Picking Up the Pieces of Shattered Lives in Southern Mississippi

PASCAGOULA, Miss., Sept. 3 -- Everywhere you look, there is something wrecked or someone crushed. An oysterman sleeps in a tent in a Kmart parking lot. A senator's daughter digs through rubble like a scavenger, and finds her childhood bed in a strange street. An Elvis impersonator's wig lies caught in a box hedge.

These are the kinds of things you see, and the sorts of people you meet, along Highway 90, the beach boulevard that runs the length of the state's coastal region. Once it was a tour of faintly seedy romanticism, of garish casinos and oil refineries, sagging tin-roofed cottages, and antebellum and Greek Revival mansions. The beaches were fine and white as sugar, the air damply and gently corrupt, and hundred-year-old oak limbs hung over blue-green bays with an ache-inducing grace. Or, that is what memory tells you.

Now the road is buckled and, in places, impassable. The houses and casinos are splintered. Huge metal structures lie crumpled like tissue. The air reeks of spoiled shrimp, and corpses. The residents wail with grief by the roadside at all the harm and spoil, or contemplate it with that peculiar local symptom called southern humor.

"When God decides to clean house," said Jo Rusin, standing in front of the pile of loose bricks that was her retirement home in Waveland, "he doesn't just use a Swiffer WetJet."

Several blocks inland from the beach, a dank little canal called the Ditch snakes through the side streets. The homes along the Ditch, which are mostly trailers, doublewides and small brick houses, were gutted by the storm surge. People's whole lives are piled into their front yards -- soaked sofas and Barcaloungers with the guts spilling out, and thick, twisted skeins of wet clothing.

In one front yard along the Ditch, hundreds of pictures of Elvis Presley were scattered across a lawn. Regina Moore, 30, was trying to dry them out. Moore, who works at a local car dealership, rode out the storm in the attic of the tiny brick home along with her boyfriend, Keith Hicks, 47, an Elvis impersonator and collector of Elvis memorabilia. They probably should have evacuated, but Hicks, who is disabled and a former policeman, is only five years from paying off the house, so "like dummies" they stayed put and fought the storm for five hours.

Starting at 8 a.m. last Monday, the water rose at a rate of two feet every 10 minutes or so. They tried to start a truck and get out of there, but the water came over the hood and drowned the engine. When the water rose up past the light switches, and the refrigerator and big-screen TV were drifting in the living room and the dogs were swimming for their lives, they decided to go to the attic.

"Everything was floating and banging into us," Moore said. "We were trying to save the Elvis stuff, but we had to save ourselves."

Since the storm, they have slept in the front yard to keep away looters, who stripped everything, including household appliances, for the scrap metal -- copper is going locally for $1.50 a pound. They have found odd things scattered in the yard. In the hedge, there was a round pillow, and something else, something dark and hairy.

A jet-black Elvis wig.

Down on Beach Boulevard, the town's most elegant avenue, the homes should have blocked the views. Instead, daylight shone through halves of houses. Foundations were wiped almost clean. Driveways led to nothing. Stairs climbed to nowhere. On one property, an undisturbed wooden wind chime hung from an oak, dangling in the breeze.

Signs were hand lettered or spray-painted on plywood, and stuck in the grass lawns. Some were ruefully witty, some angry. "House For Sale by Owner" one read. Another announced, "You Loot, I Shoot."