Day Sixteen: Friday, January 20
Special Note: We had another whoppingly overwhelming day. The only person who might experience this day more extremely than we did is a woman named Sandy Conrad. Thirty or so years ago, Sandy was a Girl Scout camp counselor at a camp that Shawny attended. Now she is the wife of our host (Eddie Conrad of River Barge Excursions) and at the time of the storm in August 2005, she lived with her family in Bay Saint Louis, MS. She has now relocated with her two sons to a home that they purchased in Louisville, KY, and her husband commutes between Louisville and New Orleans to keep his business afloat (pun intended). We visited Sandy's Bay St. Louis house today. It is not in the condition in which she left it.
Sandy, we know that you are following us in our journey. Today our journey intersected with your life. We have seen your house, even though you just became aware that it was found and you have not yet seen it. Your first opportunity to see your house rests at the bottom of this page. Before you continue down this page, then, you need to think carefully about whether you are ready to hear about your house and see it. Though things there are pretty grim, we are happy to say that there is a tiny bit of good news to report as well. As we understand, you talked to our friend Jean today and said that you are looking forward to seeing our pictures. We hope they bring you some form of relief. After all, that's why we're here...
(Special Note #2: We called Sandy today and asked for permission to post pictures of her house along with our story of our encounter with it. She was ecstatic that we had been there, and she assured us that she is eager to see...)
We tried to sleep in today, but we've gotten so used to hopping up at 7:00 a.m. that we just couldn't stay in bed. We got up and made pancakes and then prepared a lunch for our drive up the coast. It probably sounds very sweet to imagine us packing a lunch and driving up the coast... But this wasn't that kind of drive.
We were again reminded that we haven't lost our capacity to be shocked and dumbfounded by the sights and sounds of the disaster zone. Today we left Greater New Orleans and even the state of Louisiana to assist St. Stanislaus School in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. This area of the coastline suffered not only a hurricane and accompanying flood, but also the tidal-wave-like storm surges that we have heard surpassed 26 feet in height.
We made our way over Lake Pontchartrain and then headed to Bay Saint Louis. As soon as we had crossed the state line, we knew that we were in an entirely different world. It just doesn't work to keep using the word "unbelievable," so we will say that we agreed amongst ourselves that if we were trying to make a movie set for a hurricane aftermath shot, creating something like what we saw today would seem extremely overdone.
The coast of Mississippi is a pile of splinters and rubble. We don't remember seeing one tree that was still alive. Most trees were no longer in the ground at all. The swath of land that is right along the coast looked like an enormous snow shovel had started at the beach and then scraped back for about a half mile, leaving everything in a pile pretty far away from where it belongs. As we understand, that is almost exactly what these enormous waves did.
We couldn't stop exclaiming over how destroyed this entire section of the state seemed to be. Things were scattered in ways that defied the laws of physics. Cars and boats (and, of course, houses) had obviously rolled and rolled and rolled so that they looked like they had been put in crushers. Also, though, we noticed that there seemed to be a bit more noticeable reconstructive activity going on there than seemed obvious in New Orleans. More FEMA trailers were already in place, more construction work was underway, and more people were around tending to their own properties. We also noticed that houses with steel framing at least had that framing still standing. (We actually kept thinking of the Three Little pigs and how steel reinforcement would have kept them from ever even fearing the wolf.)
Our friend Jean, Executive Director of Parkway Partners, guided us to St. Stanislaus school where we met Dan Zwerg, their sailing coach. He could easily be one of us. He is as gung-ho, fearless, and tireless as we are. Only a person like that could have found these boats, and only a group like ours could help to retrieve them. We were a match made in disaster heaven. He told us that he had followed the lines of the fallen trees to imagine where their team's boats might have flown. (Besides coaching sailing, he also teaches physics, among other things.) He then used satellite images from the internet to zero in on the location of the boats. They were far from water, and far from the place where they had been stored (Sandy Conrad's house).
On Friday he had blazed a trail into the mucky area that surrounds the marsh in Bay St. Louis. Equipped with a chainsaw, he and three seventh-grade boys made their way to a couple of the missing boats. They were understandably unable to recover them, as the boats were deep in the tangled woods, and the obstacles were nearly insurmountable. No four people could have gotten them out of there. But luckily for Dan (and, frankly, for us), we came along. With a crew of 26 people, the prospects of seeing those boats walk out of the woods greatly improved.
We parked at a local funeral home that had been completely blown out by the storm. Its casket showroom had been transported into its back lot, with open caskets scattered about, including a custom race-car-themed one. We marched past the odd display, and trudged out into the woods. We encountered quicksand-like mud in places, but fortunately for seven of us, Papa Hoot of the Hippie Camp had given us some serious steel-shanked muck boots. Those with the boots, therefore, were required to be the ones who stepped into the deepest mudholes that surrounded the boats we were after. Two of the boats actually belonged to Jean's Girl Scout troop from New Orleans. Those were the first two we found. They, along with their trailer, were wedged between some trees in some of the deep muckholes in the woods. With Dan running the chainsaw, we freed them one by one, and hoisted them up and out of the trees. Each one seemed virtually impossible to carry out, but in the end, we had no real problems.
As we began to carry them back to the clearing near the funeral home, we glanced to our right and saw something that we had been told we'd find out there: Sandy Conrad's house. Or at least most of the parts of it. We've seen lots of crushed houses by now, but for the most part, those houses don't belong to anyone that we know at all. We feel some kinship with Sandy and her family, though, because Shawny actually knows her, and because we have been treated so well by her husband Eddie and his associates.
Sandy's house was obviously a beautiful yellow beachhouse, and it clearly had lots of character in the form of interesting doorframes, trim, and probably lots of nooks and crannies. Those things are obvious even though at this point, the house is reduced to a pile that a normal-sized person (that is, NOT Casey!) could almost see over while standing at ground level. We don't know how tall the house was (it was one story; we know that), but at this point the roof is resting right on top of the floor to the attic, and the floor to the attic is resting right on top of the floors of the main house. We crawled in through a rooftop dormer and found all of the contents of the house collapsed on top of each other. Because we were entering through the attic, we found lots of soggy Christmas decorations and other smashed-up things that were probably not top priority items for us to salvage.
In fact, we had heard that there was only one item that Sandy really hoped had survived the storm: an unusual custom carving of a swan made from a very rare wood (burled cypress, maybe?). Things didn't look good for finding the swan, as we could barely get to anything inside the house at all. Dan had already been inside, and knew where we could find some important keepsakes, including china, flatware, and even crystal (yes, crystal! It is incredible how many wine glasses, champagne flutes, and other fine pieces of glassware have survived the storm in many of the houses we have visited). Five of us entered through the upper window (Stephanie, Bree, Mallory, Shawny, and Justin - Casey switched out with somebody later as well), and began crawling around the attic floor joists trying to see what we could reach underneath the attic floor. Mallory managed to maneuver her way under the floor, but things were too dark and cramped to really locate any particular item. Even under these conditions, quite a few intact items surfaced. We set up our usual bucket brigade, sometimes passing things through the roof to get them to containers that we could carry away through the woods. Eventually, there were no more items within our reach. In his usual superhuman way, Justin began to pull entire sheets of particle board up from the attic floor with his bare (well, gloved, anyway) hands. That way, we could begin to identify which rooms were underneath. Unfortunately, we kept finding ourselves over the bathroom(s?); we knew that this was not the room that we most needed to find. We were astounded, though, to find some items intact under the crunched parts of the house, including an original painting and some of the boys' homework notebooks. (Sorry boys! And Dan was there, too, so he can report in on your late assignments!)
We knew that we were spending too much time in the house, as there were still boats to retrieve. Still, we kept saying to each other "We GOTTA find that swan!" Dan finally convinced us to leave, so we started to make our way to the window. We looked one more time at a strangely-shaped wooden item that Stephanie and Bree had long before noticed just below our point of entry. This time, though, Shawny and Mallory agreed: "THAT'S the SWAN!" They tried to free it, but its unusual size and shape prevented it from fitting between the floor joists. Justin grabbed the chainsaw, cleared the house of all people, and cut through the crossbeam to free the piece. Victory!
We marched back through the mucky woods with all of the salvaged goods. Once we regrouped at the funeral home, we decided to walk back down to the beach to avoid dragging the muck into the bus. Dan told us that the other boats were somewhere out in the woods near the beach. We hiked in, but found that this hike was unlike any other we had ever done. We were on the edge of a marsh after all, and each step was a very squishy one. Incredible amounts of debris were everywhere, including an infinite number of boards with huge nails sticking out of them. In other words, we were very unsteady on our feet, but it was very important that each step be a careful one. We were up to the challenge.
We slogged and slogged through the thick mud and the dense (but dead?) woods. In fact, when part of our group dropped behind, we were unable to see each other or the "trail" we were walking. We started playing "Marco Polo" in the woods to find each other again. There was no doubt, though, that Dan knew exactly where he was going. He led us in a wide arc around to a little zone where quite a few boats and boat parts had landed. Two of those boats belonged to St. Stanislaus. Having struggled to walk in there carrying nothing of consequence, we couldn't imagine how we were going to walk out carrying two boats.
The first boat lifted out rather quickly and easily, and a strong group of troopers headed back into the woods to carry it out. The second boat, unfortunately, was deeply embedded in the mud. Those who had not carried out the first boat all joined forces to try to bring the second one up out of the mud. Those with the Papa Hoot boots went in deep enough that the mud almost squished over the tops of and inside their boots. (Eventually Dave experienced this exact agony. Yuck.) Twelve or so people put hands on the boat and grunted, groaned and struggled to just flip it out of the mud. Having done so, they made an awful realization: the entire hull was full of water, making the boat weigh altogether too much for any group of people to carry it out through that muck.
At the same time that this group was struggling with the swamped boat, the group with the first boat was having struggles of its own. Dan was leading with the chainsaw, but it was beyond difficult for the group to move in unison in the deep, deep mud. Emily, Arthor, Vanessa S., Stephanie, and Elvia came to the rescue. Using the scattered debris that was all around us, they led the boat-walkers and laid down boards, plywood, siding, and shingles so that everyone would have firmer footing and a better chance of succeeding.
Eventually, the group with the swamped boat put out a distress call to the boat-walkers. Darkness was clearly coming, and the group could not imagine a way to get that monstrous load through the woods, with or without a debris-boardwalk. Everyone gathered back at the swamped boat, and we joined all of our forces to set it up on its end, so that the water would eventually drain out. Because it was draining slowly, we had to abandon that boat with the knowledge that some of Dan's high school students would be able to get it out eventually. To make up for leaving a boat behind, a big group of us carried the first boat all the way out, put it on a trailer, and hand-pulled it to the "yacht club" (now a parking lot) down the road.
We were a mess. We wrapped everything in plastic, changed clothes if we had them, stowed all of the messy stuff under the bus, and finally began our drive home in the darkness and the rain. Jean's Girl Scouts were so happy that we had recovered their boats that they offered to buy us pizza for dinner. We accepted. Knowing that pizza would be waiting, we got to laugh and relax on the way home. The Verrips brothers talked about buying a unicycle together, a "really fancy one with shocks and everything, so we can do tricks."
We went through a lot today. It was very difficult. It was very messy. Some of the tasks were unfathomable. One of them was impossible. We made it through.
The way we lived our lives today is the way that some families in Mississippi are living their lives practically every day. For us, it was a grand adventure that was miserable at times, but definitely worth it. For them, we can't even imagine...
Sandy, Eddie, the boys, St. Stanislaus, Dan, and the rest of Bay St. Louis: we wish you well. We look forward to the days when these pictures will be items over which we all say, "Do you remember THAT?!? We're glad THAT'S over..."
P.S. We've noticed something interesting. We don't call our camp "camp" anymore. We call it "home."
Jean, Executive Director of Parkway Partners, introduced us to Dan, the St. Stanislaus sailing coach. We worked with Dan all day to recover his team's boats out of the swampy woods.
This group carried out the first boat that we found, which belonged to the Girl Scout troop that our friend Jean leads.
Led by Chris and Dave one of the first recoveries of the day was this two-boat trailer found at least a quarter mile into the woods. Two boats were found near it and also brought out by our group.
Our super-human group hauls the trailer for the sail boats to a safe location.
Justin and Shawny look at what is little is left of trees and homes with amazement.
Vanessa F. stands tall next to a fallen over tree, the area seen are the roots of the massive tree.
Bree stands by another fallen tree.
Justin took this picture from a tree he climbed in order to locate Eddie and Sandy Conrad's house. The group was following those lifting the trailer and looking for some semblance of a path in order to make it to the collapsed house. This part of the swamp (actually every part of the swamp) had a bug problem to say the least; the DEET, the tiny gnats, large mosquitos, and the rain created a mixture of dead bugs and bites on most of our faces and clothes.
This is how we found The Conrads' house, flattened, moved more than 500 yards, and turned 180 degrees from its original location. The only level of the house that we were able to see and enter was the attic, which was level with the ground.
This is the only entrance and view we had of Sandy's house. Only five people were allowed in at a time so the rest of us assembly-lined the family's crystal and china out to dry ground.
A bucket brigade coming out of the only exit at Sandy's house.
A photo from inside the Conrad home. Though this shot makes things look roomy, this is an atypically spacious section of the interior.
Stephanie, Casey, Shawny, Mallory, Justin and Bree searched through the remains of Sandy Conrad's house in Bay St. Louis. The group managed to salvage some cherished items such as some crystal, china, paintings, and Sandy's beloved hand-carved swan.
This group followed Dan as he used a chainsaw to clear the path for the last two boats out of the marsh.
As daylight dwindled, the guys managed to carry out one of the last two boats. Unfortunately, the final boat had to be left behind.
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