Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [47]
MY FATHER DIDN’T like gambling, at least as a teenager. I know this because when he was sixteen he wrote a letter to the Meridian Star about gambling’s negative effects. I found a copy of the newspaper recently, in a scrapbook he kept as a kid. It was sitting in storage, in a box of his papers I’d never gone through.
“Many a person who has strayed from the straight and narrow way began his erring at some slot machine dive,” he wrote. I laughed when I read the letter. It sounded so priggish, his teenage voice so unlike the open-minded man I remember.
Quitman, Mississippi, where he was born, is just a few miles south of Meridian. During World War II his family moved to New Orleans, but they didn’t stay there for long. When they came back to Mississippi, they settled in Meridian. My grandmother opened a general store, and my father worked as an announcer at the local radio station while taking classes at the junior college.
I was eight when my father took my brother and me to Mississippi to see where he was born. We drove out to Quitman, to where their house had been, but found no sign of it, just some faded bricks where the chimney once stood. He’d grown up in a small wooden house on some 250 acres of farm and pasture land. The barns were gone as well, the wood long since rotted. The pasture, the peach orchard, the cotton fields had been reclaimed by trees and underbrush, buried under canyons of kudzu.
We’d walked around Quitman, stopping in at stores, running into old friends my father had gone to school with.
My father’s name was Wyatt, but in Mississippi, when he was a boy, everybody called him Buddy.
“Buddy, that boy is the spitting image of you,” people said when they stopped to talk to us during that visit. It made me happy to hear, though at the time I didn’t see the resemblance. Now I look at pictures of myself and I see my father’s face.
TUESDAY. I WAKE up hungover, not sure where I am or what’s happened. Cellphone, TV, BlackBerry—I check them all, but nothing works. I’ve no idea what the storm has done. Outside, the wind still whips. Light rain. A line of police cruisers snakes through the hotel’s parking lot. I’m sick of this. Yesterday I told myself I was going to quit covering hurricanes for a while. No more. Then the winds bumped up, and my heart quickened once again.
I stumble out of bed and walk downstairs to the parking lot, where the satellite engineer is checking on his truck. There’s a phone on board that works as long as the truck has gas. For the next few days this will be the only phone communication we have with the world beyond.
When I finally get a call through to the assignment desk at CNN in Atlanta, they don’t have a lot of detailed information.
“We know it’s bad,” the supervising producer tells me. “We don’t know how bad. We’ve seen pictures out of Gulfport, and it appears heavily damaged.”
In New Orleans the levees have already failed. The city is flooding. Eventually 80 percent of it will be underwater. The Superdome is already overcrowded; the air-conditioning system has broken down. As the floodwaters rise, thousands more will seek shelter at the Convention Center, where they will find no medical care, no food, no way out.
We decide to head to Gulfport. At least we’ll be near the water, and depending on what we find, we can figure out where to go next. The problem is gas. We don’t have enough. The electricity is out in much of Philadelphia. I hear that the nearby Wal-Mart is open, and when we get there I’m surprised to see that their gas pumps still work. We fill up our vehicles, and buy as much food and water as we can find. Waiting in line to pay, a woman recognizes me and suggests we go to Bay St. Louis, a small coastal community west of