Landfall

Every tropical system kills in its own unique way. So far, Irene’s specialty was inland flooding.  And hysteria.  Irene was a Cat. 1 hurricane with Cat. 5 hype. He knew several of the cable news network anchors had to be having heart attacks.

The firefighter looked out his window and watched the heavy tropical rain fall.  He had moved to Vermont to escape this sort of thing.  The weather man came back on waving his arms and talking about the flooding on the Middlebury River.  In fact, the whole state was under siege. It looked like this afternoon would be busy like the one six  years ago.

On August 29, 2005, he was sitting in a fire station near Jackson, Mississippi. He and his men watched as Jim Cantore reported from near the Treasure Bay Casino in Gulfport, Mississippi.  “Look around,” the Weather Channel’s angel of death said, ” This will never be the same.” Say what you want about Jim Cantore, he was always right. It wasn’t the same.

Hurricane Katrina was a Cat. 5 hurricane barreling straight for the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  She was huge — with a wind field the nearly the size of the Gulf of Mexico. Early computer models had her heading into Pensacola like Hurricane Ivan did. But on the last day, she veered west.  Landfall was near the mouth of the Pearl River.  She and most of the Gulf of Mexico came ashore with a vengeance.

His dog Gus curled up next to him.  Gus hadn’t been the same since Katrina and did NOT like storms of any shape or size. Neither did he, come to think of it.

Irene was picking at a scab.  A scab he and several other Katrina survivors had tried to heal over the past six years. He closed his eyes and thought of that horrible day.

The morning had started out pretty much normal.  “Good — We’ll get some rain,” he thought as he watched the first feeder bands work their way north.  It had been terribly dry that summer. The clouds angrily came in from the east, dropping the first wind-whipped rainfall.  “This is unusual,” he thought as the first gusts started to make the metal fire station creak.  By 10:30, the radio squawked with the news: The Beau Rivage had water on its second floor. The Beau Rivage was a massive casino built by Yates Construction. Yates built things to last and to hear that the casino was being flooded made him stop and pause. If it’s that high up there, God help the rest of the Coast.  Calls started coming in. Trees were falling and people were scared.  An oak across the street crashed down on the house next to it.  Katrina was here. And she was $%^$.

He and his men spent the afternoon clearing streets and rescuing people. Power outages were widespread across the area. Then the call came in — he and some of his men would go do search and rescue on the Coast.  They were on the road South even before the wind stopped blowing.

The trip down Highway 49 was mind-blowing. Trees were down like matchsticks. The Mississippi Department of Transportation had been working hard to to clear the debris, but he and his men also used their chainsaws to help clear the lanes.  Hattiesburg, Mississippi was in ruins. And the damage got worse the farther south you went.  They met up at a command station at 1-10 to get their assignments.  They’d be searching and rescuing in Hancock, County.  Katrina’s Ground Zero.

Television couldn’t do the damage justice.  It was trying to look at the world through a cardboard paper towel roll and saying you saw the full picture. And television only allowed you to use two senses — sight and sound. His touch, taste and smell were totally overpowered the first time he saw the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

He had never seen anything like what he saw. And he prayed he never sees anything like it again.

The day after the storm was hot.  Survivors milled around the beach area like zombies, picking through the rubble. People were totally in shock and the smell of death was beginning to become choking. Katrina had pushed a wall of water up to 30 ft. high into the coastal communities of Waveland, Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian.  Debris littered the tree tops like teenagers had rolled them in some sort of sick homecoming prank.  A 90-mile stretch of the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coast was wiped out by surge.  Just gone. Even as far away as Mobile, Alabama, the U.S.S. Alabama had been knocked off her keel.

Back to the present. The reporter said a lady three towns over had died when a tree hit her house.  Vermont was having a bad time of it during Irene. A tornado warning was called for his county.  The poor reporter stood near the rushing river in the pouring rain. He laughed. She must’ve drawn the short straw.

He hadn’t laughed for a long time, though.

He and his men had searched every dwelling. Dwelling was a strong word because most of the houses had been totally blown apart by the force of the incoming surge. They’d mark a wall or remaining section with an X with the number of fatalities found.  Search and recovery quickly turned into a recovery mission. They started finding several corpses.  Many had survived Hurricane Camille and had decided to stay. Some said that Camille had killed her last victims that day — 36 years after she had barreled on shore. He believed it.

But the image that had forced him into therapy and the recovery that had caused him to quit his job and move north was the last one of the day.  They had found a trailer in the woods. When they pried open the door, they found a horrible sight — a drowned family inside. There were three boys who looked like his. A father holding them in his bloated arms. And a mother with her head shoved up a vent pipe desperately and unsuccessfully gasping for air.

He had seen death in war.  He had watched his buddy die in the deserts of Iraq.  He had worked many car accidents and seen victims of fires.  But this, well, it was more than he could take.

As the national media rushed to cover the hell in New Orleans, he left the destroyed Coast of Mississippi a broken man.  He moved north to escape his nightmares. To get as far away from the Coast as he could get.  He settled in Middlebury, Vermont.  He was a Southerner in a sea of Yankees.

But every time he closed his eyes he saw her face. Every time he went to sleep he heard the children’s cry for help.  He’d cry for hours uncontrollably.  The memories washed over him like Katrina’s killer surge.  Like them, he couldn’t escape.

Tomorrow there’d be Katrina anniversary specials.  He knew most of them would focus on New Orleans.  But he’d struggle with his own memories. Alone.  He’d think of the family he couldn’t save. And the incredible pain suffered up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

He remembered when he spoke at Emerson College in Boston about the storm. And he thought about the nice young student who asked him the simple question, “Did Katrina hit Mississippi?”  He knew it had. He had the scab on his heart to prove it.

Gus curled up in his lap and they both drifted off to sleep. He had to take a quick nap before his shift began. The nightmares came in like the surge had six years ago. His scab was being picked at. Katrina was making landfall once again.