From the edge of Katrina...
The View from the Eastern Shore (Mobile Bay)

I have just returned from my first art show, which was held in Daphne, Alabama. Daphne, like its more famous sister, Fairhope, is situated on Mobile Bay’s eastern shore, just before you drive over the long bridge and then down into the tunnel into Mobile itself. High bluffs line the eastern shoreline. The Interstate 10 exit is rife with commercialism, chains of every sort.

I’d passed through there for nearly two decades without getting of for longer than it takes to fill a tank with gas, or grab some quick food. Then I’d be on my way to New Orleans, or back to Tallahassee. But something about the magnificent view of the bay as I looked westward toward the big city glistening on the far shore, and the contour of the ground on the eastern edge, always made me wonder about what towns called Fairhope and Daphne and Spanish Fort would be like.

As I became a jewelry artist and then an exhibiting jewelry artist, I began to hear about Fairhope’s spring art show. The first time I applied, I was not accepted, and so I still did not see Fairhope. Passing through there again several years ago, I caught wind of the fact that the show was up and running. But I was with my elderly parents, heading toward New Orleans to see the D-Day Museum, and Fairhope was a long way down the bay, parking would be a hassle, and walking around would be tiring and time-consuming. So we continued driving west. (The D-Day Museum is/was a fantastic museum to WWII, its ending, and how the war was won. I have not heard its fate during Katrina…)

The next year after this trip to New Orleans, I again applied for the Fairhope show and I was accepted. And it was at that point that I first saw this dear little town. My friend, Melanie, had ties to Bay St. Louis, MS, and had often spoken of how wonderful it was. Over the next few years, I came to think of Fairhope and Bay St. Louis as bookends, two coastal villages looking back at each other, Bay St. Louis looking east, Fairhope looking west.

Like Ocean Springs, MS, Fairhope and Daphne were located a bit back from the most open water, hence further back from most storm surge. Below Fairhope, where the bluff tapers to sea level, surge from Katrina did slam ashore, reducing The Grand Resort and close by residences to construction sites. When I first beheld Bay St. Louis, its proximity to the open sea freaked me out. It was lovely, it was interesting, and I couldn’t believe it had lasted so long. Today, it is merely toothpicks. All of St. Louis Bay is demolished, all the way in to Diamondhead. Waveland and Pass Christian are gone. There’s evidence that the surge was almost 48 feet. The water rose quickly and took with it all the little towns that had dared to perch on the beaches. So far, Daphne and Fairhope have dodged both Ivan and Katrina

A news commentator said that even without taking New Orleans into account, the damage to the Mississippi coastline alone would register as this country’s worst national disaster ever. I think we cannot understand the scope of the destruction to the west of Mobile Bay’s eastern shore. It doesn’t begin right across the bay. Mobile did receive some surge and flooding, and the city has received many new school children from evacuee families, but the real destruction is farther west and south, where water meets land.

Until last week, the survivors along the coastline of Mississippi were dependent on individuals of good will to figure out that they needed everything, from medical care to drinking water, to clothing, to diapers, to food. The government didn’t get there. The military didn’t get there. We can build bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates rivers during the fog of war, but we can’t manage to get aid to our own citizens on the mainland of our own continent.

In Daphne and Fairhope, I found numerous Red Cross shelters and collection facilities. Private citizens and churches were running supplies over to the Mississippi coastal towns. At the art show, I talked with artists who have lost everything, save the inventory that was in their vehicle when they fled. They have nothing to go back to. They are bankrupt and selling down the last of their art works. No one yet knows how many other artists were in the path of Katrina.

I also spoke with people whose homes or businesses went underwater in New Orleans. They don’t know the fate of their buildings, and therefore their own fate. They told me they’d be my customers, if they knew they were free to buy art.

And yet I had a good show. People turned to art for diversion for awhile. They also spent their money with regional artists, to support us. They sensed how fragile we are, too. How quickly we can go away, how quickly we can end up as Wal-Mart cashiers.

My friend, Amy, who allowed me to stay in her family’s home near Daphne when I lost my motel reservation (too many storm evacuees huddled there), understands how important it is to reach out to those who are now displaced. She also told me her thoughts on art: “I don’t know much about art theories; I just know what makes my eyes happy.” I hope to always do my part to make peoples’ eyes happy. Their souls, too.

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Six Days Later...

I have now heard from everyone I'm directly connected to from New Orleans. They all got out ahead of the storm and have alighted in distant communities. Feeling there's nothing left to go back to now, they face their futures with less planning than they would have put into a weekend getaway. And they are the lucky ones.

Brad is in Baton Rouge, no doubt finding effective ways to organize the refugees crowding that city and to alleviate their misery. David and Vera are in Minneapolis and Madeline Island, WI, still flinching from this sudden change in their lives and thinking that they are now, perhaps, residents of that new region.

You gotta understand: David, Vera and Brad are New Orleans for hundreds and hundreds of people who have passed through that city wanting to taste something of authentic N'Awlins. Brad and David are both transplants, from decades ago, from Pennsylvania. Vera is a true native of the New Orleans area. Spinning out from them, by less than six degrees of separation is everyone else who ever came into contact with their city. For them not to be there means there is no there there.

Looking back on what we might have taken for granted: that these wonderful human beings who welcomed us all into their homes, their lives, their hearts, and informed us of New Orleans culture and let us sample it in unique ways.

In the 1970's Brad began to publish his newsletter, Dialogue. David began to publish his newsletter, The Southern Agitator. And I founded a cooperative/collective newspaper in Tallahassee called Spectrum (long before that word came to be so overused). In an era before personal computers, email, blogs, cell phones, or even phone answer machines, we all managed to find each other and to network our publications together. We had different points of view in our respective publications, but we held a shared mission: to illuminate the thinking of the Left, of progressives, of community builders and activists. To push back against what bumper stickers now call "the dominant paridigm." These publications were the media arm of a complex movement that included food co-ops, land co-ops, alternative schools, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, environmental issues such as anti-nuclear energy and renewable sources of energy. A lot for disparate young people to critique in the society and to try to take on effectively. And yet we did it with great confidence that we could.

David became a resident in a large Spanish-style set of houses that had been united as cojoined twins and turned into an apartment house with six large apartments. Over his 25+ years there, Crete Street (the name of his street and the proper name of his building) hosted at least twelve crawfish boils that became famous throughout the city and beyond. Crete Street runs up the the New Orleans Fairgrounds, home of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the crawfish boil was held on the last Saturday of the two-weekend festivals. The boils always began early in the morning, with skilled cooks showing up in the back yard to hook up gas-fueled boilers and to lay out long tables on sawhorses, which were then covered in rolls of unprinted newsprint. As each boil was successfully completed, two strong men would pour out the contents of the large pots across the tables and feasting would begin. Corn and potatoes and onions and crawfish and spices would slursh down the tables and the eaters would line up and eat their fill, until they could eat no more. New friendships would be made and old ones renewed. Kegs of beer would be drunk. A small campfire ring would burn in the center of the brick patio's spiralling layout. People would come and come and come. David would often go to bed for the night long before the boil was ended. And gypsies would arrive deep in the night, bangling and jangling. This was New Orleans.

Some of us experienced the Harmonic Convergence on that same spiral patio. Jim drew a chalk dragon that followed the spiralling bricks and we had a fire and it was a quiet event. We watched the night sky pass and wondered about the Universe, with deep space starting just meters above us.

From the rooftop of Crete Street, you could see the neighborhood below and over to the rooftops of the Fairgrounds grandstand. If you strained, you could hear the horse races being run and JazzFest musicians making their music.

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All week, people have been getting in touch with me, to see what I think and feel about New Orleans. My son, Kevin, asked me this several times, before I gave him a partial answer.

Like everyone else, I have been following events as they've unfolded on TV all week. I concentrate on street scenes behind TV reporters, trying to catalog what I see: flooded streets, lootings, desperate people wanting rescue. Sometimes I recognize a street that isn't destroyed.

And I, like everyone, am devastated. This is a loss so tremendous, I cannot yet wrap my emotional arms around it. I find myself weeping several times a day. I am so devastated for my friends and their friends and the poor of the city. I am terrified for the artists, because their work is so delicate and irreplaceable; as are their incomes. Artists are never insured. To feel even remotely useful, I purchase toiletries and children's toys and box them, routing them to the Astrodome. In Mississippi they still need drinking water. I'm in touch with all sorts of people, such as I can find them, trying to get help out there.

Today I learned that my art show in Daphne, AL, on the Eastern Shore might still occur this next weekend. But my hotel reservation is gone. Refugees fill my hotel, living in a building that experienced some storm surge. I speak with the concierge, someone I know from numerous art shows there. He's sorry I can't come, but I happily yield my reservation to those in need. He doubts the show will be any good, under the circumstances. But a friend in that area, who owns a shoe store, tells me that -- counterintuitively -- her store has been quite busy this week. People from Mobile have been coming in, to escape the yuckiness by buying high-end designer shoes. In her own defense, she's sent lots of beach-type shoes out to the Mississippi coastal areas where people lost everything. She has rent to pay. She wants to contribute to her chosen region. She offers me a bed in her home, if I find the show is still on. This is very sweet and I am grateful.

From Fairhope and Daphne, people are running vanloads of insect repellent, sunscreen, drinking water and charcoal to Pascagoula. It's as far into the damaged zone as they can get, and for some of the communities near there, it's still the only way anything so essential is still getting through.
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I have not been hearing about Ocean Springs, MS, a small town that sits immediately across a coastal bridge from Biloxi, to its east. I've heard people call in to NPR about Ocean Springs, but no one knows anything. Last night, I made it my mission to learn of Ocean Springs' fate. It is okay. The bridge is gone and the millionaire mansions that were being built right on the beach are gone, or will be condemned. But that particular town is not perched at the edge of mere sand, as were Biloxi, Long Beach, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Waveland or Bay St. Louis. Its founders took less of a chance on the Gulf and its propensity for strengthening hurricanes lucky enough to pop over or around Florida from the Atlantic or Carribbean. Ocean Springs is also on a rise. And so they received some damage, but not utter devastation. The Walter Anderson Museum and its fantastical paintings and murals survives. This is real American treasure and we should get down on our knees in thanks for this. If you do not yet know the work of Anderson, look him up.

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The South's history is rife with tales of killer hurricanes. Katrina, Dennis, and the Florida hurricanes last year are not the first to take us out. They are a return to our history. A hurricane sent a tidal wave across Lake Okeechobee a century ago. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote of such a hurricane. In the days before Doppler radar, reconnosance jets flying down and then up through the hurricanes' eyes, media graphics and 24-hour coverage, these storms just arrived on the horizon and struck. Can you imagine this?

But today, even in the time of incredible technologies allowing us to visualize these storms, we have thousands dead. And it is time to bury our dead. And time to bury our President’s foolish, rigid plodding toward an unnecessary war in Iraq. This natural disaster has dealt us a blow beyond the imaginings of terrorists, and we were undefended. And when the damage was done, our government was impotent in its response. This should cost the bastards their jobs. But they are all the leadership we currently have, and we can critique them later. For now, we need them to step up and do their jobs, completely without guile, without spin. Just do their jobs. We aren’t asking them to be spiritual leaders in an end-timers’ nightmare, but to affirm our lives with effective and appropriate leadership. FOX News needs to get real and stop spinning this situation from their American-heroics slant. Report real news. You have the reporters on the ground and you can do this. Quit acting like a propaganda machine for a failed regime.

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The Wiccan/pagan chant plays in my mind a lot these days: “We all come from the Goddess… and to her we shall return… like drops of water… returning to the ocean…” Oh, were it not so literally true.

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