As I approached the city of New Orleans for my first time ever, listening to an old Neville Brothers CD, Yellow Moon, headed toward America's musical Holy Land, I started to cry. Alone in my VW Vanagon, I had the space to sob freely. I was finishing a 3,000 mile road trip which began in Northern California and approaching a city I'd yet to experience, but had always wanted to. How odd-still looming some 35 miles in the distance, it was already bringing me to tears.
The sheer Size Of It All was beginning to seep in. This was January 7, 2006. Four months had passed since Hurricane Katrina had razed the region. Yet every mile approaching the looming grey shell of a city was an abandoned landscape of increasing destruction -neon sign skeletons, their colored plastic skins blown away; boat-strewn lakeshores and fields; forests of trees stripped clean of their last speck of greenery. Many pine trunks were randomly severed at their thick middles, like brittle garden stakes overrun by some invasive, endless herd.
From the consistent southward compass points of the snapped timbers, it wasn't difficult to read the last prevailing direction of hard winds. This was striking to me, as I could clearly envision the hurricane coming from the direction they lay, up from the Gulf of Mexico, where increasingly warm waters had boiled the storm into its ferocious category 5 climax. Reading these snapped trees, I rendered a vision of the storm's huge spiraling arms, playing rotational havoc as they swept across the multi-state region, first long and hard one direction, then wrapping around the other way, to finish the insult. Tears still streaming, I confess a simultaneous thrill in witnessing such mind-bending evidence of natural's humbling power.
Fascinated though I was, New Orleans wasn't even my final destination on that guilt-ridden drive-through during that moody winter sunset. I was heading one state over, two more hours east along Interstate 10, for Biloxi, Mississippi. Believe it or not, Katrina's storm force actually hit hardest well east of highly-publicized New Orleans.
Viet Biloxi
After dark, I finally wound my way to my new home at the end of the east Biloxi peninsula. I was joining a nationwide group of mostly Burning Man art festival [2] participants who had begun camping there since shortly after the storm. They had gathered at that site in particular to rebuild the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple, the grounds on which we had established a somewhat elaborate camp and infrastructure, including tent office, gourmet kitchen, and a donated 40-foot geodesic dome. As cruel fate would have it, following decades of saving and years of building, this temple had opened and was officially dedicated exactly one day before Katrina hit, quickly filling it will 10+ feet of water. In the earliest post-storm days, the group offered immediate-needs support to the marginalized, mostly immigrant Vietnamese community, often even thinner on resources than others stuck in the disaster zone.
There was some hidden symmetry and logic to our presence there, of all places. Burning Man annually builds (then ceremoniously burns down) a large temple at the late summer arts festival. It was during the 2005 festival when Katrina hit. So directly following the event, it was members of this Burning Man group who initially committed their bodies and heavy equipment to the region in general. Due to our collective experience with experimental gift economy, not to mention building and dismantling a 40,000 populated temporary city out in the middle of the Nevada desert every year, we were well-accustomed to self-sustenance where there was no existing infrastructure, giving our all, and cleaning up very well when we were done.
The Buddhist temple sits just a few blocks in from the white sand beachfront, and a few blocks from the end of the peninsula which makes up east Biloxi, surrounded by water on three sides. The high storm surge rushed in, across, and back out over this range, as if it were a river bed.
Typical of most people on their initial arrival, I was a little somber from the war zone I had just driven through. I introduced myself to this cozy, low-key group, gathered around the ever-present burn barrel. A little creepy at first glance, a wide variety of rejected/slightly defective wheelchairs were cleverly re-appropriated as dynamic campfire seating, allowing for effortless heat range adjustment, as well as acrobatic exploration and spontaneous contests, which were the nightly norm. Throughout our stay in the region, many visitors would later confess similar mis-impressions on passing through our camp for the first time; they were truly astounded with a group that did so much hard work while having so many physical disabilities!
It seemed almost callous at first, how cheerfully everyone moved through our post-Armageddon surroundings. The corner of an unseated house still stabbed through the garden fence into the edge of our replenished temple garden. This house seemed so "dropped there," I eventually referred to it as "Dorothy's house" from the Wizard of Oz. It soon became obvious one must find a way to float through the endless destruction, utilize the wide-open landscape of otherwise wasted material wherever possible, or not survive there at all.
How different it must be, though, when all this new insanity exists right where the only home you've ever known used to be. Almost all the remaining locals I got to know inspired me in their apparent abilities to float and cope. Increases in self-medication, post-traumatic-stress and tripled suicide rates withstanding, what are the alternatives?
Breaking And Building
Our self-imposed deadline for completion of the temple had been set for the fast approaching Tet ceremonies on January 22, the all-important Vietnamese New Year. Each work morning, six to seven days a week, began with a work camp meeting around a whiteboard covered with evolving lists of volunteer projects. This system offered task consistency as one desired, or a great cycle of variety for the attention-challenged among the crew.
Throughout my time with Burners Without Borders, there was rich opportunity to improve my hand at newer skills - operating tractors and chainsaws, home construction and swamp-dredging. Or we could apply previously mastered skills we arrived with, as project needs dictated. Alongside our ant-like rebuilding efforts, we had a highly talented heavy equipment operator and around $70,000 of donated heavy equipment from Doosan Daewoo, which we used for everything from recovering boats from places they shouldn't be, to clearing total home wreckages from a few lots a day, so residents could finally prepare the space for FEMA trailers and rebuilding.
As one of several experienced visual artists, I had the honor of applying the finishing touches to the Buddha statue himself, sanding, repairing the gold leaf on his gown, completing some paint and sculptural details to his large lotus platform. Huge and heavy but built of hollow fiberglass, He had floated about in the ten feet of interior water during the storm and ended up face down, having taken a moderate beating for it. I'd been shown the video that was shot from the rafters of the temple during the storm, so it required little imagination on my part to understand his journey and battle scars.
We were a broadly creative group, in a strange land full of abandoned resources, much of it available for some form of resurrection, especially if you didn't mind digging through a little mud or rust, and knew where to look. Finding any item in a place or form preserved enough to return to the owner was a highlight beyond any other. It was a strange and often awkward way to spend one's days, immersed in picking through other peoples' everythings. We followed the tractors to clear the rest of the lots by hand. Take a whole house and dump it all out. What gets left behind, like it or not? Typical items ranged from mismatched baby shoes and toys to the dumped contents of those private boxes from the backs of closets. With all due respect, I can humbly attest that each American family probably owns too many holiday decorations of all kinds, and Billy the Bigmouth Bass singing fish wall hangings.
A Little Play
A talented blacksmith volunteering with us for a week created a makeshift forge right there in the temple driveway one night, toward completing a hand railing project. With that, we all got to forge art metal for an evening or two.
There were several ways we relieved the stress of the environment through creative endeavor. Between shifts one weekend, we built a sea-going vessel completely out of salvaged storm materials and dubbed ourselves Mississippi Island Liberation Front (MILF). Several locals quickly became engaged, and lent hands, experience, sailor knots, life vests and a small back-up vessel, to ensure our buoyancy for the duration. One mentioned that this was the most fun he'd had in a long time.
Using oars built of crutches, foam and duct tape, we paddled out to the nearest barrier island for a liberation invasion/evening cruise, returning under a breathtaking sunset. We had also thrown together some custom laminated photo IDs, each of us photographed one at a time wearing the same eye patch. We joked this was done in case the Coast Guard required credentials. Along with the several amused locals, the Coast Guard did come around to witness our voyage, their only request being that we be back to shore before nightfall if we didn't have regulation running lights. We on the vessel assessed that we probably could've built some with the collective stash of junk in our pockets, but returned to port in time to enjoy our nightly, resourcefully gourmet meal, prepared by our professional outdoor chef volunteer.
By Tet and temple completion, we felt it was high time to leave Biloxi for more needy pastures. The community's needs were as met as we could reasonably help with, and several large casinos surrounding us along the shores had been first by far to get up and running again. This made good sense from the standpoint of the depleted Mississippi State coffers, but the ethos was not one of direct humanitarian effort anymore, with the few remaining locals now tucked away in FEMA trailers on their flattened lots, struggling to keep their historic family land out of the eager hands of hungry casino and golf course developers.
We now wanted to find the best fit to apply our fast-acting, non-bureaucratic, heavy equipment resources. About thirty miles east of New Orleans and fifty miles west of Biloxi, we found rural, unincorporated, under-represented Pearlington, Mississipi, which seemed to fit that bill.
Read Part II [3]
