Katrina: Gulfport, Mississippi 9 months later

The feeling is indescribable as I drive my rental car along the bumpy highway. She had given me a tour the day before, but I wasn't prepared. I really couldn't fathom what I was about to see. Only three rolls of film, so I put the camera down on the car seat next to me and rolled the window all the way down. The humid salty air painted my skin as it whipped into the truck. I caught myself holding my breath until I choked. She would interject into my desperate babbling from time to time to give me some "locals-only" insider knowledge as to what I was seeing. I was happy to hear her voice as it meant my own incessant chatter and bewilderment could rest for a moment. On the other hand, her words created a sad desperation of their own to mark my heart like few other experiences.

I felt like I was stuck in a quasi-world dangling between the decadent South, a war-zone, a third world country, and an old settler's baron land. Addresses marked on dying hundred-year-old oak trees with nervous spray paint. It was hard to tell where we were without the markings. I kept imagining the horror of those stranded or too weak to evacuate. The shrimp boats catapulted into the trees, tucked away in the marsh.

I'm back the second day on my own this time. Fully stocked with film and free to stop and soak in the surroundings as I catalog what I can see in 35 mm roll after roll. The beach is closed except for carefully combed sections of pristine white Gulf-Coast sand. The scene is scant so I casually stroll off to the restricted portions of the waters. Here is where I find a treasure trove of wreckage and a host of saturated items representing lifetimes of memories and accumulation of personal stories. Mattresses rotten and algae trimmed caught under the haggard, broken docks. A microwave oven clinging to the branches of an old oak tree lofting in the shallow beach waters. No one will ever know the extent of the items that have taken up residence in the warm, welcoming waters. A ladies handbag washed up on shore adorned with proud barnacles sits lonely in the sand.

Once elegant Southern palaces with their garage-conversion slave quarters sit gutted. Foundations remain as a newfound patio for the luxury of a FEMA trailer.

The nearby cemetery is disheveled as if having fallen prey to pipe bombs. I close my eyes and suck in a deep sigh as her words float in my mind "yes, there were caskets floating in the flood waters."

Photos: copyright 2006 Nichole Leigh