I'm asleep in the back of the truck. Air mattress died; all night I've been tossing on top of the hard plastic grooves of the truck liner. Gnats divebomb my face: the sheet over my head must have slid off. Even as I sleep, I can hear the ocean waves, taste the salt in the air.
My boyfriend Bob touches my shoulder, and I sit straight up. I still see the building. My first thought at six a.m. on a Sunday: "Casino's still there."
Later we find out that we'd parked on the same lot where during Katrina, one of the Biloxi casino boats landed on top of a hotel. Maybe you saw the picture of it on CNN.
"We've gotta go across the street," says Bob. There's a cop standing nearby, and the pavement behind us has been wet down. "We're in the perimeter."
I'm still batting gnats from my eyes as I stumble to the other side of the road. Several Mississippians holding cameras mill around the curb in front of empty slabs. Petunias bloom over the yards where people once lived.
I nestle back into my sleeping bag on the truck, now parked in the "safe zone." I overhear an older, heavy-set woman chatting to the people in a trailer next to us. "You can't have good without evil," she says. "You can't have happy without sad."
This statement, banal though it may be, seems significant as we continue to wait. Boats line up in the harbor. A helicopter flies overhead. All eyes are on the Grand Casino Biloxi.
Soon the older woman and her red-headed granddaughter join us. The girl chats with Bob as he readies his camera on the tripod. The woman zeroes in on me. She has much to say, so much to say, about her destroyed house and her dead husband's ashes and the girl's delinquent mother. It's only 6:15 a.m. When I tell her I'm from New Orleans, she takes the opportunity to criticize the people who didn't leave for the storm. "You know, the trains leaving there were only a third full," she tells me in her south Mississippi accent. "I think lots of those folks stayed just so they could steal from each other."
I should know better, but I still get thrown off guard when complete strangers tell me their ugly, racist theories. If I were black, they'd keep their ignorance to themselves. But I'm not black. I'm white and I'm a northerner, which means that I don't expect to hear this sort of talk. Even after nine years living in New Orleans, it still surprises me. Especially when it's not even 6:30 in the morning, and there's absolutely nowhere to get a cup of coffee.
I mention that the vast majority of people left behind were elderly who refused to go. The grandmother responds by telling me that she stayed in her Gulfport home, too. "I wasn't ready to abandon my house yet," she explains. The wind and the water didn't get to her, but when the pine trees fell on the house, then she got scared enough to get in her car and leave. I don't point out her hypocrisy, because I know she doesn't really fault the people of New Orleans for staying during the storm. She faults them for being there in the first place.
We've been waiting for it, but the noise is still a shock. Like gunshots or blown out tires-a violent bang! Bang! Bang! A few pieces of concrete fly out from the first floor. The building stands for a long moment, stands and then slides downward, as if begging for forgiveness. The sparse crowd cheers as a huge cloud of dust rises where the building had been.
Already the show is over. Less than thirty seconds after the first bang!, there's only rubble and dust clouds. The other onlookers wander off, ready to be entertained somewhere else. The granddaughter pulls her chatty grandma away so they can't get caught in the dust cloud.
I take the camera and try to zoom in on the rubble, try to catch the beauty and the sadness of it. Impossible. It's like trying to take a picture of tears from 400 feet away; maybe a pro could capture the feeling, but not me. I'm better with the small details, like the Casino Magic playing cards caught in the mud at my feet. The brave petunias in the morning light. The addresses of demolished homes spraypainted onto trees.
Since it's our first time on the Gulf since Katrina, we look around. First we visit the section of Highway 90 that used to run over the water from Biloxi across the bay. Katrina's storm surge racked the once-flat highway into a jagged skyline of concrete sections. Each part of empty highway runs diagonally from sky to water; all together, the sections look like a row of dominoes frozen as they begin to fall. It's much more shocking than the collapsing casino. I'm young enough that I don't remember life without four-lane interstates, and so I've always considered them a permanent part of the landscape, like mountains or the ocean itself. Not anymore. Seeing the gigantic slabs of concrete thrust into the air, with rebar jutting out like broken bones, it's clear to me how little control humans have.
And the ruins continue, for miles and miles along 90 into Gulfport and Long Beach. I can see why the residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast get so annoyed at all the attention given to New Orleans. Their devastation is just as severe, if not worse. Giant hotels and apartment buildings have no bottom floors, looking as if angry dogs had chewed them away, leaving only the support beams. Empty slabs and rubble piles stand where homes had been. Only live oaks have survived, but they are mostly scraped naked with only a few budding leaves.
Yet, there are signs of hope. Literally, most of the hope can be found on signs. Pass Christian is having a catfish festival soon; Our Lady of Fatima Church in Biloxi is having a summer fair. It's amazing that people go on in this battlefield between progress and nature, but they do. Eventually we leave the carnage to satisfy our hunger for breakfast and coffee; we have our own day to begin.
1. In mid-August, Harrah's Entertainment plans to open a new casino in a hotel across the street from where the Island View Hotel stood. Harrah's, which acquired Grand Casino Biloxi last year, is expected to announce its plans for the site of the demolished hotel late this summer.
Posted at 4:09AM on May 25th 2006 by Timon