It takes 16 hours to drive the 800 miles from Durham to Waveland, Mississippi. But it only takes a one-hour tour to see what little is left.
By the shore, the steel frames of "hurricane-proof" houses stand tall and empty. Tattered flags cling to the bare branches of trees, and cars with blown-out windows lay underneath the rubble of a former town.
The eye of the most devastating hurricane in recent history hit land in Waveland, Miss., just 50 miles east of New Orleans. The Category 5 Katrina ravaged the coast, uprooting everything in its path with 115-mile-per-hour winds. On the day I arrived, the breeze was nonexistent, but the damage could not be missed.
The relief compound I visited, affectionately called "Camp Katrina," sat in a strip mall parking lot. Medical trailers stood amid the ruins of a Kmart, Payless Shoe Source, Chinese buffet, Radio Shack and tobacco shop.
"They need to get those bodies out of there," a volunteer nurse says, nodding at the demolished warehouse. All I can smell are rotten eggs, methane and sea water. When I ask what she means, she explains, "That's the smell of rotting flesh."
Walking through the field hospital-nothing more than a horde of tents and trailers-I notice the Kmart slogan in large red letters across the face of the building. Some of the letters had blown off, but the rust stains on the concrete had kept the motto intact.
"Check it out," I say to another reporter. "It's 'the Saving Place.'"
Caring for hundreds of patients a day, the hospital buzzes from the moment the mandatory curfew ends at sunrise. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up a kiosk for people in need of monetary aid. Fifty feet away, the Christian Life Church from Alabama has created a makeshift market and cafeteria, providing essentials-peanut butter, water, paper towels, diapers, pillows-for people trying to rebuild their lives.
Bianca Guice, a mother of two from Bay St. Louis, Miss., evacuated the area before Katrina blew through but still lost nearly everything.
"I've lived in Mississippi my whole life, and I don't even recognize it," she says. "It's chaos, just pure chaos."
As we drove through the ruined streets of Waveland, which had been submerged in 12 feet of water, mud still stuck to the tires. Two other Chronicle editors and I saw house after house demolished by the hurricane. All that remained of one shorefront property were piles of bricks and palm trees blown to the ground. Another house facing the beach had rested on stilts to safeguard it from seasonal flooding. Only the platform remains.
The railroad tracks that run through Waveland and across the St. Louis Bay were skewed by the winds. I point to a few supports collapsed in the water, and someone tells me it used to be a bridge. Boats and cars had relocated to front yards, and entire houses lie in ditches along the highway. Telephone poles, useless, remain standing only by the tension of the wires that connect them.
Some houses had spray-painted messages from the residents: "John, Todd, and Colleen are OK;" "We're in Houston;" "We're OK." A neon-orange 'X' had lit up other doors. An 'X' with four filled quadrants marked houses that had been searched for occupants; the numbers on the bottom and right side indicated the number of bodies found on the first and second floors, respectively. We mostly saw zeroes.
Despite the state of the town, most people try to cling onto the positive things they have-whether it's their families, their homes or just their lives. Putting aside any differences, they've come together now: everyone here is, often quite literally, in the same boat.
Before leaving the compound, we stopped by the church's New Waveland Cafe for dinner-fish sticks, rice and a soggy side salad. I ate my meal and tossed the Styrofoam box in the trash, leaving a couple of fried strips and most of the salad behind. But as I walked by the tables, people seated in this makeshift cafeteria caught my eye. As they swirled their fish sticks in tartar sauce, I could see the gratefulness on the faces-they are thankful that the dinner they ate that fateful Sunday night Katrina hit was not their last.
"I was in my house. I tried to stay, and I got washed out the door by a wave," Louis Kieff says, his vacant eyes beginning to well up. "I stayed in the water all night and half the next day, and somebody in a jet-ski picked me up. I was hanging onto the upstairs porch."
Kieff, a resident of Bay St. Louis, sat alone at a table. He was nervously tearing apart the chicken breast he was served for lunch.
He went on to talk about his ex-girlfriend, whom he had seen earlier that day.
"We broke up three days before the storm, and I seen her today. And she made me feel like crap," he states with just the slightest bit of resentment, which quickly turns to hopelessness. "She said she wished I would've died in the storm. That would've made her happy. She doesn't need to treat me like that. All I ever did was treat her good. If I'd have died, it would've made her feel better.
"If I'd have knew, I wouldn't have fought the water. That way I would've at least made her feel better.
"It's hard. I'm by myself. I don't have anybody," he says. "I ain't eat nothing for about four or five days because I can't. I'm not even sure I can do this. It's just hard, you know?"
But I didn't know. I didn't know what kind of suffering he was experiencing, even though I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. I didn't know what it would be like to lose two brothers, to cling onto a porch in the rushing waters for 17 hours wondering if I'd live. I didn't know what it would be like to have forms shoved in my face without knowing how to proceed. I didn't know how anyone in this city could manage to go on day after day, with nothing but rubble around them.
I really didn't know at all.
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