Delayed Posting - Monday, Sept. 19

It was a sweet sleep, at last. The morning of my last day dawned clear and humid, the sound of the Porta-Pottie People bringing a new phalanx of units (finally) jarring me from my slumber. The day brought the promise of 100 generators....or none. It was always wait-and-see.

Material was now pouring in from all over the southern States. The firefighters, the FEMA guys, the Walton County guys - all chipped in to unload it quickly so we could distribute it in a timely manner. It was a moving sight, at one point, to see a dozen or so of them in a congo line handing off tents, tarps and boxes of clothing and food to each other as they snaked their way inside. Quite a contrast to a week earlier, when they were barely enough of us to keep up to the trickle. The minister from Minneapolis was back, this time with ten young Divinity students. In short order, the place came alive with sorting and stacking. One young man appraoched me and remarked that we needed shelves. I looked at him as if to say, "Yeah, we need a lot of things." Two hours later, he and a colleague had travelled to the Home Depot in Slidell, La. and had purchased 2x4's, plywood and a portable circular saw. Two hours after that, eight of the most beautiful shelves where sitting in the canned goods area and the others were sorting the food, just like in a regular store. It was awesome. But still, no generators....

A number of groups of “clipboards” had shown up in the past few days. The Air Force Colonel demanded a meeting of all the players, to coordinate that which was already perfectly coordinated. The meeting was set for noon on Saturday. He never showed up and I never saw him again. We all just went back to work. Then there was the man from the Hancock County Health Department. I ignored him. As I rushed past him, I overheard an innocent young Guardsman say: “And who are YOU, now?” I stopped dead and spun on my heel. I walked up and said to the young man: “Son, that’s the operative phrase of the week, isn’t it?” The Health guy was embarrassed. “If we had known how desperate it was down here, we would have done something about it.” Well, the part of Mississippi that borders the Gulf is narrow, perhaps a third the width of the state. What did he think was going on “down here?” “I’m going to get you guys proper showers, and make things more comfortable for y’all.” I almost lost it. “It’s not ME who needs a shower,” I told him, pointing toward the field full of residents. “IT’S THEM!!!!” Time to go home....I was getting cranky. Another “official clipboard” freaked when he saw a few of the big Rotary tents in the side room of Aid Mart, demanding they be distributed right away and suggesting we were hoarding them. When informed that they had only appeared five minutes earlier and would be gone five minutes hence, and that in fact we had already distributed or erected scores of them for the residents, he left and we never saw him again. Then, an older nurse came in and told me she had been 36 years with the Red Cross and had quit the day before. “What can I actually do to help,” she asked?

I was inside the Aid Mart, helping an old woman “shop” when Stacy approached me from behind. “They’re here,” she said. “I think you’d better come and look.” I could have kissed her, but still needed to see them with my own eyes before I committed my lips to the cause. She took me outside and there was an enormous tractor trailer packed to the gunwales. I couldn’t see the boxes of generators at first, because stacked in front were skids of desperately needed tents, huge tarps for covering the open roofs of houses and a skid of heavy duty extension cords for the generators. These were crucial, as three of the first 36 generators I handed out had burned - one to the ground - from folks using cheap cords to take power from them. The firefighters were alarmed and so these cords - hundreds of them with four-way-splitters and all - were just what the doctor ordered. I got more and more excited as Darren moved the stuff with the forklift off the tail end of the truck. There they were. Stacy and her crew had loaded the truck until they had exceeded its gross vehicle weight and, in the end, there were not 100 generators.

There were 111! One hundred and eleven brand new, life saving, perfect generators.

Kisses, hoots and pictures later, we were stacking them in the secure area of the compound and I was back on the laptop I’d borrowed transcribing the handmade waiting list onto a storage stick I’d also borrowed, from Minnesota Jack. Soon we were ready to go. But I needed the list printed. There were too many names to copy by hand as I had done with the first batch of generators that arrived. People had caught wind and they were lining up, silently pressuring me to find a solution. No one had a printer, at least one that worked.

On a hunch I approached the man that ran the Communications Mobile. He was a particularly distasteful man to me, one that sat in his air-conditioned coach, with the white plastic picket fence he’d erected around it with the KEEP OUT sign prominently posted - I suppose to keep we plebeians at bay. One of those who imagined himself running a small European country, rather than an RV with radios and phones in the parking lot of a little school in a little town on the bayou of Mississippi. Yet, they had provided satellite phone access for us and now had finally set up a table at the school so the locals could also make calls.

He was NOT amenable. Too busy. I appealed to his sense of destiny (as only I dramatically can!). No go. In the end, I had to bribe him with the use of one of our precious generators (probably to run his cappuccino maker, or something) and then I got some action.

Here was the drill. The main gate was manned by the National Guard. As I issued the generator and marked their name off the list, I would take their address and some form of official ID, if they had it. I would give them a handwritten chit to get them through that gate and over to the secure area where the generators were stacked. Once there, two men would unbox the machine, issue two 50-foot cords, gas, oil and instructions, then load the machine in their vehicle. If they had no vehicle, we would arrange delivery. The Guardsmen were concerned about someone forging my chit. Silly, but I thought that they deserved a little intrigue in return for standing, fully packed, locked and (almost) loaded in the broiling sun all day. So we designed a little code that satisfied them and was easy for me to do. The men issuing the generators would record the serial number on a copy of the list and only two cars at a time would be allowed into the secure area at a time. This, the Guardsmen jockeyed with incoming trucks to be unloaded and other traffic such as the two fire engines needing to go on calls. Mayhem, but orderly mayhem.

We began and it worked smoothly. My replacement Mike was handling daily business as I and a woman named Amy did our generator thing on the laptop. It was a great few hours and the relief on the faces of the people of Pearlington was palpable. I could leave now and know that I had contributed to the common good. But leaving was harder than I expected....

There has been a man, in his mid-thirties, coming to the Aid Mart every day and loading up. I thought at first he was hoarding, so I approched him carefully. He told me that he was a former employee of Stennis Aerospace, a NASA installation nearby that owned all the land around Pearlington as a security exclusion zone. It was at their installation that the FEMA people and others were billeted. He said his employer had allowed him and others from Pearlington who worked for them to stay there, but wanted $13.00 per person per day to feed them. None of them had the money, nor any access to their banks or credit cards. There were 40 or so of them, he explained, some with families that were old, sick and infirm. From then on I facilitated anything he needed to take care of them - cots, air mattresses, blankets and sleeping bags, food, juice, water and clothes. When one of the food service people pulled out and left a huge BBQ behind, I hid it and gave it to him, along with briquets and starter fluid. Things like that.

As I was getting ready to leave, he entered Aid Mart. He spoke to me, as he always did, in a low, quiet, intense voice, focussed solely on helping his neighbours and co-workers in a way only he could. He asked politely for some things. He thanked me politely and went about gathering things for his flock. That’s when I kind of lost it, at last. I was sobbing quietly at the generator table when I heard his low, concerned voice. “Are you OK, Jon? I stood up and told him what I thought of him, his dedication and grace under extreme conditions. He hugged me and I sucked it back up and helped him get the last of what he needed. I never caught his name, but I will find him again some day, I know.

The time came. There were many tears and hugs and the exchange of email addresses. I made a few heartfelt little speeches, as I am prone to do, then tore myself away and got in my rented Durango. Before I left, I posted a handwritten sign on the backboard of the basketball net in the gym that was the Aid Mart - just beside the former high water mark.

“CANADA LOVES CAMP RENEGADE.”

There is an old African myth about a magical beast, so unusual that if you were to ever behold it, the sight would explode your notion of what was possible to a point you would never be the same again. Of course it was the elephant and, once seen, can never be unseen. When we return home, if we try to live our lives the same way, if we try to suck it up and be who we were before, we will surely pay a price.

I sometimes use the metaphor of Seeing the Elephant when I lecture. I never told that story in Pearlington. Therefore I was stunned, as I was leaving town that last day, to encounter a man whose name I do not know. He is an eccentric character, something of a hillbilly scholar, who liked Canada and would sing the opening line to our anthem whenever he entered the Aid Mart. I stopped to say goodbye. His parting words, and the last thing I heard in Pearlington, Mississippi, was:

"You surely saw the elephant down here, din'ja, son?"

Indeed I did.