Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (19 page)

“ALL I CAN SAY
is there better be an independent investigation,” a police officer says to me on a street in the French Quarter. I’ve never met him before, but he clearly wants to talk about what he’s seen. It’s past midnight, and he’s been waiting for half an hour for me to finish my broadcast.

“They’re hoping people will forget,” he says, looking around to make sure no one sees him talking to me. “Honestly, I’ve forgotten things from five days ago. So the farther you get from an incident, the fuzzier the facts get. And that’s all I can think of that they’re hoping to do. I want to know why the governor rejected help that could’ve come. I want to know why the governor and the mayor, who I think is a good man, and the police chief, who I think is a good man, did not have a cohesive plan. It breaks me to say this because I love my department and I love my city—and I don’t want to say anything bad about my chief—but something should’ve been put into place. There was no plan in place whatsoever.”

We arrange to meet back at my hotel. He doesn’t want his name used.

“I don’t want to point fingers,” he says, settling into a chair in a darkened room. “I’m just a patrolman, but nothing was prepared, and lack of organization and planning cost people their lives.”

“Officials say no one could have predicted this would be so bad,” I say.

“Well, the Hurricane Center knew what was going on. FEMA knew what was going on. Everybody knew what happened if the big one came to New Orleans. It came, we knew it was coming, we had plenty of warning, and people were told, ‘Hold on, we can handle it ourselves. Hold on, we can handle it ourselves.’”

He pauses as tears fall down his face. “The people I swore I’d serve and protect—they’re floating. They’re dead. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up to be abandoned. These are American citizens dying. This is not Ghana. This is not Burundi. These are not Hutus and Tutsis, or whatever, you know? They are American citizens. Old people were left in nursing homes to die.”

He doesn’t pretend to know exactly what went wrong, what happened, but he’s pretty sure race had something to do with it.

“I hate to go there, ’cause I’m white, but how can you not think race played a role?” he says. “If this was Governor Blanco’s sisters and brothers dying here, do you think she can say, ‘Forget it. We can handle it’? ‘Give us twenty-four more hours, we’ll figure it out.’ I mean there were buses here, there were things we could’ve done to save those people. And they died in the hundreds, because nobody had an idea what to do. If this was a city in Connecticut, these people wouldn’t have died.

“Man, all I can pray is an independent commission comes in and looks at what happened. Whether or not there are criminal charges, at least the public knows who to vote for next time. The poor planning caused a lot of people to die. There was no plan, there was no plan.”

AFTER A MONTH,
I reluctantly leave New Orleans. I head back to Mississippi for several days. John Grisham and his wife have begun raising money for rebuilding the Gulf, and they agree to meet me in Biloxi so I can report on their efforts. He suggests we meet at a restaurant called Mary Mahoney’s. It’s a Biloxi landmark that Grisham has included in several of his most popular books. Mary Mahoney’s was badly flooded during the storm, and workmen are busy trying to get it reopened. I arrive before the Grishams, and when I walk into the restaurant, the owner, Bob Mahoney, smiles and says, “Welcome back.”

“What do you mean ‘welcome back’?” I ask.

“You came here with your daddy in 1976. He was on a book tour, and you’d just been at the waterslide park. You came in. You were still wet, wearing shorts and wrapped in a towel.”

As soon as he mentions it, I remember the trip, the waterslide park; I was shivering, but didn’t want to leave the clear blue water, I kept prolonging getting out. A friend of my father’s had taken me to the park, and afterward brought me to the restaurant. I remember riding in her car, the feeling of my wet shorts on the vinyl seat, the clicking of the turn signal as we pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot. I walked through the crowd to the table where my father sat. I remember the feeling of being with him so far away from home. Just he and I, two men on our own.

Bob takes me through a series of rooms and points out a large round table. “That’s the table y’all sat at,” he says, smiling. “It survived the storm.”

“How did you remember all this?” I ask him.

“Mother was a big fan of fashion and writing,” he says, pointing to a painting of his mother, Mary Mahoney, the restaurant’s founder. “When Wyatt Cooper came into your restaurant in 1976, that was a pretty big deal.”

I went to hear my father speak to a crowd of ladies in Biloxi. His book had just come out. He spoke to them of families and memories; he connected with them right away. At night we slept in the same hotel room, and he worked in the bathroom writing his speeches, with the door closed so the light wouldn’t keep me up. I can almost remember the feeling, the safety. After he died, nothing ever felt safe again.

IN WAVELAND, NOT MUCH
is different. The urban search-and-rescue team from Virginia with whom I spent time has just pulled out. More roads have been cleared, but that just makes it easier to see the devastation. A handful of work crews pick up downed trees and try to restore power lines.

I head over to the house where a month ago they found the bodies of Edgar and Christina Bane and their two sons, Carl and Edgar Junior. When I arrive, there are two cars parked outside. It turns out that Christina and Edgar Bane also had two daughters, Laura and Serena. They didn’t live at their parents’ house, and both survived the storm. They’ve come back to visit because yesterday was their mother’s birthday. She would have been forty-five years old.

“A couple days after the storm, we came back,” Laura Bane tells me, standing in what used to be the kitchen of her parents’ home. “When I first turned the corner, I was all excited because the house looked untouched—no shingles missing or anything. As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I seen they had some writing on the door. They had a
V
with a circle around it. And underneath it, it had
FOUR DEAD
. So that’s kind of when I just went crazy.”

The writing on the door is barely visible now.

Laura is twenty-five but already seems much older. Her hair is pulled back tight into a ponytail and there’s a blurred blue teardrop tattooed under her left eye. She has three kids and another on the way. Her sister, Serena, is eighteen and has the awkward posture of a girl not yet a woman. She already has a child, though, a little girl who is wandering around outside. Serena clutches a photograph taken in May at her high school graduation. She found it in her boyfriend’s car. It’s the only photo she has left of her mom.

Christina Bane’s ashes are now in an urn in the apartment where Serena is staying. “At night my daughter, she’ll go and she’ll kiss the urn and she’ll be like, ‘Night-night,’” Serena says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell her. I never thought I’d have to do any of this. I’m eighteen. I never thought my parents would die when I’m eighteen. They were so young.”

In honor of their mother’s birthday, Serena and Laura had planned to barbecue today on the dried-out lawn of their parents’ house, but the stench is still too great.

“My dad was right there next to the sink,” Laura says, unaware that I saw his body there one month before. I try to tell her, but I don’t think she understands. “The coroner did tell me that the refrigerator was in the middle of the living room floor, like right below the fan. And they had prints—like, feet prints—right inside the refrigerator, like they tried to get up to the attic. But the water was above the attic. So even if they did get into the attic, they wouldn’t have survived.”

For a moment I’m reminded of searching my brother’s apartment after his death. I was looking for clues that might explain what happened. I was hoping to reconstruct events, build a time line. In the end it wasn’t possible.

“I do try to imagine how it went, like step by step,” Laura says. “I guess the water came in real fast, and they probably just panicked. My mom, she was the only one who knew how to swim. I think she could’ve saved herself but she didn’t because she wasn’t going to be able to save my brothers and my dad. So she just went with them.”

“She’d been married to my dad for twenty-five years,” Serena says softly. “There was no way she would have left them.”

The Banes’ bodies lay in their house for five days. During that time someone tried to steal Christina Bane’s van from the driveway.

The house has now been stripped, the wallboard and insulation removed, the flooring cleared. All that remains is the wood frame and the exterior walls.

“The insurance man came today and he said he doubts they could help, except for just little pieces of shingles that are missing off the roof. My parents didn’t have flood insurance,” Laura says.

Laura is living in a hotel room with her three children. She has until tomorrow to get out. Serena is staying at a friend’s apartment with eight other people. They’ve applied for a FEMA trailer but are still waiting to hear back.

“Before I go to sleep I’ll pray and I’ll talk to her,” Laura says of her mom, “and I can just feel them just hover over me. I think they want me to know that they’re okay.”

Serena is unsure what she is going to do. She still finds it hard to believe her mother is dead.

“If you needed anything, all you had to do was say, ‘Mom, I need this,’ and my mom would be at my house with it,” she says, crying. “And now it’s like, if I need something, who do I call?”

I SIGN OFF
from Waveland, Mississippi. Tomorrow I’ll return home. My office is insisting I come back, “at least for a little while.” That’s what they say, but I know it means it’s over. They’ll let me return, visit from time to time, do updates, but soon there will be other headlines, other dramas, and those who weren’t here will want to move on.

When the final broadcast is done, we’re standing on a destroyed street. There are about a dozen of us—producers and cameramen, engineers and satellite truck operators. It’s near midnight. No one else is around. All the homes have crumbled. Everything is black, silent. We break down the equipment, wrap up the cables, and turn out the lights. Neil Hallsworth, one of my cameramen, takes out some beers from the cooler in his truck and passes them around. Someone cranks the radio on the dashboard of one of the rented SUVs. The Talking Heads echo in the dark.

“Into the blue again / after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime / water flowing underground.”
Bottles are opened, glass clinks against glass. “Nice job.” Awkward handshakes. A few hugs. We promise to exchange photos. Some talk of other trips. The spell is quickly broken.

We pile into our SUVs and head in different directions: Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile. Taillights grow distant. The promises won’t be kept, the names remembered, or the photos sent. Memories will fade until the next time the storm bears down, the edge appears, and we rush to reassemble—a small band, knockabout boys, battle-scarred and full of what we’ve seen.

We are survivors, lucky and happy to be alive. It seems inappropriate against this backdrop of destruction. My muscles are taut, my mind wound tight. I’m ready to spring. I want to cry. I want to shout. All I can do is laugh. For a moment I’m back in Sarajevo, tumbling down Mount Igman, howling with my driver after exposing ourselves to snipers.

Driving through deserted streets, the SUV’s headlights shine on splintered wood and collapsed homes. I don’t want to leave these colorless streets, the mud and debris, cars hanging from trees. I don’t want to return to the cleanness, the convenience, the traffic rules. I want the roadblocks, the hassles, the heartache, the look in peoples’ eyes—thankful you’re there. There is no good that comes from the storm, no silver lining, no Hollywood ending. Death descends. Lives are lost. No good comes of it, but you meet good people along the way. They open up their homes, they cook you food, give you a cot to crash on. I was honored to be here, privileged to have been a witness to so much feeling, so much kindness, so much heroism.

Back home it’s petty, small—morning meetings and celebrity stand-ups. The clicking and clacking of tongues. Freshly scrubbed faces. It’s hard to imagine going back to that. I turn on the radio, searching for news, another spot on the map to head for. Baghdad is heating up, there are wildfires in California. Maybe the storm has touched down again, maybe I will be in motion soon. The map of the world constantly changes, new fault lines split open, new frontlines appear. I want to hurl myself into the storm.

It’s impossible to maintain, impossible to sustain. You can’t stay like this forever. Blissed out. Bugged out. High, but not stoned. I’m in this moment. This second. Nowhere else. The work is done.

On the highway a few red embers glow on the horizon. I press down on the gas pedal and imagine myself dissolving into the dark, exploding into molecules transmitted through the air, floating forever in silent space—surrounded by potential, never having to slow down, never having to land.

Epilogue

I
N OAXACA, MEXICO,
there is a celebration called el Dios de la Muerte, the Day of the Dead. It takes place every year on Halloween, the day when the souls of the dead are said to return for a few hours to the world of the living. On the night of October 31, Oaxaca’s cemeteries fill with people who’ve come to welcome back their lost loved ones. They place candles around the graves and bring offerings of food and drink to help the dead sample the material world they’ve left behind.

I’ve come to Oaxaca because I wasn’t sure where else to go. When I returned to New York from Waveland, I was told to take some time off, a couple of days at least.

“Go to a beach. Relax,” someone suggested. The idea seemed impossible to entertain. I couldn’t imagine lying on a beach, watching people sunbathe and swim in the surf. I feel as if I’m carrying with me all those I met and saw this year. I want to be someplace where they will be welcome.

I spend most of the week in Oaxaca sleeping and writing the beginnings of this book, but on Halloween night I head to the city’s largest cemetery.

Oaxacans believe that the souls of infants come back first, and at their graves there is only sadness. At one child’s headstone, I watch an elderly woman relight candles that keep blowing out in the wind. She’s all alone. Parents of children tell no stories about their babies. The joy of their birth makes their sudden death that much harder to bear. At older people’s graves, however, there is drinking and laughter. Funny tales about moments they shared.

Around one candlelit grave, I count nearly a dozen men standing shoulder to shoulder. They play some guitars and sing out of tune. Some clutch glasses of beer. One of the men is far drunker than the rest, and he hangs on the shoulders of his friends, weeping while they sing. Later I see him sprawled on top of another grave. His arms stretch out, he shouts at the stars.

I imagine all those whose stories I’ve told this year returning to their loved ones: Sunera and Jinandari, Aminu and Habu, Christina and Edgar Bane, with Carl and Edgar Junior. I think about the people whose names I don’t even know, whose bodies I saw abandoned or buried in unmarked graves. Who would be there to welcome them back?

I picture my own small family sitting around the graves of my father and brother. I suppose it would be just my mother and I. How would I welcome them back to the world of the living? What would I say? I’ve told their stories. I’ve kept them close. It’s not enough, but it’s all I was capable of.

I still wish I knew what my brother was thinking when he put his feet over the balcony outside my room. It’s doubtful I ever will. He was a young man who wanted to be in control. In the end, he simply wasn’t.

For so long I’ve been isolated by sadness; by the end of this year, however, I finally feel whole—connected to both the past and the present, the living and the lost. The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go.

By midnight, Oaxaca’s cemeteries are crowded. The dirt paths have turned to mud. Children dressed as skeletons and ghouls run amid the graves, asking for candy or trying to scare people passing by. There is so much laughter, even in the midst of all this loss. It’s the way it should be—no distance between the living and the dead. Their stories are remembered, their spirits embraced.