I wake up to David Bowie. I feel clean from the wonderful shower I found the night before, but I’m not quite ready to get up yet, I set my Ipod alarm back an hour - sleep comes easily lately. Bowie… Today we work. Harvest has “adopted” a family down here from Crosspoint so we head to the house they are going to rent. We travel south, beach, rubble… houses gone, we see a sign saying “We’ll be back!”… - Waffle House. Lucky for Gulfport they have 2 Waffle houses, the latter survived. Suzy directs us through the streets that are not labeled to our destination. Tim & I begin to due work to the house that is neccesary, The women folk go shopping for furnishings for the house. 60% chance of rain. While knocking down sheet rock in the kitchen I murder a little gecko lizard type thing, well actually I killed him accidentally - so neglatent homicide. He took a hammer to ribs, there was no hope… taps. Lunch is spent at Daddy’s Diner. Tim and I both get the daddy burger, a double cheeseburger the only way a greasy spoon, the kind of place that waitresses yell across the room asking you what you’d like to drink, can make it… delicious. More work at the house. 20% chance of rain. We decide to take the tarp off the roof and begin to scrap off the shingles. Tim was nice enough to let me choose my stripper. We laugh. We scrap a good 4 or 5 shingles, I feel a drop, look up in the sky, and within a minute it rains crazy nuts. We spend our time brushing out the water the comes in through the freshly untarped roof…
Dinner. We pick up Kris (guitar) and Randy (drums) who have flown in, and have lost their luggage at their last connection. Now we are 6.
Time to sleep, but first, I’ve got to fight for that shower…

2 hrs later I wake up, feeling hungover at best, there’s nothing like sleeping in a car after coming down that kind of caffeine high. I find myself in Arkansas, in a part that seems to have been overlooked during creation… desolate. A jug of Dasani water is my only relief. I feel as if I might hurl. Soon my inner monologue (which started with the caffeine) becomes unbearable - I begin writing everthing you’ve just read since day 2 part A. Suzy tells us we’ll be arriving in Gulfport at 3:12 pm. I just might vomit before then…
We enter Mississippi (m, i, s, s, i, s, s, i, p, p, i) and the landscape becomes quickly foreign to my eastern Montana eyes - we drive through what I can only describe as a bayou, perhaps the very bayou John Fogerty was born on… Trees poking up through the mirky water, old shacks & litter pass by magnifiying the parallax before my eyes making me even more nauseous.
I’ve been attempting to find a music store to buy some pics at, and after many a wild goose chase I end my quest in failure… thus begins the final push of the trip, in failure with the overwhelming urge to evacuate my stomach. We’ve got appx 140 miles to go, they seem as if the slowest of the trip. However we finally arrive & are greeting by great people who go out of the way to make dinner for us. Tasty bbq sandwich, mmmmm. My stomach is beggining to feel better, body recovering. However the need for sleep is overwhelming, so is my body odor - before I can sleep I’ve got to take a shower. Problem is the shower trailer’s water is luke warm at best & people keep beating me to the one shower in the main building. If I can just secure a hot shower, I could sleep… I’ve got to sleep…

Or is it day 3? They seem to run together these days. I wake up outside of Lincoln, Nebraska - where I name our GPS unit “Suzy”. We eat, we drink. After beating Tim in a game of Madden 2004 (Bears 24 Packers 20) I resist the desire to watch a movie and choose to rest as I know that my team will need me soon. And so that time comes. After going through Kansas City, we are headed to St. Louis when Tim requests a relief driver… me. In Hunter S. Thompson fashion I stop and pick up some uppers… no doz, a can of orange energy stuff and a caramel Twix - remember when they had peanut butter Twix? Must not have been a big seller as you don’t see them much these days. I however enjoyed the variety - ironically this Twix tastes horrible. But perhaps because of the large amount of caffeine in my body, I eat it anyway. It’s 3am. On my caffeine high I take us over 250 miles to St. Louis where we turn south at the gateway to the west. I coninue driving, as the sun comes up I start to come down. It’s not pretty, it never is - but my ability to drive with precision in the wee hours as my team sleeps are invaluable. I pull off at a rest stop. I sleep now.

We wake up to find that the state of Wyoming is refusing to open the interstate to Buffalo. In a courageous decision by Tim, that some would say was suicide, others complete idiocricy - but to us it was just a way to stick it to the man without being prosecuted and fined $100, we traveled on back roads out of Sheridan to Buffalo… success. We find that the interstate at Buffalo to be the best roads we’ve driven thus far. In our determination to not be further hindered by snowfall, we change our plans of going through Denver & Witchita & head east at Cheyenne, hoping to stay ahead of the forecasted snow. While in Cheyenne, I discovered that our female travelers were lovably, gullable. I discover this after convincing them that the powerplant in front of us was also a chocolate factory, which I visited when I was younger. I have chosen to exploit this knowledge for the remainder of our trip. We now head across Nebraska which is as interesting as a Dakota…

Team members (driving) - Tim & Cindy Broadbent, Angie Iffland, Mike Brumit (me)

After being delayed by a team members family crisis (everything is ok…), the team has begun it’s long trek down to Gulfport, MS (appx 30hrs). The funny thing is (at least when we’ll look back on this), is that leaving Billings we’ve been driving through a snow storm all the way to Sheridan, WY, where we have snagged some hotel rooms due to the road getting closed 5min before our arrival. Our inital plan was to drive all the way through to our destination, however the state of Wyoming had different plans. This is the second time I’ve driven through Wyoming and been trapped here due to weather in the last two years… I’m not sure if I like Wyoming… But the teams spirits are high as we sit in our hotel eating the free continental breakfast about 6 hrs before breakfast. Alas, I cannot complain about free food. - funny note: were watching the weather channel at this moment and they just interviewed a lady asking her if she likes snow - she said yes, because she doesn’t like to sweat, and snow is a symbol of not sweating… Well, goodnight as we head for bed… sweatless.

mb

The best way to describe what it is like down here would be to imagine going on a trip from Billings to Miles City, about 150 miles. Now imagine a beautiful white sand beach filled with trash on one side where the storm surge washed back out to sea, and scattered remains of foundations and steps to nowhere at least several city blocks deep on the other. After that, imagine many more city blocks and streets filled with the debris that came from the first few blocks along with extensive flooding that comes with a 30 ft storm surge. In 30 feet of water houses resting on block foundations seem to have a tendency to float and move great distances of hundreds of yards, and then set down on other well founded homes or sometimes vehicles. This same surge pushed back and up into all the surrounding rivers, bayous, and canals flooding homes 20-30 miles inland in some areas. On top of all this winds of 150+ are still ripping poorly built homes, roofs, other structures to pieces, making even the higher grounds susceptible to rain coming in through the roof, through all of these same areas and even further. Any home that took on water or leaked extensively has to be completely gutted, stripped back down to the studs, throwing out almost everything as deadly molds and rot take over. Peoples whole lives, everything they have ever saved up to buy and cherished possessions lie out on the edge of the road for a FEMA contractor to haul the trash away. It takes a tremendous wind to snap and shatter monstrous pine trees like toothpicks and uproot many others flinging and falling into structures. Sometimes an area seems to be barely affected, while others are devastated. How Katrina picked and chose these areas God only knows. This would destroy most every house and community in and between Billings and Miles City. If you can imagine this scenario, that is the reality here on the Gulf Coast.
Down here you can see humanity at both its finest and worst. You have volunteers who are giving their all and you have opportunists taking complete advantage of the situation. There are several types of people that we are able to help. People from all walks of life call in to place a work order to help them get their lives back to any normality or just to help them see past the overwhelming mess that they have. There are the ones who will only open the door to point out what they want done. Also, there are those who will show you what they need and will work with and beside you all day and are so grateful. Lastly, there are those who will not ask for help because they know and feel that there are others worse off than themselves, and they are also grateful to the point of indebtedness. The most beautiful thing about this service of general work orders is that whoever placed the call has come to the knowledge that they cant do it themselves, that it is bigger than they are, and realize that only God can help them, so they place the call to a church because the only people down here to really help are followers of Christ. It then becomes our responsibility to follow up because they have taken the first step knowing that the cant do it all. Then there are those down here taking advantage of the whole situation. They are scamming and conning people, charging outlandish prices 2-4 times the price of what it should be, doing incomplete or very poor jobs and taking their money and running off to do the same process to someone else all over again.
Of the natives to the area, there are those that stayed and then those that fled the storm. The people who stayed the storm out are thankful that they are still alive and realize that their possessions that are sitting along the road are not what are valuable in this life. They are thankful for each other and will rebuild together. Then there are those who fled the storm. They either come back to see their loss, stay, and rebuild their lives once again or see their loss and hoot and holler to never come back again and put a sign on their property ‘For Sale: As Is.’ The traffic is mostly congested due to the huge numbers of extra people here rebuilding either as volunteer or contracted work and other resources flooding the area. The locals say they have never seen anything it before. Now open and Now hiring signs are everywhere. Most businesses can’t find enough people to run their stores effectively and people coming back can’t find places to live so they can go back to their old job. In other hard hit areas, businesses won’t open for a long while as they are still trying to clean out and clean up their stores. When they are able to open there will be nobody to work in them because they have either left the area or will still be trying to rebuild. The locals here are most appreciative of all the people here trying to help them get back on their feet and into a normal life again, some sooner than others. I will finish with the signs that a person sees as they leave the devastation in the rear view “THANKS YALL.”