One town's post-Katrina diaspora

[Swede]

Diaspora — the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland. — Merriam-Webster

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — “Diaspora” is not a word I used before Katrina. In fact, I don’t even remember hearing it spoken on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in those days before the hurricane sucked our towns into the sea. That tragic phenomenon of displacement had no bearing on our lives — how could it? Our communities ran together along those 60 miles of coastline like a series of seaside Mayberrys. Connections between people seemed securely knotted, strands of pearls that shone with the luster of history and fellowship.

Then in August 2005, in the course of a single morning, Katrina severed the threads that bound us. The pearls of our lives went flying in all directions, as if racing across a polished ballroom floor. To gather each and every one and then string them together again would have been impossible.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38851079/ns/us_news-katrina_five_years_later/

[LiberalAndProud]

1. "I miss just about everything, most all the time."

That was well worth the click. Thanks Swede.

[jobycom]

2. First town I ever lived in.

I was born in Baton Rouge but only lived there until my parents brought me home to Bay St. Louis. Months later Hurricane Betsy flooded the cute little red brick house my dad built. It survived, but we moved down the road a bit, to the corner of Highway 90 and Nicholson Avenue, where my dad tried his hand at owning a Gulf service station.

When I was four Hurricane Camille came through. I remember it, a little. I was sitting in a living room on a dark wood plank floor with floor grates, which aren't common around there. The tv and the lights went out, and I remember knowing something was wrong, maybe because my parents and grandparents were so worried. I remember waking up later when it was calm, and seeing my parents and grandfather looking out the back door at my grandparents' trailer. They say it's a true memory, that they did stand in the doorway of their bedroom where I was sleeping and survey the damage during the eye. The water came a couple hundred yards from the house, they said. Camille was a category 5, one of two (or three if you count Andrew, which was never measured as a five, but was posthumously promoted based on the damage it caused) to hit the US, and the strongest ever recorded. I remember riding around the coast afterward, seeing the bridges destroyed, and seeing ships on the highway, and in one case a path cut through the ship so cars could go through.

My parents moved a few miles inland after that, above Gulfport. They were there when Katrina hit, but I wasn't. I drove in the weekend afterward and spent a week helping them clean up, driving them around for supplies and gas, waiting for the electricity to come back on. I helped the mother of my oldest friend rescue two German Shepherds in Bay St. Louis, nearby the little red brick house that survived Betsy and Camille. It was smashed beyond repair that time. The corner where the house and old Gulf station had survived Camille was destroyed as water covered the Exxon station that had been built there.

Bay St. Louis is still there. It's got a new, cooler bridge, and a lot of the businesses are back. Two of my schools were destroyed--my nursery school, St. Claire's, and the elementary school attached to a private high school I went to for a couple of years when my dad got a job on the oil rigs making twice what he had before, Christ Episcopal. I don't know if either reopened. But a lot of it did.

Most of my friends there are pissed off right now at all the renewed coverage about "recovery." Everyone knew that recovery didn't mean everything would be the same again. It just meant that things would get back to a livable condition and the coast would be rebuilt however it could be. It's a new coast. Hurricanes always shaped that region, from the seawall and man-made beach to the houses and businesses along the shore, every 20 to 40 years a big one comes through and changes everything. Just the way it is. Katrina was the worst--not the strongest, but it had the highest tidal surge of any of them, and there are a lot of theories as to why. But the region is used to rebuilding. Growing up, every time we passed a new building on the beach we'd start talking about whether it would survive the next hurricane. Now when I go back we still do that, only now we also talk about whether it would have survived the last one. That'll fade, too, though. And another will come through in another 40 years--hopefully not sooner this time--for the next generation to philosophize about.