Freelance photographer Kate Medley and I spent two days on Mississippi's beleaguered Gulf Coast. We started in Gulfport, where part of Kate's family is from, and moved west through the towns of Long Beach, Pass Christian and Waveland. Drawn to the communities closest to the Gulf — the neighborhoods you saw on CNN in the days following the storm — Kate and I roamed the vicinity of the railroad tracks that run parallel to the shoreline, a mile or so north of the water. The tracks act as a divider these days: National Guard troops are stationed on the cross streets, protecting the public from a stretch of land so decimated that most of it will be bulldozed in the coming weeks. Heading south from the tracks, through upper-class neighborhoods and working-class ones, past schools and churches and downtowns, the pattern is the same. The debris grows steadily with every block, until house and rubble are indistinguishable. When you finally reach the water, convinced that it couldn't get any worse, it does. Nothing is left. The mansions that lined the beach — many of which withstood Hurricane Camille in 1969 — were completely washed away by the storm surge's tidal wave, which reached as high as 45 feet.
Not many people live south of the tracks anymore. There's no power, no running water and very few inhabitable homes. But in the rubble of these towns — and in most places rubble is all you can see — Kate and I met some unforgettable people. Here are three stories found over two days — a snapshot of the Gulf Coast three weeks after Katrina changed it forever.
Lelia Lang has come back to her house on Second Street in Pass Christian looking for one thing: a picture of her mother. Olivia Marble died in June at the age of 78, and Lang wanted to find a photo of the two of them — she doesn't have one anymore. But Katrina had tossed possessions out of every home on Second Street, creating a mud-caked salad of mementos for Lang to dig through. And as she picks through the wreckage that surrounds her house, a white one-story teetering at a 45-degree angle, the walls slanting down over the debris, Lelia Lang starts to find things she's never seen before. A neighbors' family photo album, complete with graduation pictures. A lone blue roller skate. A rag doll. A half-full bottle of olive oil, a complete tackle box, a 1980 Pass Christian High School Yearbook.
She picks these things up, dusts them off as best she can and arranges them neatly on a bench by the side of the road. "People will want these," says the 58-year-old poet. Lang grew up in Gulfport, and writes primarily about Southern Mississippi. Her dark hair matted down, her eyes concealed by an oversized pair of tortoise shell sunglasses, Lang walks back across the planks she's laid out over the rubble leading to her house. She's looking for a white dress shoe now, the right one. She's got the left one in her hand.
"You either pick yourself up, dust yourself off and gain some strength," she says before climbing through her bedroom window. "Or you succumb to it. And I'm not about to do that." The white duvet on the bed is covered in mud. She's given up on it. Given up on the vacuum cleaner, too, which somehow remained just where she'd left it in the corner of the room, even though her house was pushed back 20 yards.
After finding a black jacket her sister gave her ("I have to salvage it — I don't own another one"), Lang sits in her white Jeep Cherokee, a set of white wicker chairs tied to the top. She's about to leave Pass Christian for Morrow, Ga., where she'll live with family "for a while." She's not sure when she'll see Second Street again.
"Would you like to hear a poem?" she asks us. She pulls a notebook out of her bag and leans against the dash, her legs dangling out the open door. "It's called 'Fond Memories'."
Lang has trouble getting through without crying; she has to stop herself after describing her grandmother's porch in Gulfport. But she keeps reading until the end, wiping the tears from her eyes.
"I'm all grown up now/ Things have changed/ And Mississippi's changing too/ So I'll share a fond memory/ With an old friend/ And one new," she reads. "'Tis one of the marvelous things an old Mississippian can do."
Lelia Lang looks up from her notebook. "Did you like that?"
With most of Pass Christian's street signs washed away, even Jerald Williams, who has lived here for four years, has trouble orienting himself sometimes. But like the rest of the folks still in town, Williams has made his way to an anonymous corner just south of the National Guard checkpoint twice a day, because that's where he'll find the cheeseburger people.
"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday," he counts on his fingers, tracking back. "I've had nine cheeseburgers!"
Sitting at a table under a blue tent just before noon, Williams takes a hefty bite of number nine as the lunchtime line builds at the buffet. A special-education teacher at Pass Christian High School, he's wearing a gray thermal undershirt soaked through with sweat, paint-splattered jeans and a pair of beat-to-shit penny loafers; he looks like he's been through a war. He lost his house to Katrina, but has stuck around helping neighbors trying to salvage theirs.
Williams' voice cracks as he describes the Pass Christian he knew before the storm. It was a place where neighbors baked fig pies for each other, he says. A place where he could visit his students at home. "And it's all gone, you know?" he says under his breath. "It's all gone."
Then Williams looks toward the men and women of Cheeseburgers in Paradise, a restaurant chain with stores in Hawaii and Las Vegas, who have been handing out free burgers for the last week. "They've been servants," Williams says fondly. "Just servants. I'm so glad they've been here, they've made it a whole lot easier."
Across the way, Laren Gartner, founder and CEO of Cheeseburgers in Paradise, is handing out patties. A week before, Gartner had been sitting in her home near Lake Tahoe, looking for a way to help with the relief effort. "Somehow, writing a check didn't feel good enough," she says. "I wanted to be inconvenienced, I wanted to step out of my own comfort zone."
So that evening, Gartner called her executives, including a foursome getting ready to open a store in Key West. The Florida contingent rented a refrigerated truck, threw in a few thousand frozen patties and met the California group at this corner in Pass Christian. They were planning to move around, to feed a new city every day. But after one afternoon away from town, they came back to the corner. "We feel like we're citizens of Pass Christian now," Gartner says.
The police station is in shambles. City Hall is gone. And Pass Christian's once quaint downtown, just off the water, has been reduced to rubble. But the cheeseburger corner — "Cheeseburger Mississippi," Gartner calls it — has picked up the slack. It's the new town center.
Pass Christian High School's football coaches eat lunch here. So do relief workers, construction crews — National Guard troops might be the best customers. Gartner and her crew are handing out between 1,500 and 1,800 burgers a day. If they kept it up for a year, they'd hand out $8 million worth.
But Cheeseburger, Mississippi is shutting down the grill in two days. They've got a business to run, and many of the 22 volunteers are family members of executives who have non-burger-related jobs to get back to. "I just wish another restaurant would come down to this little corner of the world and pick up where we're leaving off," Gartner says.
Jerald Williams finishes up his burger across the table from Mims Carter, a friend and fellow Pass Christian resident. Both men are painfully tired, their shoulders slumped, bags under their eyes. Neither wants to see the cheeseburger folks leave. "If only there was a city council," Carter jokes. "We could vote on them not going."
"C'mon, Patches. Come on out."
You want to believe David Sauls. You want to believe that a cat survived the 40-foot tidal surge that obliterated the small town of Waveland three weeks ago. You want Patches to come purring out of the rubble, as Sauls says he has every day since the storm … because you don't want David Sauls to be that far gone. You want to believe that this man, a pediatrician who lost his dream house — the one he bought in May and hadn't gotten around to insuring — isn't waiting for a cat that's never coming.
"It takes him a second," says Sauls, bending down to peer through the rubble of what used to be a neighbor's home. Across the street, Sauls' green kitchen cabinet sits lodged in an oak tree, 15 feet off the ground. We're half a mile from where his house used to stand. "C'mon," he coos at the lifeless mess of 2x4s, cinderblocks and cracked mirrors. "C'mon, little guy."
David Sauls can tell you exactly how his house looked when he left it on Sunday night, Aug. 28. It was a beautiful home, tucked just off the water on S. Beach Boulevard in Waveland, a middle- and upper-class town before Katrina's eye passed directly over it. Walking backward up his brick-lined driveway, Sauls points to his left, where nine-foot tall azaeleas used to stand. He's shirtless, his chest bright red after a morning in the sun. His khaki shorts, which look like they've been on him for a month, are caked in dirt.
Back where his house used to be, a red staircase leads to nothing. It's high — six or seven feet. From the top step, where the front door was, you can look down on the mess that was David Sauls' home. A dozen antique rifles, part of his $200,000 gun collection, sit in a heap on the concrete slab where his house stood. Sauls is one of thousands whose homes got washed away on the Gulf Coast, and like most, he calls what he has left his "slab." As in, "Come over to my slab tonight and have a beer." In the areas hardest hit, Katrina even changed the vocabulary.
Sauls bought an RV before he came back to Waveland — "a 1987 piece of shit," he says. He plans to live in it, parked on his plot, for the next two years. By then, the price hike of building materials and construction crews may have gone down.
All this, and David Sauls still has a smile on his face. He's become a leader in this beleaguered neighborhood — "my lifeblood," says one friend. Sauls has been back in town for almost two weeks, living in his RV, taking stock of his neighbors' homes, keeping up their spirits.
In the morning, he works on his own property, piling up the guns, salvaging water-damaged pictures, getting his slab ready for the work crew that will soon bulldoze it.
In the evenings, after he's made camp for the night and eaten dinner, Sauls drinks a glass or two of Clan MacGregor scotch and draws up plans for the house he will build. It'll be smaller, he says, down from 5,200 square feet to 1,200. A porch will ring the outside, and he's going to make the kitchen extra big. "That's where people gather," he says, "the kitchen." He wants his house to be the Friday-night headquarters for neighborhood parties.
And, at some point every day, Sauls takes a break to play with Patches.
A minute has passed since he first called the cat, one incredibly long minute. It seems impossible that Patches could be living in the midst of this destruction, that a cat could've survived this storm that killed so much.
"C'mon out, Patches," Sauls says calmly.
And then, from behind a busted refrigerator, a fuzzy gray and white head sticks out. "Patches!"
It takes the cat a few seconds to work his way around the cinderblocks and tree limbs, but soon he is out in the light of day, rubbing his head against the back of Sauls' hand.
"Patches and I drink together — he's a scotch man, too," Sauls says. "We just need a sense of life around here, and we'll be fine."
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
