A private journey: the storm carried him back to old, familiar ways

By David McRaney
After Katrina Newswire

HATTIESBURG — After Hurricane Katrina evaporated, after the sun disappeared behind the hills, we ventured out.

We packed into a small car, five of us, and slowly navigated our razed suburban streets until we emerged into the city. A few neighbors with chainsaws had cleared narrow paths while we collected ourselves earlier in the day.

We moved through Hattiesburg as if diving along a coral reef. There were no lights other than an occasional passing car. Our child-wide eyes would flick to movement or damage as our high beams washed across broken buildings, their roofs peeled back like sardine cans. We pointed; we gasped.

It was like browsing a museum with a magnifying glass. We never saw the big picture, and as we headed back home it was easy to imagine hundreds of bodies strewn across the mall parking lot or upturned cars perched on twisted McDonald's signs.

We had a sense, after making a few rounds in the city and returning, all of Mississippi must have looked like Hiroshima after the bomb.

Our frenetic preparations seemed distant once we unloaded from the car and lit a kerosene lamp inside our spared home.

In The Hallway

My wife, in-laws and I had been preparing for Hurricane Katrina for a day or so, the fear slowly building as we put tape on the windows and stocked up on food and water. We picked up what could easily fly and gathered flashlights. We did a million things around the clock with the Weather Channel barking at us and flashing the terrible red and green pinwheel a little closer every 15 minutes. I was almost thankful when the television expired.

We were all shaken and tense when first branches began to snap and shoot into the sky. When the tree in the backyard spiraled open like a time-lapsed flower, and the shingles started peppering the lawn, we darted into the hallway and stayed there for the next three hours.

I felt sore afterward, worn out from fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when you are pulled over and you know you're busted and are going to go to jail. That's some sort of logical, cognitive fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you think your dad is having a heart attack. That's some sort of electric, slippery fear.

And not the kind of fear you get when you are 8 years old and you know you've been caught with a questionable magazine in the school library. That's some sort of judicial, repugnant fear.

Not the kind of fear you get when it's raining and the guy next to you on the highway lurches into your lane, causing you to slam on the breaks so fast you fishtail, weaving backwards through traffic till you settle in the median. That's some sort of sharp, fierce fear that leaves your adrenaline tapped.

And it certainly isn't the fear hanging on you for days as you wait for your girlfriend to start her period. That's some sort of barren, empty fear.

While I was in the hallway during the storm's fury, the slivers of light under the doors to the living room and bedrooms flickering, the walls breathing, the roof clattering, the wind bellowing, things cracking and crashing outside, the windows screeching, I felt the kind of fear that asks you to submit.

This is the kind of fear that asks you if you are satisfied with what you've done with your time. This is a fear radiating from the reptilian portions of your brain, but you have time to consider it, to hold it in your hand and examine it. It permeates you but also delivers a sort of calm -- probably endorphins -- because your body is telling you this is the end. There will be no consequences, no one else to consider, nothing to ponder after this. You are going to die, and there are no words worth fumbling for.

I suppose this is terror, but stretched for so long you are somehow comforted by the sensation of your hunger juices cascading along the insides of your belly.

I kept my hand under the door to our bedroom and felt the air pressure alternate. Sometimes it would suck at my hairs; sometimes it would push into the room, always cold. I kept trying to explain it away with all the science I could remember.

But, eventually, I just focused on the sensation. I was alive, and I was processing information from my skin's receptors, maintaining muscle tone to hold myself up, remembering and experiencing and cross referencing and sustaining homeostasis as much as possible with my heart thumping and my fight or flight system exhausted.

I focused on being a living thing.

I know it's probably lame, but I thought of people in the towers, in the tsunami, in war.

I didn't join their club, but I had been there and spent the afternoon. I brushed against the same dread they felt when they could no longer descend the stairs or could get to no higher ground, the same fear one feels when you think the next mortar might have your name on it.

I thought I was going to die for about 10 minutes, and I told no one.

The Real World

Once we returned from our excursion, we were eager to get some sort of information after all the insanity of the day. With 90 percent of the roads blocked and no power anywhere for a hundred miles, we felt as though we needed to hear something official.

We fished an old television out of a closet and hooked it up to a generator. After fumbling with the antennae for a few minutes, something started to emerge behind the static.

Someone was on a couch next to someone at a desk. Everyone gathered around, inching closer as the snowy reception threw shadows across the room. Then I froze.

I recognized the voice and the hair; it was Conan O'Brien.

We waited for news, but none came. We sat through commercials for cars and soap and other things from the real world.

I watched a steak sizzle on the screen and looked at the faces of my in-laws. They drooped and leaned as I asked them if I could turn it off. We agreed it wasn't worth the gas.

We had no source of information other than a distant radio station for about two or three days. Trees were collapsed like accordions in the neighbor's walls, ants were getting in our food and our dog somehow hung itself on its makeshift rope leash. Meanwhile, all the television was running were sitcoms.

Things quickly degenerated. The home was intact, but the foundation of our little world was not. We knew we couldn't hold out much longer after hearing gunshots as someone in the neighborhood tried to frighten off suspected looters. Everyone was arguing and sweating and worrying. We decided it would be best if some of us went north.

My wife and I decided to go west instead, to my parent's home in Sumrall. It was more rural, less hysterical. Our in-laws begged us to come with them to fresh water and electricity. Somehow, after three days of screaming, it didn't seem appealing.

Communion

I come from a farming family. I'm among the first generation to have never manned a mule-driven plow.

They bought clothes from the profits made from growing cotton and cucumbers. They grew all their vegetables and built all their additions to home and farm.

When I was old enough to get to know my grandparents, they had already given in to the microwave, the riding lawnmower and the grocery store, but they still grew and canned most of their own food.

My family had long since abandoned that way of life when I was growing up. We microwaved and ate out, and we bought our vegetables and meats. We used Tupperware instead of mason jars.

But, during that time, everyone still enjoyed the fresh and pure results of my grandparents' labor, and that was what my grandparents wanted. They saved everything they grew and distributed it to their children and grandchildren.

Without them, I often feel the loss of something real and honest. Like the man who prefers the feel of work at the end of simple tool to the lazy, noisy convenience of a weed-eater, I find I prefer the food I received at my grandparents' table to the grocery store versions.

I have tried to eat greens and black-eyed peas from restaurants, but they are not very good. I have tried to make red-eye gravy and biscuits, but apparently I never paid much attention to the details.

Right before Katrina, I had given in to the idea I would never again eat the kind of food my grandmother used to cook.

But, a few months before, my dad found a pack of collard greens my grandmother cooked and froze before she died. He had thawed them out and brought them to a boil one afternoon before I came to visit him.

We sat together and ate the greens, grown by her and my grandfather, cooked the way she had perfected over the course of her life and returned to us from the other side by the freezer in the utility room.

I wish I hadn't done it. It was awful and strange to stumble into such territory.

Tasting her food somehow reanimated her spirit. I wanted to chew slowly, savor every second as my teeth squeezed out her essence. But, instead, it felt unnatural. Something told me I was doing something perverse.

It did not bother my dad. He was happy to commune with his mother one more time, and he ended up eating the entire pot over the course of the afternoon.

I was able to experience the life of my grandparents at the dinner table, the old ways spooned out onto a plate and laid out before me.

Until Katrina, I thought my brief interlude with the old ways would be the last of those kinds of memories.

Catching a Breeze

On the fourth day after Katrina we stepped out of the car in Sumrall and were struck with the sweet smell of frying sausage.

My father, a lifetime electrician, had set up a contraption that converted power from old car batteries into a power strip. Despite the set-up, the ice in the deep freeze was still melting.

With electric grills and ovens, my family had been cooking everything they could pull out, some of the food stored for years.

We sat down and ate our first cooked food in days, and we chewed it slowly.

That afternoon, my uncle came over with several whole chickens and some corn on the cob from his own freezer. We feasted together. We talked. We laughed. When we went outside a cool breeze billowed my shirt away from my ripe belly. I felt as if I had come out of a long sleep, or been cured of an illness. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I had a sense that I could last as long as it took to get our power back.

The night of the storm, a friend of mine left his home in the drizzling aftermath to join a crew of men with chainsaws, trucks and elbow grease who methodically cut and cleared the roads around Sumrall. It took them 10 hours to get to the highway, and when it was over, they cheered a little bit, said goodbye and disappeared from each others' lives. I figure this happened on a thousand roads and back streets before the official responders could come and do anything.

Most days we made at least one trip to find gas. Most of the gas stations did nothing, but one guy in Sumrall - Jack Aultman - wired up a generator to his gas pumps and filled up the emergency and police vehicles in the city before offering his gas to everyone in town. I'm sure all across Mississippi and Louisiana people had the opportunity to pump gas out of their stations via generators but waited.

After gas lines started stretching into the horizon, hooligans started to siphon gas tanks and snatch gas cans. In any crisis, the real values in people are unleashed. We left Hattiesburg to stay with my parents in the long wait for power to get away from such insanity. While there, we kept our eyes and ears open at night, coming to the window whenever the dogs were agitated. I saw signs everywhere that read "You loot, we shoot." I realized once this was over all those people, the ones willing to kill and the ones willing to take from others in need, would be shuffled into the same deck.

Neighbors started checking on each other, gathering for cookouts and passing information about the location of ice, water and gas. Our families, once spread out and distant, congealed to support each other.

My friend Blake, the one who cleared a path to the highway, came over every afternoon, and we sat on my parents' porch. We lazed and debated when and what would happen next.

"It's not so hot this evening, huh?" he said.

"No."

"Makes you wonder, huh?"

"What's that?"

"How people used to live like this. How did they stand it?"

Just Existing

Somehow, around the seventh day, a neighbor got us some tomatoes, and since some of the bread was already growing mold, we made sandwiches.

I've seen them prepared in a variety of ways. My family used two slices of white bread, a healthy dollop of mayonnaise and sometimes a little salt. The mayonnaise was now in a cooler covered with ice from Oloh Baptist Church .

My grandfather loved tomato sandwiches so much, during the summer he rarely ate anything else. He still had a microwave with the words "radar range" written across the handle, and you had to turn a dial in order to set the time on it, but he went right out and bought a brand new Salad Shooter thinking it would make perfect slices of tomato. I remember he got steaming mad once he realized the shooter couldn't handle a whole tomato.

Our olfactory bulbs are part of a direct circuit from our nose into the brain, so smell is the most rapid, most powerful trigger for memory. If I eat a tomato raw, I am transported into my grandfather's backyard, and through squinting child eyes I can see him approaching his workbench with an armload from the garden.

If I eat boiled peanuts, even the awful ones that come from a bag, I'll think of my grandmother's pebbled surface pressure cooker hopping on the stove and all of my family tearing into the pot. Some people would get bowls and eat until there was nothing left but shells, others would use napkins. My favorite was to take a handful outside where the hulls could be tossed carelessly into the grass. Sometimes, a peanut would be so cooked you could chew it up and swallow it shell and all. I can't put my finger on why that makes me smile so deeply I have to take a breath, but I'm happy it does.

I can be moved to memories of my mother shelling peas and snapping beans just by being in the frozen food section and catching a glimpse of a pack of frozen butterbeans, although I much prefer traveling to that memory via an old metal washtub.

Before we had to dump the freezers and begin eating out of cans, my father told us about biscuits with cream skimmed from fresh milk and cane syrup. He paused for a moment to truly take the memory in with his lids half closed, then he lamented on how that sort of food is gone forever.

After all the food was gone, and we stopped cooking, it seemed to stay hot inside and out.

My wife and I sat for long stretched saying nothing. We watched out the window listening to insects and pine trees. Without any sort of predictable schedule, we did a lot of sitting and lying on the floor waiting it out like a fever.

Outside that afternoon, Blake lit a cigarette.

"Have you noticed how much more focused you become without all the distractions?"

"Yeah. There's nothing to think about other than surviving."

"I know. It's like.you're just alive. You're just aware of.existing."

Life Rushes In

On the tenth day, after returning from Hattiesburg to check on our home, we saw the streetlight next to my parent's house glowing.

The air was on full-blast. The television was squawking. The refrigerator was humming. We took hot showers.

Our neighbors retreated to their living rooms once the cable flickered back to life. Restaurant sales soared, as did Blockbuster's rentals.

Four months later, I saw a commercial on our local television station for a DVD of their entire week-long coverage. They've edited together all of the reports and news desk footage into a DVD they are selling for $24.95.

For months, all around our city there were little tents set up selling Katrina T-Shirts and homemade DVDs about the storm. Several books have emerged as well, the kind you can write in a week. There are still Katrina-themed bumper stickers and key chains in local gas stations.

It is only every once in a while I think about Katrina now, despite vowing I would never take anything for granted again. I laugh at Conan O'Brien every time I watch his show.

Occasionally, it will just pop into my head without warning while I take a hot shower or eat a home-cooked meal. I think about that long 10 days sometimes when I turn on the light to read, or get online to check my email, and I know one day I'll tell my children about Katrina.

They'll be complaining about something banal, and I'll unleash a Katrina story on them in the same way my parents did with Camille. I'll say, "Your great uncle slept outside in a rocking chair with a sheet over him to avoid the mosquitoes and the heat, but sometimes the stench of dead chicken houses would keep him up." Or, I'll say, "Your grandfather and I went around the neighborhood delivering Powerade and baby formula, but we could never get rid of the big box of maxi pads the church gave us." Or, I'll say, "Our friend Blake saw a seagull walking in his yard right after the hurricane passed over him."

I won't worry if they don't understand, or if they even care. I'll make them tomato sandwiches if they develop a taste for them, and I'll be sure to make them chew their food slowly.

David McRaney is a senior journalism major at the University of Southern Mississippi .  The After Katrina Newswire is a project of the School of Mass Communication and Journalism at USM (www.usm.edu/afterkatrina). This story can be reprinted with this credit included.