FISHTRAP HOLLOW —
FISHTRAP HOLLOW — A hummingbird was buzzing the lantana’s breakfast bar, and the yard is clipped and the critters fed. It was hard to believe a storm was coming.
The Gulf Coast, once again, was taking it on the chin, and my thoughts were there, not here, eight hours north. I was hunkering down with Jeanette and Johnelle in Henderson, La., sitting in the dark with the boys at Iggy’s bar in New Orleans, evacuating Pascagoula, Miss., and its flooding with Jo Grierson. I have all of those friends on my mind, at least.
No region is without its weather risks, but, for some reason, a hurricane captures my imagination more than wildfires or tornados or earthquakes. Hurricanes are both deadly and majestic. As Carl Sandburg wrote of the sea: It is the face of a rough mother speaking.
Hanging on my wall is a Winslow Homer print of a wicked storm, and it is terrifyingly beautiful. Painters paint stormy seas, not tornado wreckage.
And somewhere on my iPod is the clever James McMurtry song “Hurricane Party.” Hurricanes both horrify and inspire us.
This one, of course, had the name Isaac, which made me think of the book “Isaac’s Storm,” Erik Larson’s brilliant recounting of the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the chief Texas weatherman at the time, Isaac Cline. Let’s just say, Isaac was only human.
Hurricane Katrina made us think no progress had been made in death prevention during natural disasters. It, in fact, was a natural disaster that had a lot of unnatural response. But then you consider Galveston. Some 8,000 men, women and children died in that Isaac’s storm, half that many in Katrina.
That statistic, of course, is not impressive at all if you consider the century-plus time lapse. No doubt things should have gone differently during Katrina. And if six people die — the toll at this writing — in Hurricane Isaac, that’s six too many. Every storm is someone’s Katrina, a wise official said.
The seven years since Katrina have been an uphill climb for the people who survived it. Baby steps have been taken toward recovery. Amongst the vacant lots new construction sprouts, and there are once again restaurants and bars and stores.
The libraries are new in Biloxi and Pass Christian on the Mississippi Coast. I sat in their gleaming facilities not long ago and was impressed. Towns that rebuild libraries have my admiration.
And the repairs at private residences are slowly but surely rebuilding the Coast.
One Gulfport man interviewed on the Weather Channel was just finishing up the extensive remodeling Katrina had dictated. With Isaac’s approach, he had to pause to nail up plywood over new windows.
And yet he was philosophical, the way folks on the coast are wont to be. “It’s just part of living here,” he said, and with a shrug, he put another nail in the plywood.
Jacques Cousteau may have said it best: The greatest resource of the ocean is not material but the boundless spring of inspiration and well-being we gain from her.
For everything, there is a cost.
(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)
Columns
Once there was another Isaac’s storm
- Columns
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Columns Headlines
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