I've recently returned from a week in Bay Saint Louis. These are some thoughts on what I found there.
The Go-to Guy
His business card reads like this:
Special Assistant for Fisheries and Natural Resources
And he's a marine biologist. Or he was. Now he's mostly a scavenger, a fixer, and the Go-to Guy for the what's left of the town.
He grew up in Bay Saint Louis, and in high school he anchored the swim team that beat Hattiesburg for the state championship and practiced in a spring-fed black water pool; there really is black water down this way.
Seventeen years ago, his buddy Gene Taylor went to Congress, and Chris went with him; that's the Special Assistant for Fisheries and Natural Resources bit. Twelve years ago, he came home to the Bay, and has been Taylor's eyes and ears here ever since.
Now, his full-time job is Katrina.
Chris lives in the old family home next to the CSX mainline, about a half mile off the beach. By either the grace of God or the lay of the land, when The Wave came, it went right around his place.
No water came in, but twenty-six of his neighbors did. Most moved on by that first Christmas. Six are still there: his sister Liz, her husband, and their four adopted children.
The old place looks pretty hardscrabble; the upstairs windows are still boarded over, the top half of the chimney and much of the paint was blown away during the storm.
There's a FEMA trailer and an old rusted-down 1952 Dodge truck in the driveway. The shed, the porch and the yard are filled with dozens of milk crates full of, well, stuff. Crockery and engine parts and road signs and powertools and cookpots and sacks of nuts and bolts and nails and even a keg converted into a still. In short, anything- absolutely anything- that might concievably be of use to someone, someday goes into one of Chris's crates.
It's all stuff he'll deal with eventually, because right now, he's still dealing with Katrina. Because Chris is also the keeper of the lists. Who needs their lot cleared, who needs their power run, who needs their house mucked, who needs help moving- anybody in The Bay who needs anything is on one of his lists.
Which all goes to make him a little forgetful.
At 4:30 of the morning on our second day in the camp, I sit in an old Tupperware chair under a nearly full moon watching the remains of a bonfire burn away. That's when I hear the sound of a bicycle racing to a stop on the grass behind me.
Chris. Chris is sitting on an old ten-speed that's been pulled out of somebody's trash pile. He's barefoot, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a greasy gray hoodie, and he's got a miner's lamp strapped to his forehead. And he's carrying a broomstick across the handlebars.
And I'm thinking to myself, this man is probably the only federal employee in Bay Saint Louis. And he's lost it. And now, he's going to kill me.
Well... he apparently does this every night; says it's his "patrol." But on this night, he really has come looking for me. He's forgotten to tell me we need to be up at the library before 7 o'clock to unload a relief shipment.
So Chris, I say, what would you have done if I hadn't been sitting here by the fire?
Why, he says, I'd have whupped this stick alongside the Quonset hut 'til you came out.
It's not that much of a stretch to say that this is pretty much sums up the nature of the federal relief effort in Bay Saint Louis. Smile or cry- your choice
There aren't a whole lot of resources at Chris's disposal here, so he relies on his Gift of Gab and the Art of the Deal. Butch needs a backhoe to fill in the hole The Wave carved in his hill; Carl has a backhoe, but needs the old plumbing cut out of his place; Gary has a cutting torch but needs to get a coat of paint on his house before the sun starts to bake it.
Round and round it goes, deal after deal with volunteers like us the worker pawns in this grand game of Cajun chess. Not that we mind. Not one bit. It's what we've come for, and we marvel at the juggling act. Nothing gets dropped, stuff gets done, and oh so slowly, the place is starting to heal.
And day after day, he's always upbeat and he's always got a joke or a story or another clever idea and a seemingly endless supply of energy. But he's been doing this for a year and a half now, and it shows in his face. And you wonder how long he can keep going, and what will happen to this place if he can't?
And you wonder what it says about the rest of us that so much of this sits on the shoulders of this one man.