the person who was helping me that day to reach up and grab the windchime (it had been above the water line.) It traveled cross-country on the back floor of my car, underneath a portion of my salvaged CD collection (the Christmas CDs I was listening to on the way).

After I got settled in to my cottage by the creek, the windchime made its way to my new back porch, which is what I use as the main entrance. Everyday, when I go in and out of my house, the chimes are there to greet me. Among the wonderful discoveries I've made here is how breezy it is in the springtime where I'm living, between the Coastal mountain range and the Cascades, about an hour east of the Pacific Ocean. So the windchime is tinkling constantly nowadays, and I can hear it from wherever I am in the house. It's actually got a sweet, mellow, alto voice. Very peaceful, very reassuring, very much alive and vibrant.

Altar-ation

In my cottage by the creek, the focal point of the living room is a large fireplace made of native stone. When I moved in, I started putting things on the fireplace mantel, at first just to have some place to set them while I was unpacking. It has evolved into a kind of an altar. The things on it now are there because they are "at home" on the mantel at the moment.

From the left, the items on the mantel are:

Eight-inch high Buddha statue, given to me by the friend with whom I stayed when I first arrived in Portland.

Laminated card with the Four Immeasurables printed over an image of White Tara. I bought this at Coyote Moon, a bookstore in Baton Rouge, to replace one just like it I had in Bay St. Louis. When I went back to the Coast in October, I found the original card in good shape, on a bookshelf above the water line. After I had finished salvaging what I could, leaving the rest to be hauled out when the house was gutted, I deliberately left the original card where it was.

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness

May all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering

May all beings never be separated from the supreme joy that is beyond all sorrow

May all beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion

Red, incense-scented candle with image of a Hindu goddess in gold leaf, purchased at Powell's City of Books in February, set on a brass candlestick that I salvaged from my house in Bay St. Louis after the hurricane.

Orange calcite carved into a ball, which I bought a long time ago at a metaphysical bookstore in New Orleans called Golden Leaves (since relocated to Hot Springs, AR); set on another brass candleholder from my former home. The calcite was in a cardboard box with a lot of other stones and crystals that I had stored in the bottom of my hall closet. When I first went back to my house, I couldn't get to the box because of all the mud. When I returned in November to meet the FEMA inspector, I discovered that the volunteer church group who had gutted my house had overlooked the box of stones. I also had a similar ball of rose quartz, which I gave to the massage therapist in Baton Rouge whom I saw weekly during October and November.

Large quartz crystal cluster. It spent 5 hours underwater; it apparently did not float in the storm surge, because I found it on a shelf two inches from the floor, right where I had left it. On top of the quartz I've placed a Douglas fir cone from one of the trees in my yard here by the creek.

I'm using the cluster as a bookend for a collection of books on the Pacific Northwest. When I was staying in Dallas right after the hurricane, I bought a couple of travel books about Oregon at Half Price Books, not knowing exactly when I'd be using them. I always have an insatiable need to know about my surroundings, and especially since this is my home now, my new place and new life. So after I arrived in Portland in December, I began acquiring books about the history, politics, architecture, topography, and flora and fauna of the area.

The other "bookend" is a brass candleholder in the shape of a lotus flower, likewise salvaged after the hurricane.

A wooden box covered with silver and gold metal pierced in an intricate design. I bought it at an import shop in Gulfport, MS, several years ago, right at the end of a very trying time in my life. The box used to be on a three-foot tall bookshelf in my former living room, next to part of my CD collection and my CD player (which drowned.) It did get wet and is dirty inside, so I don't want to put anything into it, but every time I look at it, it reminds me of some things about truth and beauty.

Sitting on top of the silver box ... I don't know how this little fellow survived the storm surge without getting wet and moldy. He is a turquoise velour bear that I bought at a Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge, LA in 2001 when I was there on business, and was one of a series of 'birthday bookmarks' (he's the one for December.) Last time I saw him before the hurricane, he was on a shelf in my living room a couple of feet off the floor, so I have no idea how he escaped being ruined.

Laminated card depicting Vajrasattva, the buddha of purification.

Card showing the face of a buddha, which had been on a similar "altar" on a bookshelf in my living room, right above the high water line. It bears a quote from the Dhammapada:

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life.

Picking up the pieces of my life

After I arrived here in Portland and found a place to live, my main "jobs" were (1) to rest and recuperate, and (2) to pick up the pieces of my life that were scattered all over the place last August, and that, out of the necessities of the situation, I was not able to deal with in the interim. Sometimes, balancing those two jobs has been difficult. At the same time that I have needed not to have to think about anything, there have been an awful lot of things that have needed attention, and a lot of it has not gone smoothly, for various reasons.

One of these was getting my car registered in my new state of residence. My current auto registration expires at the end of May, and there are a lot of hoops you have to go through here, such as getting a vehicle emissions inspection. As I've gotten settled in, I'm starting to feel like I'm sticking out like a sore thumb, driving around with my license plate from Hancock County, Mississippi.

Problem is, as I've mentioned before, almost all of my personal and business papers were destroyed in the hurricane, so I'm having to replace them all. One of the first things I did when I got here was go down to the Social Security office and order a replacement Social Security card (kind of a necessity when you're looking for work.) I still haven't replaced my passport, since that's a relatively minor item on my priority list.

In order to register my car in my new state, I not only need my current auto registration (which fortunately I kept in the glove compartment of my car) but also my auto title, which I do not have. I called the Mississippi state agency that handles auto titles and was told that because everyone on the Gulf Coast is in the same predicament, they are having to process many thousands of requests for replacement auto titles. Therefore, it would likely take many weeks to get it to me. At the end of March, I called them back and asked if there were anything I could do to expedite things, and this time they told me that if I paid an extra fee ($30), they would get it to me sooner. The turn around time was supposed to be 72 hours, although I was not counting on that happening, under the circumstances.

I sent in my request and a $34 money order (they would not take a personal check) on Thursday, March 30, and yesterday when I went to my mailbox, there was my replacement auto title. Hallelujah!!! and Happy Easter to me. I feel as though I'm gradually being reborn, and this week feels like it's been a turning point. I started out on Monday depressed and despairing, and now I'm feeling a bit more grounded and optimistic, that things are going to right themselves and my life is going to be free to move forward.

The Katrina Spread

I talked this weekend with a friend back in Bay St. Louis. It's springtime there, as it is here in Portland. I've got pictures of spring buds posted on my  blog, and everywhere I look there are yellow daffodils and red tulips and green shoots coming up out of the ground. Any other year on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in March and April, you'd likewise be seeing cascades of lavender and white wisteria, hot pink azalea blossoms, purple crepe myrtles, and trees greening out all around you.

This year, everything there is gray.

The saltwater storm surge that covered the Gulf Coast for five hours last August 29 caused great damage (in many cases irreparable) to the trees and other vegetation. For people who have been living in travel campers in the midst of rubble for seven months, this is rather challenging. I was very happy to learn that my friend is taking a trip for a couple of weeks, to a place where there are green fields, and trees with leaves on the branches, and where people live in houses, and have grocery stores and drugstores and libraries and restaurants to go to, and their children attend school in buildings instead of tents.

I mentioned to my friend that my body has been holding on to weight since the hurricane, more than is justified by what I've been eating. (And I haven't even had my shrimp po-boy yet.) When I was in Baton Rouge last October, I bought some jeans to replace the ones that were destroyed, and I can't fit into them now. My friend said that everyone on the Gulf Coast is having the same problem ... they've taken to calling it "Katrina spread". Most people there have either lost a lot of weight or gained a lot of weight. They are averaging a couple of clothes sizes larger than they were seven months ago. Some of it may be due to emotional eating, but these are people who are also working their behinds off physically to put their lives back in order.

I did some research to see if there was something I could do to help my body readjust itself to "normal" living, and found a great book, The Cortisol Connection, about the effects of prolonged stress on the endocrine system, which include weight gain. Basically, when the body operates under "emergency" conditions for an extended period of time, it doesn't process food into energy the way it would under ordinary, safe, everyday conditions. Just as it takes the emotions and mind a while to re-normalize, so, too, with the body.

Comparing notes, my friend and I discovered that we've both turned a corner during the last month. We're feeling more and more "normal", less as if we're in crisis all the time, and ready for there to be more to life than being a "Katrina survivor".

Craving

I want a shrimp and oyster po-boy so bad.

Katrina aerial photos

I just came across the best aerial photos of post-hurricane Bay St. Louis and Waveland, MS, that I've seen. It's a set of 66 photographs taken on Friday, September 2, 2005, which was Day Five after the hurricane. The first picture was taken at Bayou Caddy, at the far western end of the beach road in Hancock County; you can tell because of the distinctive water tower. The photo sequence proceeds generally eastward through the towns of Clermont Harbor, Waveland, and Bay St. Louis, then heads north up the Bay of Saint Louis to the Jourdan River.

The pictures speak for themselves, which is a good thing, because, looking at most of them, I'm hard-pressed to identify what I'm seeing. I lived there for nine years (almost to the day; I moved there on September 3, 1996) and had visited there often for several years prior to that. Yet I can click on any of the photos, and while it looks familiar, I can't tell what was there before. I've tried to find the pictures that show where certain friends' homes were, and I can't figure it out. The only exception is the historical "Olde Town" area of Bay St. Louis, which is located up on a bluff (this is the area where I lived.) Although it suffered extensive damage, most of the buildings remained standing and so can be identified.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what Bay St. Louis-Waveland still looks like today, April 1, 2006, seven months after the hurricane. Although much of the rubble has been cleared away, most of the destroyed homes and other structures have not been rebuilt.

What is really interesting is that on separate occasions during the past two weeks, I have mentioned to people here in Portland that I'm originally from New Orleans. They asked whether I was there at the time of the hurricane, and when I told them, no, I was living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, they responded, that's good, you were OK then, because it didn't flood there. I had to explain to them that the Mississippi Gulf Coast was wiped out.

Note: these aerial photos are part of the Hurricane Katrina Aerial Impact Reconnaissance Assessment conducted by the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS). Aerial photographs of several other locations along the Gulf Coast may also be found at their website.

Edited in 2009: The original link to these photos does not work because the PSDS Image Library been moved to another site. Here's the current working link. To get to the series of images I've mentioned, click on "Katrina" in the menu bar. On the page that gives you, open the dropdown "Options" menu located to the upper right of the photoshow, and choose "Album Thumbnails View". The Waveland-Bay St. Louis images begin with Image no. IMG_0574.JPG.

"I Don't Know"

One of my favorite sayings is "the three best words in the English language just might be 'I don't know' ."

"I don't know" is the most teachable place to be in the whole world, and also the most honest. It's at the point where we are willing to give up the idea that we've got it all figured out that we begin to open to true understanding. This requires that we give up the illusion that we're in control. The biggie in this is that by saying "I don't know", we're then going to have to look at things about ourselves and our world that we have been trying for eons to avoid seeing.

We're also going to have to give up on the idea that we've got the answers, and that if we can force everybody to see it our way and do what we think they should do, we'll be safe and everyone will be happy. Point of fact, that's total BS, and it's an incredibly brutal way to interact with our fellow human beings.

Earlier tonight, I was reading an Amazon customer review of Elie Wiesel's book Night, a fictional narrative based on his experience as a childhood survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. The reviewer in question emphatically stated that the author had to be lying, because he wasn't "emotional" enough in the way he described what happened. The implication was that she knew what an appropriate response to such an experience would be, and Mr. Wiesel did not meet her criteria.

Pardon my French, but how the hell would she know?

If you haven't been through it, you have no idea how it feels, how it affects you physically or mentally, or how you would respond in similar circumstances. If you're sitting there on your comfy sofa, beverage in hand, and saying "Well, I know I'd do such-and-such", you're fooling yourself. You do not know. You have no way of knowing.

Now, I didn't go through something of the magnitude of the Holocaust, but having gone through Hurricane Katrina and the events afterward has confirmed for me the truth of that old saying, "don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in his shoes."

The amount of sheer ignorance and arrogance on the part of people who ought to have known better is still mind-boggling to me, and now that my mind is getting "unboggled" from the PTSD, I'm seeing it even more clearly. This includes people in my immediate experience after the hurricane -- family and friends -- as well as people posting on the Internet and writing op-eds and letters to the editor, sitting in the comfort of their homes and spewing their judgmentally self-righteous puke onto people who had just had their entire world wiped out.

"I don't know. I am willing to learn."

Then listen.

Then we can begin to communicate with each other, and maybe, just maybe, we can start working together to save this world of ours.

Mid-flight

For several years, I had this poem tacked up on the wall of my house in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

Come to the edge, He said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, He said.
They came.
He pushed them ...
        And they flew.

-- Guillaume Apollinaire

I had a feeling of what it meant: the trusting needed to let go and do as your spirit -- your life -- directs, even if it means leaping over the abyss. I'd been preparing for this for a long time, knew it would happen someday, but didn't know how or when.

In the end, the leap itself wasn't about doing. The doing was in the preparing, the coming to the edge. My part in the actual leap was to allow myself to be pushed, to spread my arms and open myself to the experience.

In a couple of blog entries, I wrote that I am having the intention of letting what was happening act on me.

During the autumn, after the hurricane, I had the distinct feeling of being in free-fall.

Now I'm in flight. Look at what I've done.

** I just Googled "letting it act on me" and the results were my two blog posts and a chapter from an online "high fantasy" novel.

A hole in the brain?

A couple of weeks ago, I started having dreams that indicated that my psyche is finally going back and processing what's happened since Katrina hit last August. I've paid a lot of attention to my dreams over the years and know the valuable information they can contain. So I've been having the intention for the past week of remembering the dreams I'm having now. In the past, I've had no difficulty doing this. Apparently, that's not going to work at the present time.

I know that I'm having dreams, because I've been waking up a lot at night and when I do so, I notice what I've been dreaming. But when I get up the next morning, I can't remember any of them. I guess I could get up and write down the dreams each time I wake up, but then I might get no sleep at all.

This is unusual for me, but then everything is out-of-kilter for me right now.

I've been paying attention to what the people back on the Gulf Coast are experiencing. I talk to friends who tell me what's going on, and I read what some of the people there are writing online. Even though I'm not there, I'm still experiencing a lot of the same things. PTSD is PTSD, no matter where you end up after the traumatic event.

Here's what one person recently wrote in his online diary; he's an educated person, a school teacher and musician, so I think he's probably inclined to be more aware of what's going on psychologically than a lot of people, who are simply living it. The title of this particular diary entry was "A Season of Forgetfulness":

As the days go by, I find consolation in the number of people that I know who seem to be suffering the same effects as me. I hesitate to write anything that might smack of negativity, as I have gotten SUCH a response from friends and relatives over my last post that was "upbeat" -- sort of like "WOW! I'm glad he's over all of that 'hurricane stuff,' and is better now!" -- but sorry to say, it comes and goes ... comes and goes.

The latest "normal" for me is the fact that Katrina washed away a huge hole in my brain where my short-term memory used to be. Heather and I have both noticed a marked inability to concentrate for any length of time, for instance, listening to NPR stories on the way to work. We often realize that we've both forgotten what the story was about before it's over with. I used to read the comic strips every morning in the newspaper, but now I find myself unable to follow the narrative all the way through. ... I keep finding scraps of paper in my wallet (at least that is better ... I used to just lose them immediately) with people's names on them, and I remember the planned call or email, or contact that I forgot ... but then I forget again.

I'd be a little scared if it was just me, but it is happening to nearly everyone I know ... The fact that it's happening to everyone actually makes it scarier now that I think about it. Now is the time that we're all having to make really important decisions, and remember really important facts and figures for insurance purposes. Now is the time when we're having to decide how to rebuild our destroyed towns. But this is all happening while our brains aren't working optimally.

I've also noticed that my body is holding onto weight like it has never done before. From what I read, prolonged periods of stress, which creates overloads on the adrenal system, can do this. My body has never been this heavy, and it's just not comfortable.

I'm doing my best to trust that things will get better, that with time and therapy and patience, my body and mind will get back into balance, so I can go on to live a "normal" life again. It's hard to be patient, though ... scary and frustrating, actually. There are things I want to do -- get out and about to explore my new environment, for example, and start working again to support myself and contribute something to the community here -- that my body, mind, and emotions will not support me in doing yet. 

I have to do things in bits and pieces. Committing to a five days a week job, for example, or even committing to a weekend meditation retreat, is not feasible right now, because I never know when my energy level is going to drop or when the emotional stuff is going to hit, or when my mind is going to shut down and say "I can't deal with this anymore right now."

Thinking, talking, and doing

One of my new blog categories is "the personal is political." I recently heard that concept explained as "the intersection of personal responsibility and collective movement; of individuality and of influencing many people. "

For the past several years, most of my information-gathering has been via the Internet. In my opinion, the mainstream mass media, notably TV but also most newspapers, is currently less than worthless for that purpose. All of the major media outlets are owned by a handful of giant multinational corporations -- GE, for example -- and their bottom line is making money: marketing and entertaining, rather than challenging their viewers and possibly upsetting them with real, hard facts that might not match what they want to see.

The reason I said "less than worthless" is because we've got a marketers' world of illusion that's being presented to us as reality, and that illusory view of the world is what most folks are using to make their decisions. That's dangerous and scary.

I've spent a lot of time online the past few years, reading, thinking, seeing what other people are saying, and sometimes adding my own voice to the mix. Talking is very important. It helps us sort out what we think, refine our ideas, and create community with others. However, thinking and talking can be a really good way for us to pretend that we're addressing a problem when we're actually avoiding it. There are times for philosophizing (and believe me, I love to do that) and there are times for doing.

I can tell you exactly when this became crystal clear to me.

On Day 5 after Hurricane Katrina, I was aware that my entire town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had been destroyed, and I'd spent several terrifying days trying to get my elderly father out of New Orleans. I was intimately involved with what was happening in New Orleans. I also was worried about the friends who I knew had stayed in Bay St. Louis during the storm. Through Internet message boards -- the magnificent Katrina version of the signs posted in lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11, by people looking for their loved ones -- I'd been able to find out that some of them were still alive but had no food, water, shelter, or medical care; and some of them had been injured or gotten sick because of the toxic conditions.

After my father made his escape from New Orleans  -- he literally hitch-hiked out, after a Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy refused to help him and left the 83-year-old man standing by the side of the road; the authorities in this upscale, conservative suburb of New Orleans were too busy trying to keep the people from Orleans Parish from using Jefferson Parish roads as an escape route out of town to help their own residents get to safety -- we went to visit some relatives in north Louisiana.

On Friday night, Day 5, we were watching TV at their house, viewing the scenes out of New Orleans, still flooded, with the misery at the Superdome ongoing. At the time we were watching this, the people in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast were suffering horribly. I knew what was happening; I was afraid for my friends, exhausted and in shock about what was happening to the place I'd lived in for my entire life. I could do absolutely nothing for them, and was trying to hold on to the hope that the people who could do something were doing so.

After showing scenes from New Orleans, the news switched to Washington, D.C. They showed U. S. Senators and Representatives, standing on the floor of the U.S. Congress, carrying on about how horrible this was, something's wrong with our government, blah blah blah. Now, I don't disagree with a lot of what they said, and if I hadn't been from Katrina land, I might have joined in the discussion about it on the Internet. But something clicked for me.

Human beings were suffering, beyond endurance, and in imminent danger of dying. They didn't need people pontificating and philosophizing. They needed actual, live, specific physical help from their fellow human beings.

In labor

This process of moving through the PTSD is like giving birth.

For four and a half months during the autumn, my energy was focused on surviving, managing the shock, taking care of business, and moving myself cross-country. I was not in a place physically or emotionally where I could let down and process what was taking place. I had to keep moving forward, in addition to maintaining some extremely well-defined and narrowly circumscribed boundaries due to the difficult situations I found myself in with my family and the friends with whom I stayed after the hurricane (about which I have not gone into much detail on this blog.)

During that time period, I was very aware of what was happening, both internally and in the external world. I was very present to life in a way that I had never been before, and for an extended period of time. Very intensely going through it, as mindfully as possible.

However, I am now also aware of the extent to which I was having to block off a lot of feelings in order to be able to function adequately. Well, I was aware at the time that this was going on, and I understood that it had to be that way, but I can now see even more clearly what that involved. As I've said before, I have not yet been able to cry, and it's been six months now.

After moving into my new home on January 7, it's taken me almost two months to slow down. It's as if I'm having to relearn how to be in my own energy. To use a computer analogy, it's like I went through a defrag process, and now the parts are coming back together again ... ultimately better-functioning, but put together differently from what was there before.

Each week, I visit my therapist, and each week I can see the progress I've made. The first step was getting myself grounded; my body and mind had gotten so used to operating on adrenaline and functioning 24/7 in crisis mode, they had forgotten how to relax and just be normal. Some days I feel like a normal human being, living an ordinary human existence, and other days, I wonder if I'll ever be OK again.

This is hard to describe to someone who has not been through it. Fortunately (for me; not so much for him), my therapist is also a survivor of a natural disaster, so he has some understanding of what I'm experiencing.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been having dreams that indicate I'm in the process of bridging back to where I was when Katrina hit, and bringing myself forward. In therapeutic terms, I guess we'd call it a process of integration. That's a good sign, although it's a bit painful.

Like labor contractions, I've been cycling anger and grieving, and each time they come around, they're more intense. As with giving birth, it will happen. It has no choice. I'm doing my best to trust in this process and allow it to unfold, giving it as little resistance as possible, although at times that's very challenging.

Confluence

About a dozen yards behind my house is the confluence of the creek I live on with one of its tributaries. Right now, since it hasn't rained in almost two weeks, the water level in the creek is several feet lower than when I moved in last month. You can see the rocks in the creekbed; some of the sidestream beds -- where the stream splits to go around obstructions during high water -- are dry; and there are little waterfalls and eddies everywhere. A couple of weeks ago you couldn't see the little "peninsula" where the smaller creek enters the larger. It was under water.

To orient yourself, the creek runs downstream from northeast to southwest (towards the left in the photo above.) The small tributary creek runs in approximately the opposite direction, from west to east, and merges with the main creek at a 150-degree angle. When the water level of the main creek gets high enough, its current is a lot stronger than that of the tributary. Then the tributary backs up, causing flooding in the areas it traverses upstream.

The other day, I looked out of my kitchen door and saw two guys kayaking down the creek. They took a rest stop on a small island just upstream from my house. That island did not exist six weeks ago. Shortly after I moved in here, in early January, the creek was very high and fast, and it eroded the right bank. The soil beneath a tall tree on the bank gave way, and the tree was uprooted and fell partly across the creek. As the weeks went on, debris and rocks carried by the stream collected around the fallen tree and created an island. The creek stream split, with a new, smaller stream flowing between the tree and the bank.

It's been amazing to observe how alive this creek is, and how it is constantly changing. In the photo above, the water looks blue, because the weather that day was sunny and clear, and the water reflected the blue sky. On overcast days, when it has been raining and the creek is full of runoff from upstream, the water appears brownish-green.

That's how nature works. We have fertile farmland because rivers normally overflow their banks at periodic intervals. People build their communities beside the rivers and then construct dikes and levees to protect their property from flooding. That interrupts the natural cycle by which the soil is replenished, as well as causing other problems, such as are seen in the Mississippi River delta in south Louisiana, where land is being eroded and not replaced by the soil deposits that are the natural result of floods.

Every once in a while, a levee gives way and an inhabited area is flooded. We humans refer to that as a natural disaster. If nature could talk, I expect it would disagree.

If we ever have the idea that we've got any control over what nature does, we are in denial. I have heard people say about the residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, "it's their fault for living in an area where there are hurricanes."

I've got news for everyone: there is no place on this planet that is safe, if by "safe" we mean that we can make things stay the same and avoid unexpected and inconvenient events. Life does not work that way.

Lucky Turtle

Looking out my kitchen window towards the creek.

In the center of the window ledge is a little turtle carved from Catlinite, a mineral found in Minnesota and South Dakota, also known as pipestone because it's used by Native Americans to make sacred pipes.

This little turtle sat on the front console of my car all the way from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Portland, Oregon.

The last time I was in Bay St. Louis, right before I left in November, a friend of mine who is one-half Native American gave me the turtle as a going-away present. Her house was completely demolished by Hurricane Katrina. It appears that her neighborhood was first flattened by a tornado, and then the 35-foot-deep storm surge (flood) came through and washed away what remained of the houses after the tornado.  Her refrigerator and mailbox were found several blocks away. Part of what appeared to have been her kitchen was piled up at the back of her lot.

My friend went back numerous times, combing the debris to see if she could find certain items that belonged to her deceased parents, without much luck. One day, she lifted a two-by-four and this little fellow was underneath. Except for some scratch marks across his back, he was unscathed.