17 October 2005

Auburn, California

Katrina, Rita and Me

Welcome to Slidell

 

The first sign that my 2-week trip to Slidell, Louisiana to help the animal victims of Hurricane Katrina might not go smoothly came on Wednesday, September 14, 2005, when I arrived at the airport in Baton Rouge and my luggage did not.  Granted, I was going into a disaster zone, and yes, I was expecting to have to “rough it” – that’s why I had prepared so carefully by packing everything one would need to survive, perhaps without shelter.  It’s just that you need all that stuff you packed.  That’s why you pack it.  Sigh.  Luckily, as always, I had the necessary essentials for short-term subsistence (my meds, a change of clothes, some food) in my carry-on backpack, so I wasn’t entirely destitute.  Cindy, my fellow volunteer and traveler, only fared half as badly.  Of her two bags, one arrived and one did not.  She got her clothes, but not her gear … or maybe it was the other way around.  The airport was teeming with people as it tried to handle the overflow flights assigned to it while the New Orleans airport was closed to all except cargo flights.  Suffice it to say that we were not the only people with missing luggage.   It didn’t matter, though.  We were on our way to volunteer with a group called Noah’s Wish (www.noahswish.org), which provides rescue and shelter for animals in disaster situations, and we were looking forward to it.

The second sign that this wasn’t going to be a cake walk came when I was filing my lost-luggage report with American Airlines.  After completing the required form, I handed it to the clerk and asked, “Will you be able to deliver my luggage to me when it finally arrives?”

“Sure,” he replied.  “Where will you be staying?”

I dug out the address of the animal shelter in Slidell where I would be working (the only address I knew to give since I had no idea where I would be sleeping) and handed it to him.  He looked at it, looked at me, and asked, “Are you sure you can even get into Slidell?”

Perhaps he knew something I didn’t?  I told him that as far as I knew, our volunteers were going back and forth daily, so it must be possible.  He replied that they would, in that case, get my luggage to me.

The third sign came when Cindy and I went to the Avis desk to rent the car she had reserved.  Cindy asked if she could upgrade to a larger vehicle, thinking we might need it to move people and/or animals.  She was told that, being the world traveler and excellent Avis customer she is, of course she could upgrade, but that all of their vans were gone; the best they could do was give her a Lincoln Town Car.  She said that would be fine and continued with the paperwork.  Once everything was completed, she asked if they could give us directions to Slidell.  The agent just looked at her, grabbed back the car keys, and said, “You’re going to Slidell?  You’re not taking my Town Car to Slidell!  That’s where all my broken-down cars are now!  The best you’re getting is a Ford Taurus!”

By now Cindy and I were starting to get a little nervous about what we might have gotten ourselves into, but we forged ahead.  And hey – we certainly didn’t have much luggage to drag to the car!

It took about 2 hours to drive to Slidell.  As we got closer, we started to see the storm damage left by Katrina.  It was everything you saw on the TV news.  Along the highway we started seeing decimated forests, with trees snapped off like toothpicks.   Pretty soon the debris started building up on the shoulders of the road.  Cindy and I looked at each other – now we knew why Mr. Avis Man didn’t want us to take his best car to Slidell! 

At around 7:30 that evening we took the Slidell exit off the highway and I got my first good look at the place that would be my home for the next two weeks.  The main drag through town, Gause Boulevard, is a 4 lane road with businesses, strip malls, a hospital, and government buildings along the way.  Most of it was a ghost town.  Gas station’s roofs had been twisted off.  Many businesses had been completely destroyed by the storm.  One car garage, which had almost nothing remaining, had a piece of plywood leaning in front of it that said “Looters will be shot – no traespasing!”  Southern phonetic spelling at work.  All along the road, the plywood signs that the city had put up telling residents to boil the water had been crossed out and now read “Water OK”.  “Well, that’s ok,” I thought, “but I think I’ll just drink bottled water, thank you very much.”  Everywhere there were “Help Wanted” signs in windows.   At the Slidell Quiznos we saw:  “Help Wanted - $25/hr”.  At the time we arrived, only 30%, roughly, of the businesses were up and running.  Many still lacked electricity, and those that had power had no one available to work.  With so many homes destroyed, many people had left town.  It became clear to me as we drove along that this was not going to be just about the animals, but about an entire decimated community.  I couldn’t even begin to think about what was beyond Slidell.

Gause Boulevard

We found our way to the animal shelter by about 8pm.  It was located on the property of the Public Works Department.  The entrance was guarded by soldiers from the National Guard, who stopped every car going into the grounds.  Slidell’s animal control facility had been flooded and, as a result, had been condemned.  Noah’s Wish arrived to provide a temporary shelter.  As things evolved and the long-term impact of Katrina on the public infrastructure became clear, Noah’s Wish also committed to building a new Animal Control facility and a spay/neuter clinic for the city 

We found the director of the shelter operation, Terri Crisp, on-site and let her know we had arrived.  I had worked with Terri during the 1997 Northern California floods and she was expecting me.  I asked her what she wanted me to do and she said she would have “my assignment” for me in the morning, that for now we should just go to our sleeping quarters.  As an aside, I had a running joke with Wendy, a fellow volunteer from the ’97 floods, that I would not get to touch an animal once I got to Slidell, but that instead I would get assigned to some administrative duty that would keep me far away from the critters.  That’s pretty much what happened to me in ’97, and we figured it’s what would happen to me again.  Love those critters, but doubted I would get to spend much time with them.  Wendy advised me, before I went to Slidell, to insist on daily contact with the animals, no matter what my primary assignment.  I was almost dreading hearing what my duties were going to be, because somehow I didn’t think it was going to involve walking dogs.

By now, Cindy and I were pretty hungry, but we were informed that if you hadn’t gotten something to eat by 6pm, you were out of luck because everything in town was closed after that.  So we hit the human snack section in the small animal barn and rifled the food supply.  We found protein bars and helped ourselves to them, as well as to some military MRE's (“Meal Ready to Eat”).  Then we found our way to where we were supposed to bed down for the night.  That took a while.  We were looking for a closed furniture store, where the group had been given access to the loading dock and storage area in the back.  Did I mention that the temperature during the day was 100+ with 90% humidity?  And that these sleeping quarters had no air conditioning?  Rumor had it that the National Guard had just vacated the premises.  I didn’t wonder why.  It was freaking HOT - hotter inside than out!   There was no running water (except for a hose that we rigged into a shower by draping tarps on a chain link fence).  There were, however, about 20 port-a-potties.  I’ll leave you to imagine what they were like inside, given the heat and humidity.

sleeping quarters, minus the trucks

I managed to find a sleeping bag that no one was using – like I really needed one in that heat.  Cindy and I studied the situation and although a huge fan was dragged into the building, all I could see it doing was blowing the heat around and making noise.  We decided we preferred to sleep outside.  But outside on the pavement with no air mattresses was a bit of a stretch, so Cindy the mechanic went to work disassembling the dome light in the car (there was no way to turn it off on the dash) so that we could leave the doors open to get what little air flow we could.  She slept (and I use that word loosely) on the back seats and I slept on the front seats.  I wadded up extra clothing to try to fill in the spot between the bucket seats and the gear shift.  We smeared ourselves in bug repellant and tried to catch a few z’s.  Actually, first we tried to stop laughing at our ridiculous plight, and then tried to catch a few z’s.  There was no peace to be had, thanks to the giant generator grinding away at the truck stop next door.  Sigh.

 

Diving in

We awoke at the crack of dawn … because it was in our eyes.  And our backs were screaming.  All we could do was start laughing again.  “Cindy,” I queried, “can you believe we just spent the night sleeping in a car, next to a bunch of smelly port-a-potties, sweating, being eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds?  Are we having fun yet?”  She just groaned.

We made a bee-line to the truck stop to get in line for a shower (to the tune of $9!).  I’d never showered in a truck stop before.  That  was an interesting experience.  Thank the heavens I’d packed athlete’s foot cream!  Showering didn’t do much good, though.  For one thing, I had limited clothing to change into, and for another, with the high humidity level we started dripping sweat as soon as we stepped outside.

Our first mission of the day when we reached the shelter was to meet and greet the National Guard soldiers who would be on duty for the day.  They, you see, would probably be the first people to see what was becoming more and more important to us – OUR LUGGAGE.  We explained the situation to them and also to the Noah’s Wish “Boutique” that was set up at the entrance.  The Boutique was manned by volunteers from 8am until 8pm, so that was another possible place where our luggage could end up.  The Boutique consisted of a U-Haul next to a little cabana and table.  This is where anyone from the public could come to get information about the shelter and any supplies they needed for their animals – food, litter, dishes, leashes, toys – you name it, if we had it we gave it to them.

Next stop:  Command Central, as the director’s trailer was called, to find out my assignment.  Cindy had decided to stick by my side and see if she would want to help out with my job or find something more to her liking.  She was torn between wanting to work with the animals and feeling that she might not be able to handle that emotionally fulltime.   So she thought about possibly finding an assignment that gave her a bit of distance from them. 

We walked into the trailer (which was delightfully air-conditioned) and Terri, the director of this whole undertaking, greeted me with, “Tammy, I have the perfect job for you!”  I thought to myself, “Yes, I’ll just bet you do …”  What I said was, “And what might that be?”

“How would you like to be in charge of supplies?” she asked.

“Hah!”  I said, “I told Wendy I wouldn’t get to see an animal!”

Terri laughed, saying, “Oh, we can make sure you get plenty of fur-fixes, just as long as you keep the supplies rolling!”  She went on to say, “You can have Cindy help you, or she can pick a different area to work in if she’d prefer (I’m thinking to myself, how did she get so lucky as to get a choice???), and you can pick people to help you.”

Ok, I thought, this doesn’t sound too bad.  Little did I know that there weren’t enough volunteers (about 75 at that time, with about 600 animals) for me to be able to find people to help me with my job.  And what it turned out I really needed were men with muscles (and preferably a brain).  Men were in short supply.  Over the next few weeks I would develop a few muscles that I’m not sure women are supposed to have.

I spent about 10 minutes with Terri getting phone numbers and contacts and a brief overview of what the supply situation currently was, then exited the trailer.  Cindy decided she’d stick with me until we saw how this was going to work.  Clearly it was more than a one-person job, and she wanted to scope out the shelter situation to see where her talents could best be used.  We were pretty sure that it was going to turn out that I would need someone like her on-site, while I was out doing what needed to be done.

“On-site” consisted of was what was referred to as the small-animal barn – a large metal building taken over from the Public Works Department.  In it were the cats and small dogs and exotics (some parrots, cockatiels, pet snakes, a scorpion, a tarantula, an iguana). 

small animal barn

Behind the barn were the runs and cages set up to hold the large dogs and behind that was the area reserved for poultry – turkey, geese, and chickens.  And yes, I got the turkeys to gobble to me, just like the wild turkeys here at home.  Once a turkey, always a turkey.

one dog-walking location

Down the left side of the building and out the back area was where the small dogs were walked.  On the other side of this area the large dogs were walked (or run, as the case may be, since many of them had never been on a leash and were stronger than their handlers). 

 

We deliver

In front of the small animal barn there were set up a cabana and tables as a reception area to receive people bringing animals to turn in, or for people coming to look for their lost animals.  There was also a mobile veterinary unit, where emergency surgeries could be done and very ill animals could be kept until we could get them placed in a local veterinary hospital.  Often trucks or cars would pull up with sick or injured animals and triage would begin immediately, with treatments happening right there at the entrance to the small animal barn.  It was carefully controlled chaos, with small miracles happening all day long.

My job was to manage the supplies for all of this – the vets, the animals and the 70 or so volunteers.  This involved a lot of different things.  Basically, I was supply sergeant, quartermaster, and chief scrounger all rolled into one.

 Processing all the donations arriving all day long was one of these jobs – U-Haul trucks arrived unannounced, full of donations from all over the country, driven by volunteers.  I would try to determine what could be used immediately at the shelter, and pull out what needed to be stored at the shelter for security reasons  (medicines, syringes, needles, scalpels, etc.) and then I would take the truck to our “supply depot,” which was located on the other side of the property.  There I would unload (always with the help of the kind people who had brought the delivery) the goods and try to keep things sorted in some sort of order.  By the time I got involved, there were pallets and pallets of supplies that hadn’t been sorted, as well as a Wal-Mart trailer, that they were letting us borrow for storage, full of dog food.

supply depot

Near the Supply Depot, in an empty field on the other side of the fence, 3 helicopters landed and departed from sun-up until sundown.  The helicopters were being used for medical transport and rescue – of people, not animals.  No talking went on when the choppers were dropping in overhead; you just had to turn your back on the dust as it flew around.

In addition to the random donations arriving all day long, I would occasionally get notice from the Noah’s Wish national supply coordinator, Roger (a charming man who is a coroner in Illinois, with a sense of humor almost as twisted as mine), that there was a semi-truck headed my way.  This always elicited a groan from me.  Do you know how much stuff one semi holds?  But it was always stuff that was really needed, either in the shelter or in the community.  It was just the unloading and storing and protecting it from the weather that presented a challenge that proved a bit exhausting to me.

Most days my duties required that I visit the local Wal-Mart (which closed at 3pm due to both staff and product shortages), or Lowe’s (which closed at 6pm), with a shopping list as long as my arm, trying to buy plastic storage containers, sun hats for volunteers who were dropping in the heat, Gatorade, foil baking pans to use as kitty litter boxes, spray bottles, watering cans (to be able to fill up water bowls without opening cage doors) … you name it, I bought it.  Each afternoon, a contingent of police officers would stand in front of the Wal-Mart store at closing time to help the store manager turn customers away – just to keep the peace.

           

On top of all of this, I tried my best to stay one step ahead of the volunteers running the Boutique.  They needed to be kept supplied with the products that were being given out to the public.  So every time I drove past the front gate, I would stop to see what they needed, and then I’d do everything I could to get it to them in a timely fashion.  Soon they were able to latch on to a “Gator” (think of a cross between a golf cart and an all-terrain vehicle) so that they were able to run to the Supply Depot to help themselves.  I was off-site so much getting other supplies that I couldn’t be relied upon to get their supplies to them in a timely fashion.

taking down the boutique

Me with Fran, who ran the Boutique, at the entrance to the property.  Her shade cabana had been taken down in preparation for Rita.

A brief aside:  I meet dog #598

In the midst of all this, the inevitable happened.  I was near the animals long enough to fall in love (which I’d received strict orders not to do from my husband, my mother, and my daughter before leaving home).  I was carrying supplies into the barn when I saw one of the female vets carrying what appeared to be a large German Shephard puppy out the back door to be walked.  I’m a sucker for German Shephards – always have been, always will be.   I’ve never had one because it’s against my religion to buy a dog - rescues are me.  I went to talk to her and to see the puppy.  She said, “Tammy, this is not a puppy – she only looks that way to you because she’s so emaciated.”  I asked why she was carrying her out of the barn and she said she was too frightened to walk by the cages of barking dogs.  She set her down outside and this dog (who turned out to have a rather large frame) leaped up and put her front paws on my shoulders.  I tried to look away, but she wouldn’t have it.  “Don’t look into her eyes!” I kept telling myself, “DO NOT look into the light!”  But it was too late.  This poor, pitiful creature kept tracking my eyes until we made contact, and it was done.  “Fine,” I told her, “I’ll see what I can do to get you out of here.”

When I looked up her intake paperwork, the story was not a happy one.  She had been found wandering on a highway after the hurricane, no collar, with ear infections, diarrhea, severely underweight and was heartworm positive.  Great.  I know how to pick ‘em.  There was also a sign on her cage marking her as a “Biter.”  Well, the only biting I could see her doing was out of playfulness.  She was also very food-aggressive, probably from being starved.  I wasn’t too worried about those behaviors.  The next time I talked to Electric Horseman, all I said was, “I found a  German Shephard.”  He sighed, “Bring her home.”  He’s such a softie.  But, easy for him to say, and difficult for me to arrange.  No way could I put this dog, in her condition, on a plane with me.  I did, however, fill out an adoption form and staple it to her paperwork.  So far, no one else had shown any interest in her.  I’d worry about logistics later.

I started a routine each day of saying “Good Morning” to the dog when I arrived at the shelter and checking her paperwork to see how she was doing medically.  Each evening before I left, I would bid her “Good Night.”  I have no idea if she remembered me; she saw so many faces each day.  But I kept repeating to her that I was going to come back for her.  She always handed me her big paw and gave me a lick.  I like to think that she knew me.

Back at work, we recruit the National Guard

My first day on the job I was instructed to buy a refrigerator/freezer for use at the furniture warehouse, so we’d at least have cold drinks and some ice without messing all the time with ice chests.  Off to Lowe’s Cindy and I went.  Refrigerators were as scarce as hen’s teeth, but we managed to find one that met our needs – the largest, basic model they had.  The only problem was that it didn’t fit in the Ford Taurus.  Back we went to the shelter, where there happened to be a few extra National Guard guys milling around.  My little radar went up and I started talking to them. 

The head guy (I never know the ranks) stepped forward and he asked, “Would you be the ladies who brought my guys ice cream earlier today?” 

I replied, “Guilty as charged!”  He introduced himself as Mark, and thanked us profusely.  I didn’t tell him it was Cindy’s idea and we were just hoping they’d protect our luggage if it ever showed up.

I then said, “You know, I just bought a refrigerator and I have no way to move it.”  He said, “I have a hummer.”  I said, “I noticed.  Not to mention, you have quite a number of guys standing around not doing much.  What would it take to get my refrigerator in your hummer?”

Mark asked, “Do you have a golden retriever puppy in the shelter?”  I replied, “No idea, but I bet there could be more ice cream somewhere.”  We discussed the logistics (the store closed in about an hour) and all headed back across town to rendezvous at Lowe’s.

As we started driving, I said to Cindy, “Ok, we have got to stop at the very first place that might have ice cream, because I will not show up at Lowe’s without enough ice cream to make his eyes pop out.”  Cindy said, “Let’s just hit the gas station right before Lowe’s – I saw an ice cream freezer in the back last time we were there.”   I said, “Can’t risk it, what if they’re out when we get there?  Have to have a back-up plan.”

So we stopped at the first mini-mart we passed.  We rushed in, found their ice-cream freezer, and were stopped in our tracks by the sign on top that read, “BAD ICE CREAM.”  We both doubled over, laughing hysterically and started shaking our fingers at the freezer, saying, “Bad ice cream!  Bad, bad ice cream!”  Then we turned and ran out of the store.  Everyone looked at us like were had lost our minds.  Maybe we had.

“See,” I said to Cindy as she did her best race-car-driving moves out of the parking lot (Cindy is a bona fide race-car driver, which caused me to always buckle up)), “this is exactly why we need to find ice cream as soon as possible.  What if we wait to get it at the last gas station before Lowe’s and they have BAD, BAD ICE CREAM?!”

We found a Baskin Robbins that was up and running and I raced in to get the poor little kid behind the counter busy scooping up 20 dishes of 2 scoops each.  “What flavors?” he asked, with a frightened look on his face.  “I don’t care!” I said, “just mix ‘em up, and hurry, I have the National Guard waiting for me!”  He was totally incapable of making a decision, so Cindy and I raced up and down the display, picking flavor combinations and firing them at him.  He and his cohorts also thought we had lost our minds.  At least their ice cream wasn’t BAD.  We raced out of the store with two giant bags full of ice cream treats and scads of spoons for sharing.

We were finally on our way to Lowe’s, with no more stops to make.  By now I knew we were well behind the National Guard contingent and they would be wondering where we were.  I asked Cindy, with a smirk on my face, “Do you think smarty-pants Mark has figured out why we’re late?  Do you think it’s dawned on him that we stopped for ice cream?  Or is he just madder than a wet hen by now?”  Cindy just shook her head – I think she, too, thought I was nuts.

We pulled up at Lowe’s and there were our soldiers – the Hummer and 2 cars, parked along the curb, with Mark, their fearless leader, pacing furiously along the sidewalk, looking for us.  He stomped towards our car when he saw us and started yelling, “Where have you been?  I’ve been looking everywhere for you!  I thought we must have gotten our wires crossed and you meant some other store!  I’ve even been inside having them page you!”

I just smiled at him and asked, “Are you quite finished?”  Then I reached down between my feet and held up the two very distinctive Baskin Robbins bags, saying “Gotcha!”.  He just deflated and turned bright red, while his guys burst out laughing.  I climbed out of the car and asked, “Did you really think I would show up without ice cream?”  He just shook his head, couldn’t stop smiling, and said it was the best thing he’d had in weeks.  He had one of the guys run the extra treats to some of the guys across the way at the FEMA station (where ice, water and food were being handed out).

Within a short time the refrigerator was on the curb ready to be loaded into the Hummer.  It was time for Mark and me to butt heads once again.  He wanted to load the refrigerator lying on its back, which was the easiest.  I, on the other, wasn’t about to let that happen, since that would mean we couldn’t plug it in for 24 hours due to what would happen to the Freon in the coils (according to the Lowe’s man).  I explained to Mark that if I took a refrigerator to the warehouse and it wasn’t running when the volunteers showed up that night, they would most likely lynch me.  Further, I continued, it seemed to me that the canvas roof of the Hummer could simply be removed, if this was any kind of Army at all.  He countered that removing the roof was a lot of work, would take time, and they were going to load the refrigerator on its back.  He was up in the Hummer; I was on the ground – we both had our hands on our hips, staring each other down.  He asked, “Ma’am, whose in charge here?”  I replied, “I think I am, or give me back my ice cream!”  Behind him, all his guys started sticking their fingers down their throats.  He caved, and started removing the roof of the Hummer far enough to allow the refrigerator to stand up at the very back, where two guys sat and held it upright for the short trip to the furniture warehouse.  Once there, I was ever so grateful to have all those strong guys, because they had to scoot it all over the place until we found a working electrical outlet.  At that point I was wishing I had even more ice cream.

The best part of the day was when Cindy and I returned to the shelter to find, sitting behind the guards at the front gate, all of our long-lost luggage!

Our second night at the warehouse, Cindy and I slept on the ground next to the car.  She had one of those large inflatable mattresses that are about 6 inches thick, while I had a back-packing air mattress about 1 ½ inches thick.  We put these on a tarp that I had brought along to try to keep things clean and dry.  I then carefully sprayed a line of bug repellant around the edge of the tarp and ordered all creepy-crawlies to stay on the other side of the line.  Cindy had brought bug nets for our heads and we had managed to pilfer sheets to put over us to keep bugs off.  None of this worked all that well, given the heat.  The insects seemed to really enjoy her, while they pretty much left me alone.  She found the heaviest-duty bug spray she could and coated herself in it.  It was so strong it melted the nail polish off her toes.  Still she was bothered throughout the night by mosquitoes.  I would listen to them buzz around me, and then fly over to her.  And I would laugh.  She was wrapped up like a mummy, sweating, all night long.  How I wished I had my camera.

Day 3 … we discover the joys of the South … during a disaster

Once again we awoke at daybreak.  How could we not?  People were stirring everywhere.  Many other had slept outside to try to escape the heat (not that it did much good) and car doors were slamming as people started dressing.  Again Cindy groaned.  “Tammy,” she said, “I can see my cheek.”  I laughed, but I knew she was in a bad way with the mosquito bites (and heaven only knew what other kind of insect bites).

You find breakfast wherever you can

I wore a clip-on plastic ID tag that identified me as a Noah’s Wish volunteer, but had no name on it.  Our names were written in duct tape that we plastered to our shirts.  Usually I sweated mine off within hours and I was constantly having to replace it.  Lucky thing that we had a large supply of donated duct tape! 

Whenever I walked up to someone to start talking about what I wanted to beg, borrow or steal from them, they would take one look at my name tag and say, “Tammy, darlin’, what can I get for you?” or “Tammy, baaaby, what can I do for ya?”  Everyone was “darlin’” or “sweetheart” or “baby” or “honey” – didn’t matter if you were male or female, young or old – you were greeted with great affection and welcome. 

I had arrived in Slidell with a migraine, and on Friday, having been unable to shake it, I was still fighting with it.  I think a lot of it was due to not being able to escape the heat, day or night.  That morning I started rummaging through the trunk of the car looking for my separate Ziploc bag of heavy-duty, prescription migraine drugs – I had exhausted the supply I kept on hand in my fanny-pack.  I couldn’t seem to find them.  I searched inside the car.  I looked through every bag I had.  I started to panic.  I am not a happy camper when I run out of my drugs!  No matter how hard I looked, I came up empty handed.  I was down to “simple” narcotic pain-killers and I needed serious abortive meds.  “Think, Tammy, think,” I muttered to myself, while my headed pounded.  And suddenly it occurred to me.  I knew exactly what had happened. 

We had been using the Taurus to move supplies between the Supply Depot and the shelter.  I had been keeping my “valuables” in the car, and they included my very expensive prescription drugs.  Each time we pulled the car up to the shelter to unload supplies, plenty of helping hands would appear to help us unload.  I’m certain that someone saw that Ziploc bag of drugs, assumed it was animal drugs, and off-loaded it with all the other veterinary supplies.  They were clearly marked for my use, but they were never seen again.  I immediately told Cindy my theory and we headed lickety-split for the shelter to alert the folks there.  It was all to no avail.

Luckily there was a medical doctor working at the shelter and he wrote new prescriptions for me.  Unfortunately, my insurance would not cover the cost of emergency refills, so I was faced with coming up with almost $900 to replace the drugs!  Noah’s Wish volunteered to reimburse me, but I didn’t feel that was the right thing to do; not with the incredible need staring me in the face wherever I looked.  I was the least needy creature there.

I went to the pharmacy (the pharmacy that was now closed to everyone except those with prescriptions waiting, due to a bomb threat – do I have the luck, or what?!) to pick up my prescriptions.  The pharmacist said, “Ma’am, do you know how expensive these drugs are?”  I said, “All too well, but I have to have them, and the sooner the better.”  He said, “You need to go across the street and see the medical charity group behind Operation Blessing (the church group that was providing food to the community and relief workers).  They’ll give you a voucher for this – they’re providing emergency medical care to Katrina victims.”  I protested, “But I’m here as a volunteer, I’m not a victim.”  He said, “Ma’am, you came all this way to help us and you’ve just become a victim – go accept their help.”  The line of people behind me chimed in to agree.  They all insisted that he was right, thanked me for my help with the animals, and encouraged me to go accept a little help myself.  They said that the medical help was being advertised all over the papers, TV and radio and that there was plenty to go around.

So, feeling a bit sheepish, still with a pounding head, I wandered across the street through all the tents and generators until I found this group tucked way in the back.  The nicest people took one look at me, sat me down, listened to my story and took a short medical history.  They had no doubt I was in full migraine-tilt – my blood pressure is always off the charts when the pain is that intense.  They wrote out the voucher without even blinking an eye.  One of them even walked back to the pharmacy with me – I think he thought I might not make it under my own steam.  I was looking pretty rough by then.  I asked them if they had a brochure, and how I could thank them (they were a church group from Colorado).  They said they hadn’t had time to get brochures made, that I could look them up on the 700 Club and thank them when I got to heaven.  Angels, all.

The day improved after I got the proper drugs on board and my head under control.  While I waited in the pharmacy I had an entertaining conversation with a nice black woman who was also waiting for a prescription.  She told me that she and her husband opted to stay, even though there were orders to evacuate.  I asked her why, and she said, “Me and Daddy, we been married 50 years, and we never left here.  So I say to him, I do what you want to do, ‘cause we do everything together – we eat together, we pray together, we sleep together, we gonna die together if that’s what the good Lord wants!  You want to stay, I stay with you!”  She went on to say that Katrina blew through and they started rejoicing that they survived, their house was intact and all was ok.  Then the flood waters started coming.  She said, “Daddy said, when the water got about 4 foot deep, ‘Honey, I think we got to get up in the attic if we want to live,’ so up we crawl into the attic and we spent the night there.  Next mornin’, Daddy go down to the kitchen and he get me my breakfast.  He hand up a bowl of cereal, some milk, some sugar and a spoon and we have breakfast in the attic.  Everything we have was ruined.  The last flood we just put things we wanted to save up on the beds and dressers, but this time that didn’t work.  They all capsized.”

During one of my stops at the Boutique, some people had just arrived to drop off donations.  One of them was a third-grade school teacher and she told me that on her trip to Slidell, she had overheard some folks talking in a gas station about their experience during the storm.  “The police came and told us everyone had to get out – the flood waters was comin’ and we had no time.  Everybody had to get out NOW!  There was folks evaporatin’ everywhere!”  She and I started laughing so hard we thought we were going to hurt ourselves.  That immediately became my favorite saying; “Where’s so-and-so?”  My reply, “Heck, I don’t know – I guess she evaporated!”

Another saying that was overheard during the week also had me laughing so hard I almost hurt myself:: “Down here we drink Osmosis for breakfast.”  (translation for you slow folk – “We drink Mimosas for breakfast.”)

One morning, on the way to the shelter, Cindy and I stopped at the Bagelry (a great little bagel and coffee shop) for a real cup of coffee.  We hadn’t yet found our way to the on-site place to eat (there was no orientation for new volunteers, unfortunately), so we were still scrounging around town and at the shelter.  The newest joke that morning was, “What’s the new four-letter F word?”  Answer: FEMA.

We did eventually discover that in another building on the Public Works site, food was provided three times a day, and laundry was done (same day turnaround) by some of the inmates of the Slidell city jail. They all wore shirts labeled  “Trusty.”  Again, I laughed so hard I hurt when, as I was walking back to the shelter one day with one of the vets, she told me, “You know, it’s taken me 3 days to figure out that those guys aren’t all named Trusty!”

my buddies

Trusty Frank (the only one who folded my laundry) and city worker Cory.

Each time I came across one of these gems, I would scribble it into my working notebook, with “JE” in the margin (for journal entry), to capture it for later use.  I had no time or energy to keep a real journal (which I saw many people doing).  As I look through my pages and pages of notes (supplies requested, phone numbers, store address, directions, etc.) I find these crazy “JE” entries that make me start to laugh.

One of the locals I would run into everyday during my rounds kept me chuckling.  I could only understand about 50% of what he said due to his accent and local jargon.  I clearly understood him, though, when he told me, “Yes’m, I have a diff’ernt wife every weekend.  I tells her ‘Don’t you fall in love with me, just you keep on lovin’ yo husband, while I crawl out the window’.”

The importance of good footwear, and men

By now it was Sunday, the 18th of September; Cindy and I had been in Slidell since Wednesday.  We were both already bone-tired and weary of sleeping on the pavement out in the heat.  But then, so was everyone else.  Cindy’s feet were swollen, covered in blisters, and beginning to look like raw hamburger.  I was fortunate in that I had picked a pair of the most comfortable boots in the world at our local farm supply store, and will be forever grateful to my “personal shopper” there, Pam, who recommended them to me.  She saved my life by insisting that I “go for comfort” above all else.  During the entire 2 weeks I never gave my feet a thought, and they hauled tons of goods without a complaint.

Cindy soaks tired and sore feet

That Sunday turned out to be a pivotal day for two reasons: we got new sleeping quarters (AIR-CONDITIONED!) and  I snagged a MAN to help me!  It doesn’t get any better than that.

It was around noon that day when yet another U-Haul truck arrived and I just about dropped to the ground at the sight.  But I bucked up and put a smile on my face.  It actually brought back memories of fawn season during the years I was rehabbing wildlife.  Every time I would answer the phone and hear someone say, “I have a fawn …” I would have to bite my tongue not to come unglued and scream, “PUT THE FAWN BACK!”  I would instead have to take a deep breath, remind myself that this was probably the very first time that this person had come so close to such a beautiful creature, that they had no understanding that they spend the first 3 weeks of their lives mostly alone, and that it was my (volunteer) job to educate them, patiently and kindly (neither of which are my strong suits).  They had no idea that it was my n-thousandth fawn, I was currently feeding about 30 or more of them, I was sleep-deprived (never a pretty sight) and I was ready to kill the next person who kidnapped one from the wild.  Fifinella always said I should just have a tape for those callers to listen to, instructing them what to do.  So when I saw another delivery of supplies, it was much the same feeling.  More STUFF!  To sort, to find a place to store … but here would be a new person, who had driven heaven only knew how many miles, across how many states, to so graciously donate these supplies to our wonderful cause!  How could I be anything but delighted to receive them, no matter how tired or overwhelmed I might be?  But I digress. 

I spied the U-Haul parking in front of the small animal barn, took a deep breath and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade with which to fortify myself.  The truck was HUGE.  If it was full I was dead.  A man walked across the parking area, heading directly for me – they were always told to look for Tammy, the woman in the floppy blue hat.  He walked up and asked, “Are you Tammy?”  I wanted, briefly, to deny knowing who she was, but I stuck out my hand to shake his and said, “Yes, I am, how can I help you?”  He proceeded to tell me that his name was Gregg and that he had just spent the last 23 hours driving from South Carolina, delivering donations all across the hurricane-devastated regions of the Gulf Coast.  He said Noah’s Wish was his last stop and then he was done, that he just needed a little help unloading.  I asked, “Is the truck full?”  He answered my selfish prayers when he said, “No, ma’am, there’s just some stuff at the front that a group in Mississippi asked me to bring to you.”  I said, “Great, let’s look through it to see what stays here at the shelter, and we can take the rest back to my Supply Depot.” 

Gregg looked at me wanly and said, “Ma’am, honestly, I’m not feeling too good and I really need to get out of the sun.”

I thought this a little strange – he was a MAN, after all – why couldn’t he help me unload this stuff?  Hadn’t he just spent 24 hours driving in an air-conditioned truck, for gosh sakes?  But I said, “Well, ok, let me take you inside the barn where we have plenty of iced drinks and I’ll fix you right up.”  Inside I gave him an ice cold Gatorade and ordered him to drink it (I didn’t have time to break him in gently), rifled the snack bin looking for a protein bar, and grabbed a bottle of cold water.  That, I thought to myself, should fix him up nicely.  I could tell he was looking at me kind of strangely, but I didn’t have the time or energy to fool around … I wanted this guy to WORK.  This was the first live specimen – a young, apparently healthy, potentially intelligent guy - that I had in my clutches since arriving in Slidell.  No way was I going to let him get sucked away into doing plumbing or electrical work.  I needed to get him away from the animal barn before one of the Noah’s Wish Command People caught sight of him and grabbed him for themselves.

As we walked back outside I asked Gregg, “Don’t you have a hat?” slightly disgusted at some people’s lack of common sense.

“I have this baseball cap,” he replied, clearly delusional. 

“Yeah, like that does a LOT of good,” I replied, shaking my head.  “You need something that throws some shade, buddy.”

We climbed into the back of the truck, where it had to be about 130 degrees.  Little did I know that poor Gregg was on the verge of collapsing from heat stroke.  I really do know how to kill a guy.  He later told me that he stopped at the Salvation Army just before coming to us, where he was flat out on the pavement and they revived him with ice water and Gatorade.  It was all he could do to drive to us.  Yes, he had been driving for 23 hours, but the truck was barely running, the AC didn’t work, and, in fact, the heater was stuck in the “on” position so that it blew hot air on him the entire trip.  His plan was to arrive at the Noah’s Wish site, have someone unload the truck for him, while he collapsed in the front seat.  At the time, however, I knew none of this.  I just thought he was kind of wimpy and might not live up to my expectations.

I started yelling instructions and sorting through what he had brought.  “Give me your medical supplies!  Do you have any animal bedding?  What about Science Diet prescription foods?  Are these cages for us?  No – that goes to the Depot!  We’ll drop that at the Boutique!”  The whole time Gregg is just looking at me like I’m nuts and wondering, I’m sure, why I won’t let him sit down and take a rest before he collapses.

We finished pulling out what stayed at shelter and I said, “Ok, let’s take the rest back to the Depot.  You are up to that, aren’t you?  You’re looking kind of pale.”  He said, “I really don’t feel too good.”  I said, “Wait here.”  I ran and got him more Gatorade and more water and made sure he drank the Gatorade first, while we drove to the Depot.  If I recall correctly, I think maybe I might have let him sit in the shade of the Wal-Mart truck for a few minutes once we got to the Depot.  But only he could tell you if that’s true.  I’d like to think it was.

While we unloaded the rest of the stuff at the Supply Depot, he started asking me questions about Noah’s Wish (he liked what I told him), and I started asking him questions about himself (I am my mother’s daughter, after all).  I quickly found out that, despite the fact he seemed to be a little under the weather, he was strong as an ox, he was smart, he had a computer sitting on the front seat with which he could provide the design and engineering work for the new Animal Control facility, if we so desired, and it seemed he could be talked out of returning home after we finished unloading.  Things were looking up.  He just needed more electrolytes.

We returned to the shelter and I took Gregg into the AIR-CONDITIONED Command Central trailer to meet Terri, the director.  I dreaded the thought of potentially losing his muscle, but I thought him too important a find to not introduce to her (plus I knew he desperately needed a few minutes in the cool air).  We walked in and I said, “Terri, look what I found in a U-Haul truck!”  I left them to get acquainted and went back outside to troll the grounds to see what the troops might need.

By this time, Cindy had found her niche working in the small animal barn.  She spent her days organizing all of the supplies there and being my counterpart in the barn.  As new supplies came in, she would handle their distribution in the barn and sort out what I needed to take back to the Depot.  She would also keep track of what needed to be brought from the Depot, or what I needed to try to find to buy in town.  We were working as a team in what turned out to be a great hand-shaking relationship.

It wasn’t long before Gregg reappeared and found me in the barn.  He said he was supposed to help me with supplies and I breathed a sigh of relief.   Gregg’s first assignment – get us wheels.  Off to the Command Central trailer he went, jumping out moments later with the keys to a white Dodge Ram truck.  My, he’d perked up.  Perfect!  Just the vehicle we needed to haul supplies.  We needed to make a run to Wal-Mart before it closed. 

“How long do we get to use this truck?” I asked as I hauled myself into the passenger side (guys always have to drive, you know) – there was no step to help.  “Terri told me it was mine to use as long as I’m here,” Gregg replied.  Even more perfect, I thought.  Transportation hassles solved!

“How long are you going to be here?” I asked, since he had told me earlier that he was planning on heading right home.

“I’m feeling like this is where I belong, so I think I’m going to stick around.  I feel like I can do some good here.  Problem is, I don’t have any clothes,” he said.

“That,” I said, “I can fix.  We are, after all, headed to Wal-Mart!  We can even fix you up with a proper hat, I’m guessing.”

So while he drove, I added to my shopping list “clothes and hat for Gregg.”  And I thought to myself, “I think I have a keeper!”

It wasn’t difficult, once we got to Wal-Mart, for Gregg to outfit himself with the basic necessities for an extended stay at a disaster.  Guys are easy – toothbrush, razor, undies – oh, yeah – and a HAT.  Off to the hat section, where we dissolved into laughter trying on every hat Wal-Mart had to offer.  We finally settled on the straw cowboy you see in the pictures, which actually turned out to be a stroke of genius (that would be my contribution, of course – the genius part).   Just as I could be identified quickly and easily by my goofy floppy blue hat, so could Gregg be quickly spotted from anywhere by his cowboy hat.  And from then on, no one even needed to know his name; he just became “Cowboy” and everyone knew who you were talking about.  He confessed to me that he’d never worn a cowboy hat in his life. 

  

Gregg amid the destruction

 

nice hat

 Cowboy Gregg

  

After our Wal-Mart run, we found out we needed to move the refrigerator (you remember, the one I bought at Lowe’s just a few days before) from the warehouse to the shelter, since we were vacating the warehouse for some other lucky group of relief workers to inhabit.  Upon hearing this, my tired body was ever so grateful that I had roped a man into helping me, and that we had scored a truck. 

A new, reconditioned house

  

The sleeping plans for that night (and the foreseeable future) worked out like this:  the folks who were staying for an extended period of time (more than 2 or 3 days) were sent to stay at a house that was donated for our use.  One of the volunteers had been hitchhiking to the shelter and told her story to the lady who picked her up to give her a ride.  When she found out the plight of the volunteers, she said that we were welcome to use her house, which had just been given clearance by the health department to be lived in again after having everything removed after the flood.   The rest, the short-timers, were sent to stay in the ballroom of a hotel.    By the time we moved everyone’s gear from the warehouse to the hotel ballroom, the remaining small group of us (about 12) didn’t get to the house until about midnight.

Cindy and I drove to the house in the Taurus with all our gear packed in the trunk and the back seat.  We were so tired we were rummy.  It seemed that we drove and drove, going farther into total destruction as we drove.  We finally entered a gated housing community that must have been quite beautiful prior to Katrina.  Now, however, the roadway was barely wide enough for a car to fit down, due to the piles of trash alongside the road.  All the houses had been flooded and now gutted.  (Did I mention the sign we saw that said, “We gut houses” with a phone number?).  The ruins of each home were piled on the front lawns, almost as high as the houses.  The houses were dark, and a wet stench hung in the air.  It was an eerie sight as we drove slowly through the streets of what appeared to be a ghost town.

About this time, Cindy and I start to lose it.  We just looked at each other and said, “Surely they don’t expect us to sleep here?!”  And we started laughing.  Seriously, it looked like we were driving into the depths of a dark, hot, humid hell.  We couldn’t imagine that we were going to find something livable anywhere in this totally destroyed neighborhood.  Cindy could hardly drive, she was laughing so hard.  I told her we had to stop, or they were going to think we were drunk, even though we hadn’t had a drop to drink.  We followed the other cars in the convoy and dutifully pulled up next to a pile of garbage to park.  Cindy said, “I think I want to go back to the warehouse and sleep by the port-a-potties!” which, of course, sent us into gales of laughter, again.  We could hardly stand up when we got out of the car.  But, we felt a lot better for having released all those endorphins!

Once inside the house (unknown to us at the time, the owners were sleeping in the travel trailer that was parked in the driveway), we felt a LOT better.  Yes, the house had been flooded with about 4 feet of water, but it had been completely stripped up to about 4 ½ feet – that meant nothing but 2x4 walls and concrete floors.  You could see from one side of the house to the other.  The exterior walls had been draped with Visqueen and tarps to give some weather protection and the AIR CONDITIONER was chugging away.  HALLELUJAH!  A new washer and dryer had just been installed – clean clothes at almost a moment’s notice!  HALLELUJAH!  And, even better, one toilet worked, as did a stall shower!  Had we really died and gone to heaven?

We set to work making it home.  We quickly built a “wall” around the toilet using blue tarps, and used a sheet to make the glass door on the shower a little less “revealing.”  Everyone staked out their territories.  There was little privacy to be had, but by this stage of the disaster, none of us had much modesty left.  We were too tired to care, and too thrilled to be out of the heat and bug-infested outdoors to worry about a little thing like who was watching us change clothes.  We had a HOME!

That Sunday night was the first night I got some decent rest.  Yes, I was still on concrete, which is not much better than pavement, but to be out of the heat was such a gift.  It was the break I needed to be able to once-and-for-all kick my headache the next day. Things were looking up.

We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the owners of the house, Shannon and Corey.  It was so kind of them to let this group of total strangers take over their home and set about hammering and hanging tarps and sheets and generally taking over.  Poor Corey was still trying to maintain his home office amid all of this chaos.  It is truly amazing what people will do for other people in times of need.

One of the problems with living in a house with no walls is that you have to be quiet when everyone else is trying to sleep.  This presented quite a problem for me and Cindy.   We like to debrief at the end of our day.  Also, Cindy is a little hard of hearing (comes from all that race car driving).  On more than one night, the Noah’s Wish trained volunteer who was in charge of the house had to come to our bedroom to shake her finger at me and tell me that I could be heard laughing all the way on the other side of the house.  Well, geez, how hard is that when there’re no walls?  I mean, some of you have heard my ridiculous laugh, and I do know it tends to carry far and wide, but still.  And it wasn’t as if we could stop laughing at what we were going through, for goodness sake.  Sleep would come soon enough, if we were lucky.

A break to view Katrina’s wake …

One afternoon Gregg and I were absolutely beat, so we took a drive towards Lake Ponchartrain, just to see what we could see.  We only drove a few miles before what we saw was utter destruction.  See for yourself.

miles of destruction

 

where do you start to clean up?

 

no shopping here

 

the force of Mother Nature

Electric Horseman, who labeled this one “Tammy Comes Ashore”, showed this to a German friend of his who was in the German Navy.  He noted, after looking at it, that this why, in the Navy, it’s considered unlucky to have a woman on board a ship.  I’m glad they are so amused at my expense. 

The beat goes on … and on … and on …

The days now started to fall into a routine.  First order of each day was to get people moved from the house to the shelter (most people had no vehicles), where we stopped at the Trusty Bistro (as I came to call it) for a quick bite of breakfast.  Usually I had no idea what I was eating, but I knew it involved eggs.  I don’t know much about Southern cooking, although the coffee that was served with it I recognized.  I’m certain they weren’t serving any Osmosis, either.  And Trusty was always nice to talk to.

Next mission of the day was always fetching ice.  Gregg and I would head off to the FEMA station that was across town, where the National Guard would let us go in via the exit lane.  We needed so much ice that if we went through the regular lines, we would hold them up too long.  Instead, we drove into the middle of the set-up, where we could back right up to a pallet of ice, or to a spot where a fork-lift could bring a pallet to us.  We didn’t need an entire pallet, usually just about half.  Out we’d hop and we would help the guys start flinging bags of ice on to the truck.  Initially, the nice polite soldiers would try to stop me from helping, but soon they figured out I wasn’t about to stand by and be useless, (until my last day, when I could hardly stand up), and after that they graciously let me assist.  I was always happier on the days we got individual small bags of ice, as opposed to the days we got 30lb bags, but hey – beggars can’t be choosers!

Ice being ice, we always had to head straight back to the shelter to get it unloaded and distributed – freezer filled (by now, a chest freezer had been purchased to keep a supply of ice on hand at the shelter), ice chests emptied of water, restocked with drinks, topped off with ice, rest of ice driven back to the Big Dog Area and unloaded.  Next we’d stock up on some Gatorade for ourselves and race off to the next chore.

One of the nicest things Gregg did for me, and I don’t think he was even aware of what an incredible mental lift it was for me, was one miserably hot afternoon when we had returned with a load of supplies to the barn.  We were hauling cat food into the barn to stack it on pallets and he said, “Tammy, quick, give me those bags and GO!” and he pointed me to the back door of the barn.  There was a dog walker taking the German Shephard (my dog) out the door for a walk.  I ran for the two of them and the walker looked at me like I was nuts.  “This is the dog I want to adopt and I hardly ever get to see her,” I explained to the lady, as I knelt to greet my dog and give her some loves.  “Would you like to walk her?” she asked.  “Would I?!” I grabbed the leash and poop bag and didn’t look back.  It was the loveliest 10 minutes of the day, poop-picking and all – and I was thrilled to see NO DIARRHEA!  As I put #598 back into her cage, I promised her, again, that she hadn’t seen the last of me.  

Always on the way in and out of the grounds, we’d stop at the Boutique to see what they needed.  Sometimes that meant making a trip to the Supply Depot to help them out before we went back to town to run errands.  Sometimes we’d get in the truck with a specific mission (e.g. head to Wal-Mart with a shopping list) and other times we’d just look at each other, minds churning, and Gregg would say, “We’re going pillaging!”

One afternoon we were driving around, doing something or other, and I said to Gregg, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace where I’ve seen so many churches!”  He just grinned and said, “We’re in the Bible Belt and this is the buckle!”

One errand that Gregg and I got sent on was to take supplies to one of the local veterinarians.  Many of the local vets had been completely flooded out, but this one had not been damaged by the storm and was up and running and giving us lots of help.  Now it was our turn to be able to return the favor by giving him some food, medicine and supplies that he had not been able to get from his suppliers.  When we arrived, he told us that 2 dogs and 3 cats that we had hospitalized with him were ready to receive their final treatments and return to the shelter.  I, of course, was thrilled to haul something besides material goods.  Finally, I was going to get to handle some critters!  I held animals while he treated, and took notes on follow-up treatment, and bagged medicines.  We ended up with 3 cat carries in the bed of the truck and a very pregnant coon hound and a tiny Shih Tzu puppy in front with us.  Could I be having more fun?

fur fix

On Wednesday, the 21st of September, the National Guard soldiers disappeared from the front of the Public Works grounds.  We ran into some soldiers who told us that they had been deployed to New Orleans to assist in the removal of bodies.  They were to guard the streets where removal was going on to keep out the media, and assist in removal if necessary.

That same day I received a semi-truck of donated supplies driven by the nicest man, named John, from Oklahoma City.  We had to wait for hours for a fork-lift to be freed up by the city before we could unload his trailer.  I took him to the Trusty Bistro for coffee and asked him if he wanted to see the shelter.  He was game to take a walk and on the way told me that he had lost his wife (the one he had been talking about to me in present tense) in the Oklahoma City bombing.  He said, “I like animals well enough, but she’s the one who’s always bringing home the strays.”  He told me they had 8 kids, four of them adopted, and four now in Iraq.  He really loved what he saw at the shelter.  I know a sucker when I see one, so I said, “You know, John, how about if you just unhitch from that trailer and leave it here for me to use to shelter my supplies?  That way I wouldn’t even have to unload it right away and you could be off about your business!”  His eyes lit up and he got right on the phone to his company and made his best effort to be able to leave that trailer for me.  He was on the phone for hours.  In the end, we unloaded the trailer and he drove away, shaking his fist out the window at the VP’s of his company for not being able to make a timely decision without the CEO on the premises.  I’m sure they got an earful when he got back to them!

Late one afternoon Gregg, Cindy and I were running an errand to somewhere when I spied an ice cream truck parked behind an empty building, with the driver busy doing paperwork.  “Stop the truck!” I told Gregg, as I started hopping out while we were still moving.  I ran up to the ice cream truck and stepped up onto running board on the driver’s side.  The guy looked at me like I was crazy (but I was used to this by now).  “Have you got about 70 ice cream treats in this truck?” I asked him, “because I’m with Noah’s Wish across the railroad tracks where we have a bunch of volunteers who could really use a pick-me-up!”  He grinned and said, “Well, ma’am, I don’t have them right this minute, but something could probably be arranged.”  About now I glanced at the back of the truck and caught Cindy looting through his refrigerated compartments.  I had to yell at her to get out of there before she blew my chances of a long-term relationship with the guy.  He gave me his boss’s phone number, his own name and number and I let the man have some peace and quiet, confident that I could arrange something.  A few days later, I did, although it wasn’t going to happen until after I left Slidell.  But at least arrangements were made to have ice cream delivered to the volunteers on a semi-regular basis.

Gregg and I got into the mode of keeping our eyes peeled as we drove around town, always on the look-out for anything and everything that might prove useful to us in someway.  We always needed Gatorade, and we hated spending hundreds of dollars on it everyday.  We needed tents to shelter animals and cover supplies.  We needed plastic grocery bags to use as poop bags – think about it; hundreds of dogs being walked at least twice a day – lots of poop being scooped!  Whenever we checked out of a store, we asked for extra plastic bags (explaining why) and they were always kind enough to give us hundreds.  We needed bedding for the animals.

It was during one of our “looting and pillaging” raids that we stopped at a large church, where there were huge tents set up on the lawn, food being served, clothes being given away, and a long, long line of cars slowly entering the parking lot.  We parked across the 4-lane boulevard and ran through traffic to get into the site to see what was to be had.  I wanted to stop and admire their tents, but Gregg made me keep moving along.  We finally worked our way to an area where it looked like someone might be in charge and we saw stacks of bottled water, and, more importantly, stacks of Gatorade.  Gatorade was in very short supply – it was hard to find even on the store shelves. 

I started asking around to see if anyone could tell me who I could talk to about how to get some supplies, and finally got pointed to the right person – someone affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church that was running the facility.  I explained who we represented and that I needed supplies for about 70 volunteers caring for almost 700 animals.  “Specifically,” I said, “I’m eyeing that stack of Gatorade over there.  We have folks almost passing out with the heat, and we need to get electrolytes into them.”   The nice man said, “You need to get in touch with the Red Cross – let me introduce you to someone.”

And that’s how we made our Red Cross connection.  I repeated my song-and-dance routine with the Red Cross representatives, who were helping to supply this church group.  They asked me what I needed most and I said, “I’m desperate for some Gatorade and tents.”  The top man said, “Well, tents are scarce as hens’ teeth – I doubt you’ll be seeing any of those, but I can let you have some Gatorade.”  I wanted to kiss him.  Gregg had the presence of mind to ask them, “What do you need?  What can we do for you?”  He said, “We really, really need ice, in the worst way.”

Gregg and I looked at each other, smiled, and said, “Ice?!  We can fix you right up!  Would you like to follow us to the FEMA site?”  We arranged to meet at the FEMA site later that afternoon, and in the meantime Gregg and I got to use one of their dollies (also scarce as hens’ teeth – I couldn’t beg, borrow or steal one anywhere in town) to trundle cases of Gatorade out to our truck.  We piled the dolly as high as we could with the cases of drinks, and then dragged it down the long driveway, past all the waiting cars.  As we were going by one car, two old men flagged me down and asked if I had any cold drinks.  I stopped Gregg and walked over to them.  Their car had no air conditioning and I could see that they were in bad shape in the sweltering heat.  I said that I did not, but that as soon as they got up to the front of the line, I told them to ask for cold drinks and they would certainly be given some.  In the meantime, I told them, this is better than nothing, and I ran back to our supply of warm Gatorade, sliced open a case and gave them each one to drink.

We got the Red Cross reps into the FEMA station later that day and they were able to make arrangements for a semi-truck load of ice to be delivered to the church every morning!  SCORE!  I got a call the next day from the Red Cross, telling me they were ordering a truck load of Gatorade, and pallets of it would be delivered to our shelter.  Better yet, that very afternoon, two Israeli Army tents would also be delivered and installed wherever I wanted them on the shelter grounds.  Need I say it again? SCORE!

precious Gatorade from the Red Cross

Clearing the way for the installation of the tents took some major scrambling – there was a street sweeper parked in the way, and pallets of stuff that needed to be moved – but where there is a will, there is a way.  When the Red Cross came with the tent installation team, they took time to tour the shelter and were most impressed.  They had the tents unloaded and up within about an hour.  And I was impressed.  Had it been left up to me, those tents would still be stretched out on the ground, since the instructions were written in Hebrew.

very welcome tents

 

Red Cross tent erection crew

 

me and Gregg with our tents

 

Rita comes a’callin’, and evaporation sets in

All of this happened just in the nick of time, because Hurricane Rita was headed our way and I needed shelter for supplies, which is what we ended up using the tents for.  The warnings about Rita, combined with the visible impacts of Katrina, caused many of the volunteers to be very uneasy, and left them trying to decide whether to stay or head for safer territory.  Many were getting pressure from their families to return home, or at least leave the area for the duration of the storm. 

As the storm was tracked, contingency plans were made for the animals.  It was decided to keep the animals where they were, moving as many into the barn as possible, since it had withstood Katrina without flooding and without damage.  We moved the big dogs in as close as possible to the barn and under as much shelter as we could.  We moved the poultry into sheds, in cages that had no bottoms, so that in a worst case situation they could escape if the cages flooded.  The city parked their biggest trucks and vehicles next to the barn to provide as much of a wind break as possible.  There wasn’t so much of a fear of flooding as there was of wind damage with Rita – all the garbage that was still lying around from Katrina could turn into deadly shrapnel if the winds from Rita became strong enough.

On Thursday, September 22nd, the winds steadily picked up and started gusting and the rain squalls started rolling our way.  I decided I was staying with the animals.  If things got really bad and they needed to move the animals out of Slidell, I figured they would need all the hands they could get.  Cindy’s family got really worried and insisted she return to California.  Gregg assured me that everything was going to be fine and he was staying through Rita.  Electric Horseman said, “It’s just a hurricane, you’ll be fine.”  Another friend, Linda, and her daughter, Caitlyn, left when their family insisted upon it – after the Army Corps of Engineers was evacuated to Mississippi.  The National Guard left.  The Red Cross left.  I started thinking, “Hmmmm.  Everyone’s leaving, and Electric Horseman is telling me to stay.  What does that mean?”

We were told that those of us staying in the house would have to evacuate it on Friday morning for the duration of the hurricane and join the others in the ballroom of the hotel, which had not sustained any damage during Katrina.  So, before she left for the airport, Cindy helped me gather all my stuff and head for the hotel.  We took one pass through that ballroom and I said to Cindy, “Don’t even set my stuff down.  I can’t sleep in here with all these people.  I’ll sleep in the car again before I sleep here.  But, people are evaporatin’ everywhere – I know I can find a hotel room now!”

With that, I drove across the street to another hotel and, despite the “No Vacancy” sign, rang the buzzer at the front desk until the manager appeared.  She insisted she had no rooms, but I said, “Look, ma’am, I’m with Noah’s Wish, and I’ve been sleeping on concrete or pavement for 10 days, and I have GOT to have a bed.  Are you sure you can’t help me?”  She perked right up and said, “You’re with Noah’s Wish?  You come back at 11:30 and I’ll have a room for you!  Just leave your name and be back here at 11:30!”  I almost dragged her through that little window and kissed her!  Notice how many people I wanted to kiss during this disaster?!  I asked her what I could get for her, since I notice stacks of bottled water and MRE’s on the floor behind her.  She said, “Oh, sweetie, I can’t get out of here to get to the Red Cross for any help – I’m dying for something, anything, sweet – or vegetables!  I don’t eat meat!”  I assured her I could take care of that, and when I returned later I rounded out her stockpile.

The rest of that Friday was spent preparing for whatever Rita was going to dish out.  She was scheduled to give us her best shot that night.  That meant getting all the stacks of goods at the Supply Depot covered with tarps and plastic.  At the shelter, it meant moving as many animals as possible into the barn, and weighting down the outside tents and cabanas that would have to stay up to shelter the animals that would have to be left under them.  The weights were made out of sandbags and gallon water jugs.  We also stashed any loose materials that we had sitting around the shelter into Gregg’s very broken-down U-Haul truck (it was so broken down that U-Haul still hadn’t come to retrieve it).    Into it went the cabanas from the front reception area, any empty crates that might blow around, stacks of unused tarps, cages, anything that could become a problem in high winds.  It was a race against the clock, all while the regular work of the day (primary, of course, being caring for the animals) went on around the carefully controlled chaos of hurricane preparation.  It was a disaster drill within a disaster.

Missing in action

So if the dog was not supposed to be taken out, where is it? 

Hurry up - I have to go, too!

Gregg took this photo and calls it “Who’s Walking Who?”  Notice the poop bag on the ground in front of the john.

waterproofed, we hope ...

Here are the pallets at the Supply Depot, as ready as we could get them for Hurricane Rita. 

At one point during that day, Gregg and I stumbled across a parking lot that contained a giant pile of clothing, free for the taking.  Once again I gave the “Stop the truck!” command.  ‘What do you want here?” he asked.  I said, “We need bedding for the animals, and toys for the big dogs to attack, and all this stuff is going to get rained on in about 30 minutes, according to the warnings on the radio.  I’m going in!”  All day there were tornado warnings blaring from the truck radio, which made me, a California girl, a little nervous.

I circled the mountain of goods, searching for blankets, comforters, and large stuffed toys.  I started tossing whatever I found to Gregg, who tossed them into the back of the truck.  The man who was there trying to organize this giant pile of stuff asked me to keep an eye out for denim clothes.  I jokingly told him he really needed to arrange his stuff by department – you know, a linen section, a toy section, a women’s section.  He laughed, and said that he was trying to find all the denim he could for kids, that they liked denim the best.  So, in addition to what I was looking for, I started tossing denim jackets, jeans,  and shorts to him.  I eventually exhausted the supply I could reach by working my way around the bottom of the mountain.  I took a deep breath, thought how proud my mother (the Queen of Thrift Stores) would be of me, and told Gregg to rescue me if the mountain collapsed, and climbed to the top.  There I was, bent over on the top of that huge mound of clothing, rooting wildly and tossing back stuff as fast as I could find it.  Toys and blankets flew in one direction, denim in another.  Gregg started to laugh and I just glared at him, saying “No pictures!”  He later told me that it killed him not to take a picture,  me bent over, both arms flying.  He said I looked just like a cat digging in a litter box.  There’s a mental picture no one needs.

By about 9pm the dogs were all walked, the cats all tucked in and it was time for all but about 12 people who were going to spend the night with the animals to head for shelter.  I was fixated on the idea of having, for the first time, a real bed.  No matter that it was the raunchiest hotel I’d ever stayed in – I wasn’t going to be on concrete or pavement, and that’s all that mattered to me.  I vaguely heard the winds through the night, but for the most part, my memory is of the best sleep I had since arriving in Slidell.  Thank you, Rita.

Comings and goings

Saturday dawned as a relatively calm day.  Rita had blown through our section of the country doing little damage and hardly producing any rain.  We were lucky.  The only thing I noticed was that my energy level was beginning to wane.  I sorely missed Cindy.  I fed off her energy and depended on her for moral support.  I knew that the next day Gregg would be leaving and I didn’t know how I would be able to get the very physical part of my job done without his assistance, let alone how I would continue to think at warp speed without someone like Cindy or Gregg to bounce ideas off of.  How was I going to get the dog home?  I was headed into a funk.  I don’t do well with funks and did my best to ignore it.  I knew I was going to be leaving on Wednesday and decided I would just wait until then to deal with everything at once.  No time for anything else.  There was work to be done.

Sunday came and now I was on my own.  Cindy was gone.  Gregg was gone.  But wait!  My first mission of the day was to retrieve Linda and her daughter, Caitlyn, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they’d gone to wait out Hurricane Rita.  Well, all-righty, then!  Things were looking up.  Moral support, and possibly muscles, were only an hour’s drive away.  I climbed into the big Dodge pick-up and hauled down the freeway.  Gregg called at one point to ask how I was doing without my crew.  I said, “I’m ok – I’m doing 80 down the freeway and everyone’s getting out of my way!”  He said, “You can’t do 80 in that truck!  Slow down!  You’re gonna kill yourself!”  I had noticed it wandering a bit, but I thought, since our Old Blue F-250 does it that that all big, old trucks must be the same.  Not that this truck was nearly as old as Old Blue …

We dropped the ladies’ luggage off at my hotel room (where they would be staying) and then went to the FEMA station to pick up ice on the way to the shelter.  We got Caitlyn settled in at the Small Animal Barn and Linda offered to help me with supplies for a while.

Our first trip to the Supply Depot presented a problem.  It seems that Rita was not quite done with us and had done a little more damage during the night.  There was a wire down across the gravel driveway entering the area.  We stopped while I looked over the situation, then I told Linda, “Look, they’re not paying us enough to drive over that – it looks like an electric line to me.  Let’s go back and find a city worker to help us.”  City workers were scarce, since this was a Sunday, but I managed to flag one down.  I explained to him what was happening, and he said, “Hey, we’ll go back there with you.  I have Frank here with me (the Trusty who folded my laundry) and if it’s a hot line, I’ll make him move it!”  I laughed and said, “Ok with me, he’s already finished washing and folding my clothes today!”  Poor Frank just sat, sputtering, in the passenger seat.  We followed them back to the Supply Depot, and sure enough, it was a live electric line.  They picked it up and tossed it over the nearby chain link fence.  It was still there, dangling, when I left Slidell.  Not a high priority, I guess.

Soon thereafter, both Linda and Caitlyn settled in to jobs in the Small Animal Barn and were in their element.  I limped along slinging supplies single-handedly, feeling more and more tired, missing Cindy and Gregg, but not having time to think about it.

mother/daughter team

 Later in the afternoon I saw 3 men walk up to the front of the Small Animal Barn, saying that they’d brought supplies to donate and were there to volunteer their time.  My little antennae zipped right up and I started walking in their direction.  The intake coordinator welcomed them with open arms and invited them to a table to fill out forms.  I yelled, “Wait one minute – I want the pick of the litter!”  The three of them turned to look at the deranged, sweaty woman in the floppy blue hat (that would be me) and I pointed at the biggest, tallest of them, saying “I want YOU!  I need someone to help me with supplies!”  He lifted his shirt and pointed to a big, mean-looking scar.   “Sorry,” he said, “I just had major back surgery.”  His friend stepped from behind him and said, “I’d be happy to help you with that.”  Well, he was no big, bruising football player, but he certainly was willing, and that’s half the battle, so I scooped him up.  AND, he had a camera – what more could a girl want? 

So, Edd and I became the new supply pair and took off to do our duty in “the truck.”  It was tough breaking in a new guy, but he took direction well, didn’t seem to mind my short temper too much, and gave as good as he got when it came to one-liners.

Running on empty

On Tuesday, September 26th,  I was starting to, figuratively speaking, hit the wall.  Electric Horseman said to me on the phone that I should stay longer if I thought I needed to.  Of course I needed to.  But it would do no good for me to stay any longer.  I was done, both physically and mentally.  I couldn’t lift another bag of ice, another bag of litter, another case of Gatorade.  Even the soldiers at the FEMA station saw that I was physically dead on my feet and backed me away from the truck while they loaded it for me.  The lieutenant was talking to me while his guys were loading the ice and I kept trying to quietly tell them to stop loading the ice.  We kept talking, and I kept saying, “No more ice, please, guys.”  We kept talking, they kept loading ice, and I’d say, “Really, please, that’s all the ice I need.”  Finally I said to the lieutenant, “Excuse me,” and leaned around him to yell, “YOU GUYS!  NO MORE ICE!  DID YOU NOT HEAR ME?!”  They all dropped the ice they were holding and stepped back.  One of them asked, “Uh, Ma’am, were you ever in the military?!”  The lieutenant laughed, and I said, “No, but I’m gonna be in the National Guard in about one minute if any of you put one more ice cube in my truck!  Now I really appreciate it, but really, I can’t use any more ice!”  Then one of them ran ahead of me to open the door to the truck and give me a hand up into it (I must have really looked beat).  Then I felt really, really bad for yelling at them when I looked down and there was a stack of fresh meals on the floorboard – we’re not talking MRE’s here, but food that someone had picked up from a restaurant.  What a bunch of sweeties!

That night I got a very civilized treat when I was invited out to dinner by one of the local veterinarians, along with one of the vet techs who volunteered at the shelter.  We went with the vet and his wife, his partner and his wife, and their receptionist and her husband.  Dr. Nick took us to “the best little steakhouse in Slidell” which he assured us we would never find unless we were a native.  He was right – I had driven by it several times and would never have known it was even a restaurant.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  We’re talking linen table cloths, filet mignon, baked potatoes, the whole she-bang!  And real, civilized conversation!  It was a great way to begin my re-entry into the real world outside of the hurricane zone, provided by folks who had been flooded out and were living in trailers behind their vet clinic!

Heading home

Wednesday came all too quickly and it was time for me to drive to Baton Rouge to get on a plane to return to California.  Thankfully, a friend of Linda’s arrived from Sierraville, California, and decided that she would rent a car to drive home, taking as many animals as she could.  I asked Claudia if she would take “my dog” and she agreed.  It was a last-minute reprieve and was a huge relief for me.  Leaving without having that problem solved could have sent me over the edge.  I paid a final visit to “the dog” and told her it was done – we would see each other next in California – all she had to do was not catch any diseases between now and then.  I gave her a kiss and hug good-bye and sniveled my way out of the barn.

I was driving another volunteer to the airport with me – Dr. Bill, a vet from El Paso, Texas, who had worked the same two-week time span as me.  We both said our good-byes, got in the car, looked at each other, and I took off.  Needless to say, Bill and I went into major decompression mode on the drive to Baton Rouge.  There was much yelling and waving of arms as we critiqued the entire operation.  At the airport, Bill was wait-listed on my flight to Dallas and we had time to have lunch (a real lunch – our first in two weeks) and a drink (ok, maybe 2) while we waited for our flight.  It felt like we had re-entered the world of the living.

When it was time to board, I had to leave first, since I actually had a seat.  We became very quiet when the realization hit us that we had to leave each other, even though we actually spent very little time together in Slidell.  The finality of the situation, of actually making the break with the last person to have shared this experience with, was really very painful.  (What I’m saying is, Bill, it could have been anyone – not just you (kidding!).)

Once on the plane, I was overcome with emotions that I could not and cannot explain.  One of my Red Cross contacts had called me before I left Slidell to check up on me and he had warned me about this.  He said he thought this was one of the weaknesses of the Noah’s Wish organization, from what he observed by coming several times to our shelter to do PR pieces.  He said he thought it was wrong that we were working so hard with no downtime.  He said that with the Red Cross, as with many organizations, you are forced to take a day off for every week you are on-site, where as I, for instance, was there for 14 days straight with no breaks.  He felt that was too much.  He also said that he felt there should be some training to prepare volunteers for what to expect upon their return – the emotions they’ll go through, the reactions they’ll get from friends, the fact that people will not be able to relate/understand what they’ve been through, what they’ve seen.  The Red Cross has these processes in place for their volunteers.

The guy from the Red Cross was right.  The physical and emotional toll is tremendous and you just have to ride it out.  Tears ran down my face on the first plane ride and the attendants felt so sorry for me that they gave me barf-bags full of little bottles of Scotch to take home with me.  “Honey,” they said, “you just need to crawl into bed and forget about all you saw.”  Like that’s ever gonna happen.  When Electric Horseman collected me at my final destination, he was surprised to find my crying (I am NOT a crier).  He asked, “Does this mean you’re happy to be home or sad to be home?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  And I didn’t.  I couldn’t tell you why I was crying.  I was just … soooooo … tired.

The next morning the phone rang and it was Dr. Bill, calling to check up on me.  I got on the phone and he asked, “Are you in the same sorry condition as me, crying at the drop of hat?”  I said, “Yeah, and I couldn’t tell you why.”  He said, “Same here.”

But I recovered.  Even though my really good friends continually told me I looked like crap for about a week (you gotta love ‘em), I slowly, very slowly, bounced back.  Ok, maybe “bounced” is not the right word.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I clawed my way back, but I can tell you that the community of Slidell and those hundreds of animals will be in my thoughts for a long time to come.

I suppose it is only fitting to include one final photo – that would be of “the dog” when she final made it home.  Tohellandback (“Hellan” for short) seems to like it here.  She hasn’t stopped acting like a puppy since arriving.

Tohellandback comes home

I made a difficult decision to not take my camera with me on this trip.  Those of you who know me know that it killed me to be without it, but I knew it would be one more thing to worry about losing, and one more thing to distract me from the job at hand.  Therefore, I owe a debt of gratitude to three people who provided me with their pictures and allowed me to use them in this account; fellow volunteers Gregg (South Carolina), Edd (Florida) and Doug (California) all came through for me and helped make the story complete.  Thank you.

Update 8/28/2008:

Hellan has come a long, long way.  She has blossomed both physically and emotionally and is an absolute joy to be around.  She still acts like a puppy, finding great delight in simply being alive.  She still suffers from a bit of separation anxiety, but we’re working on that.

Hellan never stops smiling

Cindy adopted a Katrina kitten.  Zoey has wormed her way into her new home and has grown into a beautiful ruler of the roost.

Zoey prefers this to a hurricane