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Heavy Weather or deja vu and the evolving business plan

 

Part One: Hurricane Gustav

 

It had been three years since Katrina, and Ellis Anderson, a local community organizer, songwriter, and musician, had partnered with Bay St. Louis and the Chamber of Commerce to put together a celebration--"A New Day in the Bay." Businesses along HIghway 90 were up and running; a new, improved infrastructure was being installed beneath the roads in Old Town. It felt like a "light at the end of the tunnel" moment. Summer was waning, flowers were blooming, and, we had, it appeared, lived through another hurricane season unscathed. Or so it seemed until Hurricane Gustav appeared in the Gulf.

 

The day before the "new day," Friday, August 29th, the anniversary of Katrina, most forecasters and politicians were predicting Hurricane Gustav would hit New Orleans--the same course predicted for Katrina before it jogged right and rammed into the Gulf Coast. This was not good news. Yes, the town was improving, but another hit from a major hurricane would likely wipe out those improvements and test the resolve of people who had sacrificed to rebuild their homes and lives. I was filled with dread when I drove to my substitute teaching job at Bay High School that morning. I couldn’t imagine going through it again. Yet that possibility seemed very real as I looked out at the gusting wind and thick layer of clouds, familiar weather in Mississippi, where summer humidity routinely induces spectacular storms that explode and disappear. But these clouds had been shuttling across the sky for days without producing a drop of rain. They hovered above use like alien spacecrafts in summer blockbusters, casting ominous shadows on roofs and lawns.

 

When I got to school I discovered Gustav’s churning winds had elevated the Bay, and roads and homes were beginning to flood. As a consequence many students had stayed home to help their families. It was a strange, mostly workless day. My students, who are generally fun-based extroverts, spent most of their time watching weather reports or debating whether they should leave or stay. The storm was two days away, and no one knew what would happen, but things were definitely different in the classroom. I’m sure the dire predictions (one Louisiana politician called it the worst storm she had ever seen) contributed to the mood, but as the day went on I realized the focus wasn’t on Gustav. A quirk of timing had turned us inward, away from tomorrow’s celebration and the storm speeding towards us. Instead of looking to the future, we looked to the past.

 

Bay High had opened ten weeks after Katrina, a short time considering the wholesale devastation. Several students have told me that those ten weeks felt like a lifetime. It’s possible they will never live as intensely or feel as deeply as they did then, their experiences comparable to those of soldiers who are shipped off and in a matter of hours or days set down in an alien land. My wife and I rebuilt our house during that first year. But the following year I subbed nearly every day. I noticed that when Katrina was brought up my students would shut down. Like most of us, they’d grown weary of the subject, though that wasn’t the case on the Friday before Gustav’s arrival. For the first time, I heard my students talk about Katrina. They didn’t say a lot; their voices were dispassionate, the details sketchy, the stories brief. Yet I sensed they were revisiting lived experience. My first instinct was to ask questions and elicit details, but I let that go and listened.

 

Authentic moments are rarely experienced in classrooms (or anywhere else), and by authentic I mean completely unguarded, the sort of moments best friends and families share. And though I may be wildly off the mark, I believe there was some of that feeling circulating in the classroom. The next day people were busy packing and fortifying their homes, so the "New Day in the Bay" festival did not go as planned. Only a handful of people came downtown. Some listened to a band that bravely played on, others walked in and out of the few open shops. As I looked out on the empty street, I felt bad for Ellis, who had worked so hard to put the event together, but I also thought about my students. When I came to the Gulf Coast, everyone I met told me a story about Camille, a devastating hurricane that hit the Coast in 1969. After thirty-six years there are still newspaper clippings taped to bar mirrors, memorial books for sale in gift shops.

 

Those kind of shared experineces distill and solidify over time, hatching stories that define a community, especially in a small town. My students were taking part in that proces in my classroom, beginning to weave the sketchy details of actual experience into a narrative worth repeating. In time their stories will coalesce and contribute to a "new" perspective of our home town, a perspective that will forever be tied to the havoc and ruin that was Katrina.