(BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI, early-April 2006)

While working in the houses of the dead and displaced, we met those neighbors who survived, and furthermore, who chose to stay, living in campers and FEMA trailers, and often they would come out and tell us their stories — stories about bodies in the streets and people drowned in attics.  One day they decided prepare us a crawfish boil as a gesture of gratitude.  So with Massenet’s opera Manon playing on the public radio station, crackling from a small portable radio, we volunteers took a break from mold removal and ate crawfish in our bodysuits, listening less to the Massenet and more to the family. 

They didn’t call Katrina a storm, by the way.  They called it a flood, explaining that a giant wave swept north from the Gulf over the little finger of land on which Biloxi sits, demolishing nearly everything and everyone in its path, and emptying into the bay directly north of that little finger of land.  But like any wave, big or small, it had to return to sea.  “So we got it twice,” finished our cook, stirring the crawfish pot, his face dripping with sweat as he smiled and shook his head in disbelief. 

“I tell you,” added his wife.  ”I can still see the places that aren’t here anymore.  I pass by the spot where an old friend’s house was, but I still see it.  I still see their house.  I still see them.”

——-

Even eight months after the storm — the “flood,” I mean — the city was still in ruins, looking like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, much worse than what I saw in Mobile a few days earlier.  

All industry that once occupied the beachfront had been reclaimed by the sea with nothing but bare bones parking lots remaining on its twisted metal banks, demolished signs still standing guard over the empty foundations of fast food chains. 

Cemeteries were overturned, headstones cracked in half, tombs collapsed. 

Highway 90 had once been a shady, tree-lined boulevard of mansions on the seashore.  Now, only a few trees survived, their skeletal limbs raped and ravaged, some trunks completely ripped from the ground and displaced upon roofs, folding the houses inward, so vulgar it was almost funny. 

The houses that remained were barely standing, many torn open and exposing to passersby like myself a glimpse inside at the life that once was — a decaying corpse of a living room that still retained its carpeted staircase leading upstairs to what might have once been a bedroom. 

Another house bears a message scrawled in white spray paint:  WE ARE HOME!! WILL SHOOT  NO LOOTING!

——-

“Three in the front row,” Sister Mary whispered to me, not moving her mouth, as a small class of first and second graders filed into the classroom.  “Four there in the second row.  Four in the third.  And all but one in the back row.  All three teachers standing in the back of the room, too.  Lost everything.  I mean, everything.  In the morning, there are pillows and sleeping bags lining the hallways here.  These are middle and upper class families, sleeping on the floor of a Catholic elementary school.” 

The room fell silent as the children waited for Sister Mary to reveal who I was and why I’d come to their school.  She shifted to a cheerier tone, turning from me to the group.  “Mr. Adam is here from Vermont, and has spent the whole year traveling all fifty states to play the piano…” 

I played “The Night Winds”by Griffes, something I usually played for kids because it was fast and evocative, but here it felt different, and indeed the reaction was different, starting with the first student who shouted, “It sounds like Katrina!”  And so began a crossfire of stories from children who had been at the frontlines of a hurricane, all outshouting each other, each story more fantastically surreal than the next, and of course I had no doubt all of them were true.  Sister Mary had no visible reaction.  Surely she’d heard these stories before.  

Afterward, the room was jammed with students leaving, and a little girl close to me seemed trapped and upset by the commotion.  I crouched down and whispered to her, “You know, my mom’s a teacher and she doesn’t like it either when polite girls like you have to wait for other kids to calm down.  It isn’t fair, is it?” 

She looked at me, the two pink ties in her hair a perfect foil to the two dark circles under her eyes.  “Life isn’t fair,” she answered plainly, automatically, as if she’d heard those words many times before and, in a way, was just repeating them.