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Posted on Wed, Sep. 21, 2005

Katrina, up close and very personal
A cartooning adventure that was no day at the beach
By Chip Bok, Beacon Journal editorial cartoonist

Imagine watching an Ohio State-Michigan football game on TV. It's exciting. You can see close-ups and instant replays. You also get telestrator analysis from Bob Griese and Whoa Nellies from Keith Jackson. You can even hear a few words from Coach Tressel on his way into the locker room at halftime. Fringe benefits to the TV experience include the lack of traffic and no lines at the fridge for cold beer.

Now compare all that to being there. You enter the Horseshoe and walk into the full roar of the crowd just as the Buckeyes score the game's first touchdown. It blows you away. There is no comparison. (Never mind you're late and there's no instant replay.) Even though you can know all about the big game from TV, you can't really know it unless you're there. Which, I guess, is why the newspaper buys plane tickets for sportswriters instead of Game Day cable packages.

It was the same for me when I showed up on the beach about a week after Hurricane Katrina blew away the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Even though I had seen it all on TV and knew the facts, 30-foot storm surge, 145-mph sustained wind, I wasn't prepared for what I experienced.

I think that is why Biloxi Sun Herald Editor Stan Tine and Knight Ridder's Reggie Stuart wanted me to come down and draw cartoons. Stan wasn't interested in editorial cartoons about the president, the governor or the mayor. He wanted me to get to know what had really happened and draw about the way real people were responding to it, in a way that would be meaningful to people inside and outside the area.

Other than that, the assignment was a day at the beach.

I arrived at the Mobile, Ala., airport on a Friday night. Other than broken billboards, the weather damage wasn't so noticeable. I drove west on Interstate 10 and at Pascagoula continued on the beach road, Highway 90, because I thought it would be more scenic.

It was. Roofs were blown off, signs were knocked over and it got progressively worse as I moved west. I had to turn back at Ocean Springs because the bridge was out.

The motels were filled, mostly with power company workers from all over the country. One motel lot was filled with police cars from at least 20 states. I finally found a vacancy in Moss Springs, about 40 miles east. Debris was piled outside. A box springs and a mattress sat on the concrete floor and the walls were stripped to cement block and steel studs due to flooding.

When I got to Biloxi and Gulfport the next day, what I saw was overwhelming. Two hundred miles of devastation. Boats and cars were piled on top of each other in and out of water in unnatural acts. Huge casinos, mounted on barges so they could be in the water and thereby legal, were now illegal, having been flung onto the land where they smashed into houses and motels.

Rubble was piled high and wide and everything smelled bad due to mud and rotting debris that remained after the ocean withdrew. Sometimes the top floors of a building would still be standing even though the bottom part was hollowed out by the storm surge driving cars, boats or trees through it.

In Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis farther west, not much of anything was standing. Just huge piles of wood, brick and concrete that had once been houses. Pine trees were snapped off everywhere. Some palms were still standing. Oak trees seemed to do best, although many of those were down, too.

The part of Highway 90 that bridged the water between Biloxi and Ocean Springs, where I reversed course on Friday night, resembled earthquake-damaged roads in San Francisco. Whole sections were stacked on top of each other. The bridge to Pass Christian simply was no more. Only the pilings remained, with no evidence that a road had been on top of them.

The water pushed houses back away from the shore and then washed them back toward the sea. The rubble on a lot often wasn't from the house that was built on the lot. George Pawlaczyk, a reporter for the Belleville, Ill., News-Democrat, showed me a mailbox at 332 New Street where a Rottweiler had stood in his yard guarding a wrecked house that wasn't his.

For all their loss, people seemed happy to be alive and pleased to have anything that made life seem normal, like newspapers, which we passed out for free. The woman in the cartoon at the top of this page is real. She was photographed by Jamie Smith of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News walking her tiny dog amid the mayhem with a pooper scooper.

People were also polite and usually happy to talk. Beacon Journal photographer Mike Cardew took me to a wiry Vietnamese guy named Vinh Nguyen who showed us how he climbed out his window and started swimming for his life. He made it to the second floor of an apartment at least 100 yards away. A man pulled him in through the window. Meanwhile, a woman in the apartment below drowned.

Everyone talked about hurricane Camille. She was the gold standard of wind and water.

James Bates, a photographer for the Sun Herald, introduced me to John Leftrade, who showed me an oak tree a good distance down the street from his house. It was the high water mark for Camille. Using Camille standard reasoning, he decided he didn't need flood insurance. As he watched the Gulf of Mexico rising against his picture window, he knew he had miscalculated.

People were happy for any help they could get. They seemed to feel independent, and church groups were more efficient and helpful than government bureaucracies. A group I heard about more than once was Franklin Graham's Samaritan Purse. I saw its members in action. Their crews strip a water-damaged home of furniture, carpet and drywall and then wash every surface with a bleach-and-water solution in one day.

There is no light side to Katrina, but in all the mud and debris, I did find material for cartoons. I also found inspiration in the good nature, humor and kindness of the people who took the worst Katrina had to give and in the people who came to help them.

I'm thankful for this experience, but I hope it never happens again. On the whole, I'd rather watch football on TV.

Bok is the Beacon Journal editorial cartoonist. He can be reached at 330-996-3518, or emailed at cbok@thebeaconjournal.com

© 2005 Beacon Journal and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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