Writer shares story of trip to Gulf Coast

Last Thursday, I met a man who was sifting through the rubble of his house, looking for family photographs and pieces of a china set, and the first thing he wanted to talk about was basketball.

"A Tar Heel!" he said, looking at my UNC hat. "Well, you can tell them you were out in the middle of a daggum disaster area, and you found a Tar Heel fan."

Then we joked about the fact that Roy Williams, having lost all of his starters, is facing quite a rebuilding year.

It didn't seem to trouble Tom Ellis, standing in the middle of his utterly destroyed neighborhood in Waveland, Miss., that his entire town was facing a monumental rebuilding of its own.

He held up a painting of his former home to show me how the hurricane ripped out all of the pine trees in the yard - much to his glee - and left only the towering oaks.

"That's going to be gorgeous whenever we get this lot cleaned up again," he said, smiling.

I smiled with him, in awe of a man who could look at his demolished home and already begin to think about landscaping.

Traveling for four days along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and through wrecked parishes of Louisiana, with DTH photographers Whitney Shefte and Brandon Smith, I didn't expect to feel welcomed.

Driving into a ruined town with a camera and a notepad doesn't feel the least bit noble, especially when so many others are driving in with food, water and blankets.

But everywhere we went, people wanted to share their stories. And their food. And water. And anything else they had left to offer.

Our first night in Louisiana, we'd planned to be eating out of cans in the back of our car. Instead, the Tangipahoa Parish president prepared a dinner for us and the N.C. National Guardsmen we were following.

In Waveland, as we toured a home that had been under seven feet of muddy floodwaters, a woman apologized over and over for not having finished cleaning up.

"I'm usually a very good housekeeper," she said, as if the mudcaked floors were somehow her fault.

We spent a night in nearby Bay St. Louis, Miss., where the vast majority of the homes were either flooded or gone. But we slept under a sound roof, with clean sheets and real pillows, thanks to an angelic couple named the Kellys.

With one of the few homes left unscathed by Katrina, they put us up like royalty and chatted happily over a breakfast of pancakes. I don't know how in the world I'm ever going to write a thank you letter that will do them justice.

We never went to New Orleans - I don't think we could have gotten in if we'd cared to try - but it didn't matter. A city is a collection of people, and the people of New Orleans aren't there anymore.

A lot of them are in Baton Rouge, where we spent an afternoon in a massive Red Cross shelter.

Rhonda Smith, whose whole family had spent 11 days in the city's convention center, bristled at the thought of being called a refugee.

"They didn't call those people who left Florida 'refugees,'" she said. "They were 'evacuees.'"

But the truth is that she and the thousands of other New Orleans residents scattered across the country haven't just been evacuated from their city - they've essentially been exiled from it. Seeing the reality of what that means was probably the most wrenching part of the trip.

Sitting on the floor of that shelter, my own home was a two-day drive away, and it felt too far.

Rhonda's was an hour's drive south, but infinitely farther.

And there was no way I could understand how she felt.

 

Contact Eric Johnson, a sophomore,

at ericjohnson@unc.edu.