Like most Mississippians, Susan and I spent Labor Day weekend reminiscing about Hurricane Katrina. Looking back on the worst hurricane in Mississippi history, has been more affecting than I might have expected. Twenty years is a long time. Or ought to be. For Katrina, it’s not long at all.
August 29, 2005, began before sunrise at our home on what we called the unfashionable end of Scenic Drive in Pass Christian. We had chosen to board up and not pack up. And—for days—we’d watched as this horrible, televised meringue pie spun northward from the Gulf. We had taken irrational comfort from our house’s height—21 or 22 feet above mean high tide, and .expected only a foot or two of water in our ground floor.
Dream on. The water rose to within five inches of the second floor before noon; the surge recorded an official height of 28.6 feet, 10 feet higher than predicted. We had rain damage in the attic and on the second floor, and little more than recollections remained on the ground floor. By five, we were walking around in the gray mud, exploring the devastation. A historical marker extolling a house three doors west remained; the house did not. Ours was later bulldozed. We suffered no injuries, and we saved the cats.
One neighbor died in the surge. A second body, unknown, lodged in the debris across the street. That night, three of us extracted a heart attack victim from the Blue Rose restaurant’s upstairs. A rescue helicopter took him whup-whupping away. He survived. That ended the serious drama. From then on, it was Boy Scout Survival Camp for grown-ups.
On Thursday, my friend Charlie Kemp showed up with his Ford F-250 diesel pickup. He got through traffic barriers by claiming to have holy water for our nearby Catholic church—which had been gutted. We later contributed to its rebuilding fund, hoping to ransom ourselves out of White Lie Hell. We loaded a few paintings, some clothes, a few paintings, and one cat. Charles the Cat, however, went into hiding, to be discovered two weeks later, badly dehydrated. He survived, too.
The three of us high-tailed it for Hazlehurst and bunked at Charlie’s house. Exhausted, we watched a tape of “Blue Collar Comedy Tour.” Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, Bill Engvall, and Larry the Cable Guy were strangely soothing. To this day, I associate them with Katrina.
Next day, from our borrowed home in Rose’s Bluff, I began emailing friends in the journalism world with the news that we’d survived Katrina and to, “Please send high-paying assignment at once.” I was joking, having been off the writing roster for some years, but two friends did just that.
Csaba Csere (it’s Hungarian and pronounced Chubba Chedda), my successor as editor-in-chief at Car and Drive, e-mailed to ask, “Can you find a way to relate Katrina to cars?” Of course I could; good writers seeking an assignment can relate Humpty Dumpty to penguins. In keeping with a lifetime of getting hit with a lucky stick, I had a neighbor, a Corvette collector, who had two of his Vettes go upside down in the street. And I’d photographed them. That worked with Csaba, and I wrote a long feature, “Ride of a Lifetime.” It’s still on the Internet.
My pal David Abrahamson raised the assignment bar. I’d worked with David during my first stint at Car and Driver in the 1970s. We remained friends as David earned a doctorate at NYU and then rose to academic prominence at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. His proposed assignment knocked my hat in the creek.
“I’ve got a blood stripe for you,” he said. A blood stripe is what you get when your squad leader gets killed and you get promoted into his job.
“We had a Time guy set to be writer in residence, and he’s fetched up with cancer. Your credits are good enough to slot you in. But you’ve got to be here in three days.”
“Um,” I said, knowing I’d be leaving Susan to oversee the bulldozing of our house and the salvaging of our battered household.
Thirty seconds passed. David added, “It pays thirty-five thousand dollars.”
Almost no seconds went by, before I replied, “Uh, yeah. I can do that.”
David said, “No need to gush. And you get an apartment within walking distance of your office.” By now, I was nearing hysteria. But I managed to croak, “Does it come with a car?”
“Nope. There, you’re on your own,”
I thought I detected a whiff of apology, or maybe guilt, on David’s part, but I let it go.
William Jeanes is a Northsider living in Arkansas
