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Biloxi Bubble

by Cathy Strickler
March 26, 2006

Charles and Cathy Strickler are charter members of our Fellowship. They spent five weeks in Biloxi, Mississippi helping with Hurricane Katrina cleanup. Cathy spoke to us as part of the UUSC Social Justice program - After the Storm. The HUU Social Justice Committee presented them with a Certificate of Appreciation and a check to donate to their favorite charity. If you would like more information on the organizations they volunteered with, contact:

Hands On Network
2113 Pass Rd.
Biloxi, MS 39531
Phone: 228-257-6094

We got to the Hands On Network center on Martin Luther King Day after a smooth 2-day road trip down I-81, stopping at the Civil Rights museum in Birmingham that morning. My husband, Charlie, and I, retired, wanting to be warm, physically active and hopefully, helpful, had come to work for 2-6 weeks, depending on when we wore out. We lasted five.

The first thing I figured out was that you don’t acknowledge another person’s presence unless you’ve eaten or worked with them. At first this bothered me but I soon came to understand how the random constant flow of 70 -120 people in the commons area would be overwhelming otherwise. In fact it became overwhelming even with those parameters. After being there for four weeks I felt like I was stuffed full of nice people, my body couldn’t take another encounter with another nice person or else I was going to vomit. I don’t remember ever feeling that way before.

The first night we put our air mattress up on the 25’ wide sleeping loft that wrapped around and overlooked the commons area where we ate, people walked right by where we were lying. What a change from the complete privacy of our bedroom at home. The next night we put up our backpacking tent and at least had visual privacy.

I had been there maybe three days when I had the urge to hang a big banner over the edge of the balcony saying ‘this is fucking overwhelming’. This got a laugh. About the same time I realized that I was starved for visual beauty. I never realized how important it was to me, but there, there was none, only destruction and civilized commercial ugliness. I had fantasies of making a beauty alter on a low wall on the balcony. A beautiful piece of cloth with a vase of fresh flowers and another pretty object to be gotten from somewhere but I never did it. I stayed drained, tired and mildly depressed, just coping with what was in front of me, not initiating anything. We got there Mon. night and the first pretty thing a can remember seeing was on Sat. afternoon, like a mirage in the middle of the desert, was the outside of a gay friendly bar, Just Us, painted as a mural of a jungle panorama framed by bamboo architecture so that you felt like you were on a veranda but really just standing there in the street where you were surrounded by a concrete wasteland. We ended up doing a U turn and in the bar, dancing and with the second round of drinks bought by the performer working there that night. We had spent the day clearing debris, big tin pieces of roof, sheets of plywood, cinderblocks, etc. and the contrast was surreal.

That same morning we had cleared a plot for an older Vietnamese man who invited us into his apartment for fried rice. His home had been destroyed. He was a boat person from the war and while waiting on the beach his 3 y.o. son had become so dehydrated that not only did he drink urine but also Mr. Vu cut his own wrist so his son could drink his blood. Mr. Vu eventually had a psychotic break and was running down the street naked. His son, now an MD, had him committed. He told all this with smiles, laughing, except rarely when you could tell there was pain, maybe too much to let out.

The next beauty I saw was the cocktail lounge in one of the casinos. I told Charlie I had to get away, we had been there a week and all the group togetherness was getting to me. So we sat and I had a chocolate Martini and absorbed the beauty of the curved wood around the bar where there was no sign of the storm unless you looked out the window and saw the gambling barge sitting at a 30-degree angle.

I forgot that there was a big red Camellia bush blooming in the base parking lot looking like a woman in an evening gown that had lost her way and ended up at a county fair. Right beyond the Camellia was the boundary fence and thick growth on the other side. It was there that I saw the only rat pack I’ve ever seen. One night when we turned on our headlights, four to six rats scrambled into obscurity.

The next beauty I saw was the inside of a grand theater in the middle of Biloxi when we went to see ‘The Vagina Monologues’. Again, I couldn’t soak enough of the beauty in. And the production was flawless, so elegant and eloquent. That same weekend we saw a great production of ‘Ordinary People’ at the Biloxi Theater, no beauty there but living art. And Sunday we could have seen ‘The Foreigner’ by fellow Virginian Larry Shue but instead we ended up at a live Dixieland jazz fest at an Elks-American Legion Hall. The average age there was 65 and we were used to average age of 30 so it was with a sigh of relief that we enjoyed the women doing the second line circle strut in their black and silver coordinated outfits with decorated umbrellas. One woman was trying to give her umbrella to another who didn’t want to dance so I offered to take it and moved to that wonderful soulful music. A couple of days later I asked one of the volunteers who grew up in Pass Christian about the dance and learned it stems from funerals there. I wonder now if I was out of line and disrespectful to have taken the umbrella. It was not out of grief that I danced, but I needed to dance for whatever reason, maybe it was grief to a lesser degree. My overall point here is the wealth of art available here on one weekend in the middle of loss all around. The need for normalcy and control in the face of chaos must be universal.

The next beauty that I saw was during our fourth week there when 2 other volunteers and I finished work at 3 and went to the Buddhist temple in Biloxi. It, too, sits in the middle of an urban wasteland with an entrance garden and a sanctuary with large serene murals on three sides - Buddha under the banyan tree with a full moon, a goddess in an Asian garden with a footpath and gazebo by a lake, Buddha teaching and Buddha dying. Beautiful bouquets of flowers on the alter, an ornate drum and gong. Perfect peace. Then we walked into the room behind the alter filled with more art including a mural depicting at least 15 scenes of blood dripping torture with Chinese script. We all thought, darn, they messed it up (religion) again. The two guys I was with were out of my normal sphere of acquaintances. Jeremy, young, big and tall, dark long free flowing hair, masters from Stanford in product design, was there for only 5 days, needing to get home to Seattle the next day and then fly to Toronto for a job interview. And Armando, middle aged, short, stocky, heavy machine operator that grew up in a Belize Mennonite community speaking only German until he was 17, now living in North Dakota. He was there for a longer stay, maybe to find work for pay but in the mean time working for free. After the temple we went to Just Us so Armando could fight his cold with 3 shots of tequila. Jeremy watched, I sipped and we all enjoyed the haven. The three of us had spent the day along with 2 others from our group, measuring a stockyard full of donated windows and making a spreadsheet so that the interfaith distribution center knew what they had. We felt good about what we had done and the woman running it was appreciative. She, previous to ‘the storm,’ worked in her husband’s chiropractic office but since business was off took this temporary paying job. It ended that day. They are debating whether to stay or move, with loyalty to friends and place pulling against low business and physical safety. Their secure world no longer exists. The two other volunteers in our group that day are memorable and have a place in my heart. Beau grew up in Pass Christian, went to Andover and has a math degree from Dartmouth. His family had, previous to the storm, relocated to Bozeman, Montana but Beau felt at loose ends there and was in Biloxi to play his special niche as a native volunteer. He did it well, being patient and friendly with everybody no matter how clueless. Beverly, 67 y.o. and her husband from Albuquerque came to help because their daughter and son-in-law were killed in a car wreck in Oct. with their grandson in the back seat surviving but not walking yet. Their personal grief still raw but healing, they sought a change of scenery and a place to help others in pain. She worked at Penny’s her whole life and Norm was an airplane mechanic, built two himself. I’ve never seen a man’s face so openly grief stricken. He told me as we were standing in the middle of a debris filled yard, that he had gone to a grief counselor and they had supported the trip to Biloxi. His skills, at 74 y.o., were needed and appreciated. On another job when we worked together clearing debris for an east Biloxi family where the grandfather had built the now non-existent house, Norm talked to the grandson, Gentry, now living in Texas but back home post Katrina. There was a problem with the water pipe into the FEMA trailer. During lunch Norm got the tools and parts and fixed it. By the time we left Biloxi 3 weeks later Norms face looked better. On that same job near the end of the day when the bare lot was starting to look relatively pretty, I walked over to pick up a few missed bricks when I realized they were protecting a 2-inch marijuana plant. I examined it to make sure and saw another one unprotected near by. I don’t know who put the bricks there; maybe somebody in our group or maybe it was the grandson who helped us clean up. I hope it helps. He said his father was taking it hard. They were going to rebuild, not sell, long roots.

Another plot we cleared, different day, different group, was of a young middle school teacher, Damian. Both he and his wife’s house and his father’s house had been destroyed. He was in a FEMA trailer behind where the house stood, 3 blocks from the coast. He had been helping his father get re-established and hadn’t cleared his own place. He helped us and asked that we look out for arrowheads. His neighbor, also washed away, had grown up on one of the barely visible barrier islands in the gulf and had collected them as a child. We didn’t find any. Damian talked of the row of mature azaleas, all gone. Attachment to loved plants is strong. Some narcissuses were blooming and we savored that beauty together.

We talked to a psychologist that we met at the play that says he thinks the death rate has doubled. He told of his 41 y.o. psychologist friend who just died of a heart attack after working 80 hr. weeks and redoing his own home. Another woman we met in Pensacola, where we went for a one-night respite, owned the restaurant where we were having lunch. She and her MD husband worked intensively in Biloxi right after the storm; he told of how many people asked him for a prescription to end it all. I know from talking to a woman based in the East Biloxi FEMA office that a lot of mental health services are in place but they can’t serve every person. I’m sure many use tobacco and alcohol or other drugs for relief. Volunteers our age were all surprised at the almost universal smoking of the under 30’s, just in our group. I only hope it’s situation based. Alcohol was the same. In the face of overwhelming need, a ‘what the hell’ attitude seems logical for a little relief. And then you get up the next morning and do it all over again. And that’s just the volunteers. The victims are still in shock. We had a fancy program and dinner at the base with 2 Biloxi councilmen giving awards to our group leaders and they acknowledged their own depression still and the implied paralysis that goes with that. I was impressed that an elected official was willing to be transparent and not need to have a façade of strength.

Another day, with a full moon and low tide, there was an organized beach cleanup with the Kessler air force personnel and us, about 200 people. They told us at the beginning that if we found any bones to call an official. In the Biloxi Sun-Herald it stated the week before that 50 had died and 400 were missing from the storm. Maybe some were undocumented Vietnamese and maybe some of them were in the sound. No bones were found that I heard of. We did a great cleanup and hauled an incredible amount of refuge to the high tide mark to be hauled away later. I left early afternoon because I was on the cooking crew to fix a Thanksgiving dinner at base. I went right from the beach to the kitchen, washed my hands, and chopped like crazy. Nobody got sick. Mid afternoon, we cranked up the Latin music, somebody made a beer run, we danced and cooked and put on a feast for all 70 there, thanks to the main cook, French Evon, a 55 y.o. house husband, father and runner from Maine, down for his second time.

One day of the second week a request was made by our leaders that instead of various choices for work crews that as many as possible go to a playground building site 30 miles away where Laura Bush would be later for the dedication ceremony. Most of us went out of wanting to make our leader happy, understanding his desire for good publicity for our group in spite of also understanding that we would probably be aiding the success of the next Republican candidate there which did not sit well with many. I was pretty sick, had hoped to rally, didn’t, and spent the day in the back seat of the car, taking 2 naps and with the high light of my day being a chocolate shake on the way home, never having seen Mrs. Bush.

A gathering that happened with some regularity was a red wine cocktail hour in the corner of the loft in front of our tent. We’d fill our cups and invited anybody who passed to share the wine. There were always takers and good conversation with most of us sitting on the raw plywood floor.

Showers were another highlight, one inside limited to four minutes, 2 outside. I only took one outside on the warmest day we were there and it was lovely, also the only day I put on shorts.

Carlos is a 10 y.o. that I met while tutoring at an elementary school in Gulfport. Hands On sent 4 people there four days a week at the schools request to do reading tutoring with Title I kids. I worked with Carlos 3 times; he seemed so serious and genuine. The first time we read about the life cycle of the Emperor penguins, it followed ‘March of the Penguins’ totally. I asked him if he had seen the movie which he didn’t know about so I asked the teacher what were the chances of him seeing the movie and she didn’t know about it either; a good example of how everyone there was focused on recovery and not tuned in to popular culture. She and her husband were still living with her parents while they tore out and replaced sheetrock, replaced floors and repainted. Her father is a general contractor but there were no strings to pull for a faster job done. Her husband was Carlos’ mentor and she said she’d make sure Carlos watched the movie. She said his family had lost everything. I bought the DVD for $13. and gave it to the teacher for school use with Carlos taking it home to see first, he said he had access to a DVD player. The third time I went he still hadn’t watched it but I think he will. That day was educational game day after reading so we played a board game where you land on cities around the world. One was San Juan and I said we had lived in Puerto Rico for 2 years. Carlos responded by saying he wished he had my life. I was shocked, and reassured him that with hard work he could, blabbing on about education or skilled trades, saving money for travel rather than on other things. I think I messed up and should have said ‘what do you think your life will be like?’ to give him space to express feelings of hopelessness and to let him know somebody understands. But I didn’t. I might still write him a letter, which I just figured out writing this. I have the teacher’s info. When we got back at 3, I started cleaning the walls of the commons area when an 11 y.o. from a DC private school there with her father, came up to me, it felt like she assaulted me, and asked why I was cleaning, I didn’t need to clean, why was I cleaning, why was I cleaning? I was really angry, everything put together – feeling bad about Carlos, her seeming sense of authority, my irritability symptomatic of depression- that the best I could muster was a very controlled, ‘I just want to do it’. She continued awhile with her emphatic statements, finally leaving when she didn’t get the results she wanted. That was the second time I blew it with a child that day. I wish I would have said ‘I think clean walls are prettier than dirty walls and I’m just trying to create a little beauty around here. Want to help?’

The very first day there I worked at a Salvation Army distribution center. One of the staff there wore his badge with his name, Stress Free. One of our group running a pallet fork there that day just got his PhD in Biomedicine and was applying for a DC job at NIH and wanted work on healthcare policies. Also, that day a group of nursing students from Nebraska was working there with their public health professor. We had been around each other all day but didn’t realize until the very end of the day who each other was. We were in school together at VCU, worked together in Richmond in P.H. Nursing and even socialized some, one time spending the evening in the late 60’s at the strip joint The Black Cat Lounge on F or G St. that her cousin owned. It was quite a reunion with her students enjoying that last story. It was so hard to believe that young Carole Lainof was now old Carole Lainof, a year younger than me.

The second day I worked at the ‘Audubon Park’ in Gulfport. It had been severely damaged; trees felled blocking paths and trashing path bridges and outlooks, huge sections of a house and other debris left on the stream bank and over the rest of the park. A group of 13 worked hard, and I mean hard, all day and at the end felt good about the changes we had made. So that was about 80 hours of work. After we stood for pictures in front of the room size pile of debris we made by the road we watched a blue heron and an air force jet match trajectories with the heron winning a perspective race. The next week a different work crew went to the same park for lunch including another woman and I that had cleaned the week before. Separately we said to others, ‘I can’t believe it, it’s like we didn’t do anything’. Our focus was so skewed that we had minimalized all the debris still waiting. Humbling.

I enjoyed Becca, a Jewish princess, playing her soulful trumpet, just for herself, in the tent field at sunset. Becca, whose pants consisted mainly of duct tape, I’m sure had a grand Ba Mitzphah. Then there were Evelyn and Lorrie, married 54 yrs., who had come to gamble as was their custom but when they saw Biloxi did no gambling, found Hands On and worked hard the whole time they were there. Good Republicans from Va. Beach. And there was Rusty, 87, who came with her daughter and granddaughter for 5 days, the 29 y.o. granddaughter just going through a hard breakup. Rusty amazed everyone and got a standing ovation when she left. It is the routine every night after dinner to have a meeting-new arrivals introduce themselves, reports of that days work are made, the sign up board for cooking and cleaning is filled for the next day, work crews for the next day are explained, and then goodbyes given by those leaving the next day. From the first day I started thinking about what I wanted to say. Before going to sleep, it served as a good vehicle to make sense of what I was experiencing. In the end I choked up, said nothing eloquent, thanked the long termers and said what a precious time it had been. So much for 5 weeks of planning. Charlie’s was a perfect balance. He sat on the back of a chair facing everybody, impersonating the former director who gave long talks about the group’s progress, then stood up on the chair and said with a thrust of his arm ‘YOU ROCK!!’ Everybody loved it and he hadn’t been thinking about what he wanted to say at all, had just thought of it that afternoon.

There was Michelle, a born again Christian from Phil. who as a child had been part of a hostage group taken in Iran in the 80’s. She said she still is emotionally affected by that experience. How trauma sticks, no matter how hidden or long ago. One night at dinner we were sitting with her and a Unitarian minister that had just moved into base and was working on the interfaith task force, who more or less verbally attacked Michelle for her beliefs. Ordinarily the same words could have come out of my mouth but for some reason my sympathies were with Michelle. I don’t think that I will ever feel as hard hearted as I have in the past toward anyone in that group. It’s like I realized zealotry could come from any quarter, including my own heart.

I need to say how much every person we talked to thanked us deeply saying ‘I don’t know what we would have done without you’. In Pensacola, we gathered shells to take back to everybody at base, told a local woman also collecting shells what we were doing and she gave us all her shells, she had only the best, olives, Dutch bonnets and others. We took them back, spread them on a table in the commons with a note explaining their history. Many people felt her love that day that took a shell as a visual reminder of the wide net of love. On a lighter note, one that spoke of love and laugher, we also collected beads at the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade our last full day there, for everyone at the base and spread them out, too, for everyone to enjoy and choose their favorites. When we were standing along the parade route, we told people around us what we were doing and all together we ended up with about 6 gallons of beads, cups and trinkets. It was so much fun, we moved the car and stood along the parade route again, repeating our routine. It was so much fun all over again. Finally, we went to eat about 4 at a deli ½ block off of Canal and talked to a local couple our age. We were almost entirely cut off from news while we were at base and I had learned of Mayor Nagin’s ‘chocolate city’ remark from a phone conversation with my brother in WV. I asked them what they made of that story and they said it was said to a black group as a political stump speech and showed a lack of judgment on his part but that it really wasn’t a big deal to them. Then the man went on to say that he himself was a racist, prefacing his next comment that I forget, because I was so shocked he would say that to us. I countered him; we swerved in another conversational direction and kept an I-Thou relationship. The world is so interesting. The parade itself had an unexpected emotional impact. We drove in from Biloxi mid morning, passing miles of destruction visible from I-10, parked 2 blocks from the beginning of the parade and stood only 10 minutes until the first full blast of the brass band hit me and I started balling, hard blocks of grief, hard blocks of gratefulness that this strength and normalcy prevailed.

On two more sort of light notes there was the barge and extreme makeover. The gambling barges that were washed ashore and featured in the national media were still impressively there when we got to Biloxi. They made me say I wish I could have seen the force that did this. Now they were being compacted and our group was asked to help salvage one of them before the compactor moved in. Elaborate rigging was mounted by our extremely skilled tree person and many tables, industrial kitchen equipment and slabs of granite were lowered and hauled away to be used in soup kitchens, volunteer centers and auctioned on ebay with profits to aid nonprofit construction work in Biloxi. This was coordinated by a born again Christian who brought 2 groups together in the face of opposition from the bottom-liners. He was in a unique position to make something good happen and he did it at professional risk. Then there was the extreme makeover TV show that rebuilt a public health clinic in East Biloxi, Charlie was filmed putting toys away and has a T shirt to prove it. He might be on TV.

Many work hours were spent ‘doing interiors’. This is moving all personal belongings out of a house, gutting all the sheetrock, insulation, wood that is not weight bearing, sometimes floor and ceiling, and hauling it to the curb. Then every nail and staple that can be pulled is, so that the ‘mold team’ can come in with their grinders and wire brushes, the shop vacs, the liquid chemical solution, all that cover every inch of exposed studs, floorboards and rafters. Then Andy, our ace homophobic professional painter comes in and sprays a sealant over everything. I tried to get him to go dancing at the gay bar but he wouldn’t, or maybe it just didn’t work out or maybe he didn’t want to dance with me. I will have a strong mental image for a long time of rough wood floors full of staples and nails sticking out ¼ inch, working my way, foot by foot around the room with one or two other people doing the same. It was very Zen. ‘Doing mold’ was hot in the marshmallow body suits and respirators, noisy with the grinders and vacuums, intense with keeping track of what surface you had or hadn’t done. Even though this is the heart of Hands On, there is a waiting list of 1500 homes, I only did it for 1 and ½ days because of it’s difficulty and my health concerns, probably unwarranted but unresolved. Other groups are just starting to train their own volunteers to do this much needed step, otherwise the mold will quickly ruin the new sheetrock and continue to dissolve all wood. But I think that money should be found to pay people to do this job. There are professional companies there doing mold but their backup is probably worse.

The coin of the day at Hands On is hard work, not educational achievement, life history or anything else. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh, if you’re gay or homophobic, or whatever. Everybody brings their hands. Of course, it’s not paradise. There were some people there that maybe were taking advantage of free room and board or who had emotional issues that made group living problematic. I asked the original director how many volunteers had been asked to leave and he said that out of 1500 probably only a dozen, for proselytizing, getting mean drunk, and inappropriately arguing with the power structure. I think some others were gently encouraged to think about leaving.

Now I’m back home, enjoying with new gusto, my pink bathtub, my fireplace blazing in the cozy brick wall, my red wine in a glass goblet on our kitchen table with the bright woven placemats from Guatemala, looking out the window through the bare tree branches to the sunset slipping behind the straight blue ridge that marks the WV line. So much beauty, I still can’t soak it in enough. I said soon before we left Biloxi that I felt like I hadn’t done anything. Our son said ‘that’s crazy’. It’s all relative. Intellectually, I know that I worked hard for five weeks but emotionally it seems like so very, very little. I haven’t found the right analogy yet. Maybe we moved one grain of sand where the whole beach needs to be moved.

I coined ‘Biloxi bubble’ when I first got there, sitting in the back seat of the work van, making light of the drivers’ many u-turns and circles to find work sites. Then I changed it to express the special situation and experience that I had there, feeling it was separate from the rest of my life. But as you might guess, the bubble popped and spilled out. I got a CD from Lydia, a graduate of Tufts who’s now working at Harvard’s School of Public Health. She was part of that drunk dancing on the stage group the first Sat. afternoon, as were two UVA graduates. And Beth, the best dancer I’ve ever seen who also always showed such sophisticated, sensitive social skills I was amazed. The music on the CD is what they chose for the jute box that day – ‘To Be With You’, ‘Shake It Off’, ‘The Thrill is Gone’. I cherish the memory. I cherish knowing so many people there, a bonding in my heart that comes only from shared purpose and work. I feel as if so many people gave me soft kisses on my cheek.

People we met are coming to visit: Shaun and Jim, Jeannie and Lincoln. Shaun and Jim are from Grass Valley, CA, and are taking a cross-country road trip. I was enamored by them both, as I was by so many of the young people who reminded me of our son. Jim at first had a hardened city, generation-X, persona but one day when he and I both were tutoring at the elementary school I turned around to see him smiling this beatific smile and the child he was tutoring. Ah, the tenderness. His façade cracked. Shaun is a film buff and together we sponsored the showing of ‘Lantana’ one night at the Spin Cycle. That’s where our free washers and dryers were and where the young set hung out. About 10 people watched it, negative comments by some at the end, no real discussion, but that’s ok, underneath that façade… Shaun wrote out a list of movies for us that he loves, I lost it, he wrote it out again with complete equanimity. Jeannie and Lincoln rode their bikes down from their home in Maine to a relative’s home in FL., took the bus to Biloxi, and plan to hike home via the Appalachian Trail. We hope to pick them up on Skyline Drive for a washing machine and salad break. They are a PT and engineer and are preaching the simple life by example.

There are more stories – of the hand made sailboat from TN that docked in Biloxi with the crew of 3 working with us for a few days, of the burned-out infant caregiver in the tent city who was creating psychological havoc, of pulling the huge 2’ long impaled pine branch out of the ground, like a difficult delivery, with a NYC bass player for an all female band that gets paid gigs in Manhattan. And of the sadness when treasured new friends leave and you learn to ask right away ‘How long are you going to be here?’ so you can decide how much you want to talk to them to protect yourself from further loss.

What I learned in Biloxi was that it is doable and worthwhile. Even though hurricane season starts all over again in June our work strengthened the social fiber needed to rebuild or to withstand another storm. It rebuilt my fiber. I got more than I gave.

What I hope is that others will do it, too.