I've recently returned from a week in Bay Saint Louis. These are more thoughts on what I found there.
Ashton moved to Mississippi in the 60's to work for NASA. He bought a three-bedroom place on the corner of Third and St. Charles in Bay Saint Louis.
That corner was a French Acre from the beach. it sat at the bottom of a hill in a slight depression- what the locals call a "hole."
When Katrina moved in, Ashton thought he was ready. He'd already sent his wife and daughter upstate. By midnight, he knew it had been a mistake to stay, but he couldn't go- trees were already coming down. A little after 5am, his roof came off. Two hours later, the water came up.
He'd put the cat on the bed; both the cat and the mattress floated out where the back wall used to be. Ashton swam for the carport roof. He grabbed the cat when the mattress floated by.
A lttle bit later, an armoire washed up on that roof- he'd no idea where it came from, but it offered some shelter from the wind and the rain. Ashton and the cat crawled in. As he tells it, that's when things got really scary.
The wind picked up the garage roof and flipped it right onto the carport, pinning Ashton, the cat and the armoire in between. It took him two hours to squeeze his way out of that hole, and another two hours waiting for rescue after he swam to a neighbor's roof.
****
Ashton has stacked the lumber from his house and another up the street into neat piles around his property. It's good wood. 100 year-old sweet cypress, beaded panels and floorboards. He's got big plans to install them in the new place once he rebuilds.
I know all this because Ashton had placed a work order for volunteers to help move those piles; a contractor was finally coming to bid his job.
So we talked as we moved his wood around, and he brought out cold bottles of water donated by the Miller Brewing company. He showed us the armoire, still sitting in his lot. He showed us the pictures of the old place, the pictures of the wreckage, and the plans for the new one. And then the phone rang.
He came back out of his FEMA trailer with a grim look on his face. The contractor wasn't coming after all; he'd just taken a bigger job. Tears were welling up in Ashton's eyes as he thanked us for the help and sent us on our way.
The volunteer coordinator later told us that was the fourth time he'd sent a crew to Ashton's place. And everytime the crews would move the wood around. And the contractors never come.
It turns out Ashton can't pay enough to compete with the bigger jobs; he retired from NASA years ago, and his daughter's just started college.
And even though he was right there as his house came apart in the winds, the mediators in his lawsuit against State Farm ruled he only deserved 48 cents on the dollar.
And he only got that much because he had put himself in harm's way, and was able to talk about what he'd seen. And so he waits in his little FEMA trailer, and moves the wood around his lot.