Law Students Drive Van to Mississippi, In a Pinch, Turn it Into Bar

I'm back, and the trip was awesome. Sorry the updates on the Gulfport blog were so infrequent. The only place we had internet access was at the office, and we were usually doing fieldwork elsewhere. Imagine how traumatizing it was for me to go so long without checking my email...

The work we did down there was great, and really important. I'm so glad we went. The destruction along the gulf coast between Biloxi and Gulfport was an incredible sight. The trees are bent in half, homes look like they were crushed by a giant fist, frames of signs stand like ghosts beside crumbled buildings...it is unbelievable. There are huge piles of debris on the beach, and a polite sign: "Please excuse our mess as we clean up from storm damage." The craziest thing I saw was the Highway 90 bridge in Biloxi. It was destroyed by a "storm surge," basically, water so powerful it just crumbled.

These pictures don't do it justice, but here ya go:









Some of the destruction along highway 90 between Gulfport and Biloxi.










This building was in the process of being renovated, you can tell by the windows and the fresh-looking exterior. Almost all of the business on the coast, and many of the downtown businesses are still closed. It looks like a war zone.

We left at about 3 p.m. Friday and drove through the night. After dropping the van off, I got home yesterday at about 3 p.m. and went straight to bed. My plan was to take a little nap and then go to the library to work on my poor neglected appellate brief. Fat chance. Shad tried to rouse me out of bed at 8 or so to go to the Juxtapose show at Ox-Op Gallery, but I couldn't move. I woke up this morning at around 8. Apparently my body decided to collect on that serious sleep deficit. I got very, very little sleep this week. We worked our butts off every day and went out almost every night. I slept poorly, owing to one of my roommates (not Summ) having the loudest snoring problem I've ever heard.

We went to New Orleans one night, and drove into the upper 9th ward. Creepy, man. Really, really creepy. First of all, it looks like it hasn't even been touched, like the water just receded last week. All of the homes have a spray-painted marking on the door--a circle divided into four quadrants. There is information in each quadrant, the top has the date, and the bottom has the number of bodies found inside. We were driving around looking at the destroyed homes, but it just didn't feel right. We got out of there pretty quick. In this area, water was rising at the rate of one foot per minute when the levees broke. We didn't make it down to the lower ninth ward, where the levees broke. Here pretty much all that remains is a concrete base where each home once stood.

Aside from just feeling creepy, it was scary to drive through. We turned around a corner onto one of the narrow streets in the 9th ward when suddenly a guy in the back of the van yelled "STOP"! We looked out the side windows and saw a hole, about eight or nine feet deep, right in between the front and back wheels. We had turned right over it, and it looked like we'd fall right in if we drove forward or backward. Nobody breathed for about a minute, then I jumped out to take a look, and it turned out that we were actually about 4 inches away from the hole, so we inched slowly forward and away from it. OMG, that was so scary. An orange cone would have been nice. So, yeah. We got the hell out of there.

JoLynn alluded in her comment below to the fact that we made a few calls to people besides FEMA. I'll elaborate on what was one of the most hilarious nights ever. Since most of the businesses seem to be closed in Gulfport (including, sadly, bars), we decided to just pick up some beers and walk down to the beach to drink one night. We couldn't drink in our rooms because we were staying at a Methodist Church. We got down to the beach and saw a truck with the words "Law Enforcement" written in bold letters along the side. Crap. So we decided to just go back and drink in the van in the parking lot. We called this the Van Bar. And, as these things go, we began prank calling people. There was a Russian dude with us, and we decided to have him start making the calls. First he called my sister Greta, and introduced himself as Al, and reminded her that she gave him her number at Sporty's last Monday, didn't she remember? Then he tried to ask her out on a date (she politely declined, insisting she had a boyfriend). The calls just got better and better. His accent is sooooo funny, and he was so good at the calls. So, a few of you received a call from "Al" in the middle of the night, and for those of you who weren't already half in the bag yourselves, I apologize, but OMG was it funny. We were all rolling with laughter on the floor of The Van Bar.

Hopefully I can write more later, but I seriously have to work on this brief. Later, dudes.