Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (12 page)

My father’s name was Wyatt, but in Mississippi, when he was a boy, everybody called him Buddy.

“Buddy, that boy is the spitting image of you,” people said when they stopped to talk to us during that visit. It made me happy to hear, though at the time I didn’t see the resemblance. Now I look at pictures of myself and I see my father’s face.

TUESDAY. I WAKE
up hungover, not sure where I am or what’s happened. Cellphone, TV, BlackBerry—I check them all, but nothing works. I’ve no idea what the storm has done. Outside, the wind still whips. Light rain. A line of police cruisers snakes through the hotel’s parking lot. I’m sick of this. Yesterday I told myself I was going to quit covering hurricanes for a while. No more. Then the winds bumped up, and my heart quickened once again.

I stumble out of bed and walk downstairs to the parking lot, where the satellite engineer is checking on his truck. There’s a phone on board that works as long as the truck has gas. For the next few days this will be the only phone communication we have with the world beyond.

When I finally get a call through to the assignment desk at CNN in Atlanta, they don’t have a lot of detailed information.

“We know it’s bad,” the supervising producer tells me. “We don’t know how bad. We’ve seen pictures out of Gulfport, and it appears heavily damaged.”

In New Orleans the levees have already failed. The city is flooding. Eventually 80 percent of it will be underwater. The Superdome is already overcrowded; the air-conditioning system has broken down. As the floodwaters rise, thousands more will seek shelter at the Convention Center, where they will find no medical care, no food, no way out.

We decide to head to Gulfport. At least we’ll be near the water, and depending on what we find, we can figure out where to go next. The problem is gas. We don’t have enough. The electricity is out in much of Philadelphia. I hear that the nearby Wal-Mart is open, and when we get there I’m surprised to see that their gas pumps still work. We fill up our vehicles, and buy as much food and water as we can find. Waiting in line to pay, a woman recognizes me and suggests we go to Bay St. Louis, a small coastal community west of Gulfport. She’s a teacher and thinks her school may have been destroyed.

“We can’t get any word out of there,” she tells me. “They’re not saying anything about it on the radio. No one ever talks about the little towns.”

Back in the parking lot, we convene our small band. We have two camera crews, three SUVs, and a satellite truck. The main roads south are closed, but we hear on the radio that one highway is open for emergency vehicles only. We figure we’re eligible, and move out.

WE DRIVE PAST
downed trees and power lines; debris litters the highway. Miles of scattered steel and broken homes. I see the misery, but I keep on going. After a while it becomes just a blur. It’s a strange sensation, a schizophrenic feeling. People have died, but we are alive. Others are stuck; we are moving forward. We have gas and food, a phone. We can raise our satellite dish and broadcast around the world; all it takes is a few minutes to set up.

I don’t know where I’m going exactly, but I know what I’ll do when I get there. There are pictures to take, a story to tell. All the rest falls away. Right now I have no bills, no mortgage, no mundane details of life to worry about—just this moment, this mission. I’ve been here before, sat in this seat, looked out this window at a hundred different landscapes passing by—Sri Lanka, Niger, Somalia, Bosnia. This moment, this feeling exists only at the edge of the world. It never lasts long, like a rare orchid that grows only in treacherous terrain.

When we get to Gulfport, the motion stops and reality sets in. It’s worse than I imagined. The worst I’ve ever seen in America. Sri Lanka after the tsunami is the closest comparison I can make. For a moment that’s where I think I am: Kamburugamuwa. Little Maduranga throwing stones at the sea.

Downtown Gulfport is in shambles. People stagger about with no shoes, licking at their tears. Tractor trailer trucks that have been flung about, lie in a pile like abandoned children’s toys. Nearby, a seal lies stunned, alive, barking in an asphalt parking lot. A lady douses it with cups of water, trying to keep the seal alive. When she leaves, police shoot it in the head. Two bullets. Point blank. I remember being surprised the scarlet blood didn’t spread very far.

Next to the waterfront, a casino barge, a block long, sits on dry land. Through a gash in the side, silver slot machines sparkle. An urban search-and-rescue team walks by in the dying light in steel-toe boots, with lamps on their helmets, looking for anyone who may be alive. “Hello!” they call out. “Hello!” Silence.

WEDNESDAY MORNING WE’RE
in Waveland, Mississippi. We drove from Gulfport in the first light of day. Coast Guard helicopters pass overhead on their way to New Orleans to pluck people off rooftops, and bring in badly needed supplies. Choppers from all over the region are heading there. Nobody seems to land here. I’ve heard only a few reports out of Louisiana. We still have no cell phones, no e-mail. I know the levees have broken, and so have the promises. The city is flooded. It was predicted, but no one seems prepared. The Superdome, the Convention Center, the places people were told to go, are overwhelmed.

Mississippi has no levees, no wide-scale looting. Here the drama is of a wholly different sort. The water has pulled back into the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the land dry, destroyed. On every block, around every corner, there is loss. In Bay St. Louis and Waveland, miles of shore-front homes are gone. Block after block, nothing but debris. I’m not shocked by the loss of property; it’s staggering, but destruction is nothing new. It’s the silence that shocks me. There’s no heavy earth-moving equipment, no trucks with aid rumbling past. I stand in a field of timber that once was a street and can hear the wind blowing through the remains of people’s lives. A sheet of plastic caught in a tree rustles in the breeze. Flies swarm over the corpse of a dog. A helicopter moves on the horizon. It intrudes, for a few seconds, then silence once again.

I spot a team of men picking through the rubble. They’re part of an urban search-and-rescue task force from Virginia. One man carries a small video camera attached to a metal pole. He uses it to check beneath piles of debris to see if anyone is trapped. They’ve been down this street before, but a local woman has said that someone is still missing from here, so they’re searching again.

The pavement is completely covered with crushed roofs of homes. One of the searchers, Scott Prentice, carefully makes his way amid the debris. His progress is slow, steady.

“We can’t search all of these with all these boards,” he says, stepping over a marine’s dress jacket lying in the rubble. A child’s naked doll hangs from a tree; its eyelids close and open. “We could spend weeks right here,” Prentice says, shaking his head, “but we have to move on.” He breathes deeply, seeing if he can catch the smell of a corpse.

The Virginia task force has set up a base camp nearby, in the parking lot of a Rite Aid pharmacy. When we get there, a woman named Sally Slaughter stops by to report a missing person. Slaughter is small and thin. Her worn face is hidden beneath a baseball cap. She works in a nearby motel and is worried that her co-worker Christina Bane is dead.

“I went with some other neighbors to her house this morning, and it was still boarded up,” Slaughter tells one of the searchers. “We broke open a back window and there was a body right there in the kitchen.”

Slaughter knew that Christina Bane and her family didn’t evacuate. “They were scared of leaving their house ’cause of looters,” she tells me. Later, I learn the real reason they’d stayed: Bane’s two sons were disabled, and she didn’t want to go to a shelter where people would stare.

“I don’t want to say they were retarded, exactly,” Slaughter says, “but they were a little slow.”

Anytime a corpse is found, the Virginia task force’s body identification unit has to photograph it, and mark its location for recovery. Right now, there are no places to take the bodies; the local morgues are flooded, and so are the private funeral homes. Eventually FEMA will send in refrigerated trucks to store the dead, but it will take several days for the first ones to arrive.

At the Banes’ house, Sally points to the window she broke open earlier this morning. The house is still. I can smell the bodies. Holding my breath, I press my face up to the rear window, dirty with mud. It takes a few seconds for me to realize what I’m looking at. There’s a man lying in front of me. He’s covered in mud and sediment, trapped amid piles of lumber and insulation. I assume it’s Edgar Bane, Christina’s husband. He’s badly bloated, twisted and swollen like a birthday balloon about to pop. One of his arms is stuck at a right angle. Rigor mortis has set in.

He’s the first storm fatality I’ve come across so far. I’ve seen drowning victims before—in Sri Lanka and elsewhere—but never here in America. I didn’t expect it to make a difference, but it does.

The front door is jammed, blocked by pieces of debris left behind when the water receded. The team begins prying open a window. It doesn’t take them long. As soon as the window opens, the odor pours out. Everyone has to stand back.

Christina Bane is inside. So are Edgar and their two sons, Carl and Edgar Junior. All four are dead. Drowned. Sally Slaughter is crying. She’s the only one. One of the searchers takes out a camera—digital, downloadable—and shoots pictures of the Banes. Click. Click. Click. Click. Another searcher takes out a Magic Marker. On the Banes’ front door he writes
V
for victims. 4
DEAD
.

A FEW BLOCKS
from the Banes’ home, the searchers find a body lying on a sidewalk in an empty cul-de-sac. I think it’s a woman; at first, it’s hard to tell. Water wipes away identity, race, even gender. I think she’s African American, but her skin appears white, translucent almost.

Someone has covered her face and part of her body with a dirty bedspread. Her feet and hands stick out.

“Did she drown here?” I ask one of the searchers.

“No,” he tells me. “Apparently, she died in one of these buildings here. The residents kind of dumped her here. This has become the dumping ground for people that have died.”

The team takes pictures—Click. Click—then records the woman’s GPS coordinates. Later they’ll mark the spot on a map. It’s dotted with small circles for each of the bodies they’ve found so far.

“Do you ever get used to this?” I ask David Cash, the team’s doctor.

“Hurricane Ivan, Opal, the Pentagon, Oklahoma City,” he says, listing some of the disasters he’s worked on in the last eleven years. “You never get used to it; it just needs to be done.”

I ask Chris Davis, my cameraman, to take some tight shots of the woman’s hand and one of her feet. The image of her body, covered in the bedspread, will be too grisly for television, but I don’t want to ignore the reality of what’s happened here. Dr. Cash and his team climb back in their vehicle. We get back in ours, and follow them out.

I never thought I’d see this here, in America—the dead left out like trash. None of us speaks. There’s nothing you can say.

Chris is having a hard time with the bodies. I see it in his face. At first, I don’t understand what the problem is. Then I realize it’s his first time.

MY FATHER’S CORPSE
was the first one I ever saw. His wake was at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York. I passed the building for years on my way to school and never knew what went on inside.

I didn’t recognize him at first. I hadn’t known how different the dead really look—the sickening stillness, the flatness of an embalmed face. He resembled a figure cut from some soft stone.

I remember the clothes my father wore in the casket, the unnatural way they lay on his body. Already I felt his absence, missed his embrace, the comfort of having him near. At night we’d watch TV. He’d stretch out on the floor on his back, his head perched on a pillow. I’d lay perpendicular to him, my head resting on the soft part of his stomach, which rose and fell with each breath.

My father was born a Baptist but had long since moved away from the fire-and-brimstone preachers of his youth. He no longer went to services, and his funeral was held in a Unitarian church.

“When you mark ‘Unitarian’ down in the hospital,” I remember him saying, “they don’t know what it means, so they don’t send any minister to bother you.”

After the funeral, I stood in a receiving line with my mother and brother. People I didn’t know filed past, shaking my hand. Later, there was a gathering at our apartment. A few friends from school. A teacher I particularly liked.

My nanny, May, who’d helped raise me since I was born, had just returned from a trip home to her native Scotland. She rushed back when she learned of my father’s death.

“Don’t worry, May. Everything will be okay,” I told her. Years later she cried as she recounted the moment. “Of course, it wasn’t okay,” she said. “Nothing was ever okay again.”

IT’S WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005.
I’m still in Waveland, Mississippi, reporting on Katrina’s aftermath. Women sob searching for family photographs. Middle-age men beg to use my satellite phone. Every conversation starts the same: “Mom, it’s me. I’m alive.”

I see the president’s plane fly over Mississippi.

“Do you think he can see the corpses from so high up?” a resident asks me as we watch the jet streak by.

It’s more than forty-eight hours after the storm, and there’s still no one to pick up the dead. It’s unconscionable. Soldiers have a motto: “Leave no man behind.” I saw it stenciled on a blast wall on an army base outside Baghdad. They’ll risk life and limb to recover the body of a fellow soldier. Many have died over the years doing just that. There are front lines in America as well, and right now Waveland is one of them. These people should not be left to rot.

As dusk falls, I go back to the site where the dead woman was lying. She is still there. I think about trying to move her, but I have no equipment, no gloves, and besides, there’s nowhere to put her. I feel powerless, weak.