I’ve been cleaning out the house for a few weeks now, just sorting through old sketchbooks and Polaroids and cleaning out the shelves. I found a journal I kept the day after Katrina, on August 30, 2005. The setting is Jackson, Mississippi; no one this far north really knows yet what’s happening in New Orleans, or the extent of the damage.
Nite 2 of no lights. It’s quite beautiful—very nearly pitch black—but the chirp of the nightbugs are broken by my neighbor’s generator.I hate it. I want to sabotage it. I want to steal it and turn on my air conditioner.
Dinner is a mouthful of dark chocolate, 2 Tylenol PM + ½ bottle of red zin. The PM is to keep me asleep—-it’s 80 degrees, with no breeze, & feels it.
At the Jitney today it was packed, with most water off the shelves. There was an older lady behind me in the line who looked like she’d been through hell. She tugged on my sleeve. “Excuse me? Are you from Mississippi?” I said that I was. “I’m from New Orleans. Thank you for the hospitality.”
It is these little kindnesses that make our community. Bringing wine to our neighbors.1 Pushing a friend’s car.2 Bars charging up cell phones.3 I have one friend who had, all told, 14 people in her house (counting 3 dogs & 2 cats). Governor Barbour talked about us “being Mississippians,” as times like this give us a chance to see how people really are without the barriers of central air or dvd players, the barriers of our modern life.
I miss music the most. I have found myself getting in my car and driving around just so I can listen to a Stevie Nicks tape.4
Earlier when we were heading back through Belhaven two raincoats flag us down to miss [undecipherable; looks like the wine was having an effect]. It was Donna Ladd and Laurel Isbister. Donna said “I gotta get some lights! I’m working on a big story about the Klan!”5
Only Donna would ever say this!
[Later]
I need a fan. How did people used to do it?[Later still]
Just saw a bumpersticker of a garbage can and the phrase DON’T TRASH SLIDELL, LA.[Yet later]
I AM A NERD WHO MISSES HIS INTERNETS
[Last—in the handwriting of a five-year-old]
THE GENERATOR HAS STOPPED going to bed now
1Nobody expected the storm to be as bad as it was. Most liquor stores were still open; and most, predictably, were already out of hurricane mix. During the height of the storm I traveled with two friends over a few downed trees to deliver a case of wine to a friend’s house who was hosting several families from the coast.
2I don’t remember what this is about, but again, hurricanes.
3The downtown grid only went down briefly, and Hal & Mal’s and Martin’s had their outlets stuffed with chargers, although the towers couldn’t handle the traffic.
4This would prove to be both aesthetically bankrupt and financially unwise, as Jackson would run out of gasoline two days later.
5 This likely refers to Daddy, Get Up: This Son of Natchez Wants Justice, Too. The Jackson Free Press was in fine form in 2005, with its extensive and informed coverage of the Edgar Ray Killen trial.
There were several PrettyFakes posts about Katrina.
Professor Fury on Outrage and Action.
“The Gentleman from Mississippi Has the Floor” (In this video, you will see the true craven and pathetic nature of the Republicans—save for Steny Hoyer—and the integrity of Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi).
One Year Later (Dr. Wagner in Clinton, Miss.).
One Year Later (Jaysus in Jackson, Miss.). (later reprinted in the first Sandusky Review).
Katrina, Day 4: Gorjus hearts electricity.
I had a Katrina flashback yesterday when a helicopter flew over work when I walking to my car. The sound of helicopters will always be the defining memory of the storm and it’s aftermath. They started coming into Baton Rouge 2 days before the storm and continued for a number of weeks afterwards, ferrying people and supplies back and forth.
I can only imagine what it’s like for someone who has seen combat to have something like that define their memory of it. Something that is capable of instantly transporting them right back to not only that place but that time. It has to be a remarkable and terrifying thing.
Someone should check with Victor Gischler about this but I imagine this journal entry could be the prologue to PF favorite Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse. Though, the next sentence after “The Generator has stopped…going to bed now” would have to be “And then we started eating people,” naturally.
The first night after Andrew was surprisingly, and later I would learn blissfully, quiet. The second night many of my neighbors had generators. I too wanted to sabotage them. We didn’t have many helicopters (for the obvious reason that we didn’t need to airlift people to safety) but they used blimps to deliver messages about where to get water and what the city was doing. That was weird, blimps flying around over neighborhoods not advertising or filming some football game but actually helping people. The other significant sound was the sound of C 130’s which flew low over over the city, it seemed like they were just over the tree line, spraying stuff to kill mosquitoes.
The other major memory was cold showers. The power was out for 11 days but the water lines still worked, there was nothing to do but clean up after all the downed trees. After a day of cutting and dragging tree limbs not having hot water was not a problem. By the end we had a pile 20 feet high that ran the length of the lot and completely obscured the view of the house from the road.
I think Joe is right about this sounding like the start of a zombie flick.