Day Two- Hellhound on My Trail

I sleep well thanks to the foam earplugs that drown out a room of snoring EMSers.

I shower, have a breakfast of sausage patties, poppyseed muffins and apple juice, then collect the truck keys, radio, and narc pouch(a fanny pack that included 20 of morphine and 20 of valium), then check out the gear. The ambulance has a life pack 10, a 02 bag and a medic bag with the drugs and IV supplies. I am disappointed to learn they don’t carry saline locks.

My partner is a woman with a thick Mississippi accent. I can’t make out what she is saying and when I tell her my name, she thinks I am saying something about a computer. I ask her how she fared in the storm, and she says her house made it okay, but she lost many trees. She looks tired, and tells me she overslept and had to rush to get in. She tells me a story about someone, but I have trouble following it – something about a relative wearing a life preserver to keep from drowning in a hot tub they are so drunk.

As we drive to our post, we pass a huge tent city and a sea of utility power vehicles lined up as far as the eye can see. The traffic is slow due to a convoy of Army vehicles. At least half the cars on the road are ladder trucks. We stop to get coffee and the parking lot is full of telephone repair vehicles.

Our post is in the north part of the county. The sticks. My partner says its no the best post for me to see anything. It’s slow up there and we could go all day without a call. A half hour later we get a call for an accident on a long country road and find everyone out of the cars. No one wants to go to the hospital, not even a young woman with a pretty good seat belt abrasion. We go back to our post.

We sit engine idling. Its 100 degrees and humid out. At least our AC works.

I read a book about the blues legend Robert Johnson, who was from Mississippi. He can’t play a lick, then disappears for a few years, comes back and is so good everyone believes he has made a deal with the devil to play like he does. He is the man who wrote “Crossroads,” “Love in Vain,” and “Me and the Devil.”

I watch “Love-bugs” on the windshield. I don’t know what the deal is with these two-headed insects that are everywhere. The bigger end drags the smaller end around. They appear to be two insects attached to each other at the but ends. I contemplate cutting the head off one to see if the other end will die. My partner tells me they are in fact two insects, and this is mating season. The bugs are everywhere. It is not unusual to see two or more couples going at it at the same time. The grilles of trucks that pull into the country store – a feed and saddle show -- are black with the bugs.

We get some walkup calls. A kid stepped on a nail. I ask him if he wants a tetanus shot – they give us a bag of the shots in the morning to give to anyone who needs one – but he got one yesterday from the car that was posted out there. Another young man asks me to take a look at his foot. He dropped a cement block on it two days ago. He has what looks like an infected wound on the top of his foot, and a swollen ankle. I press against the bone and he winces. “YOU need to go to the hospital,” I say. “I think it’s broken.” He just shrugs and says he isn’t done working for the day. “I’m not kidding. This isn’t going to fix itself. You don’t get care, you’ll be limping for the rest of your life.” “I got two more hours of work today. Can’t let the boss down.” He says he may go see a doctor when he gets off. A mother with a baby with a fever of 103.8 asks for directions to the hospital. It seems people are on the stoic side in this state.

We eat lunch at a gas station/food mart that has a small grille in the back. I order fried oysters, but they say since the hurricane there have been no oysters. Instead I get a fried catfish “po-boy” which is the catfish served on French bread. I also order fried okra and corn. While we are eating, two young men come in looking dazed. They are not from the neighborhood. They say they both lived down by the beach. “There’s nothing there,” one says. “Its all gawn. It’s all gawn.” They say they are living in a car.

I give the waitress a tetanus shot. Everyone else has had them. We go back out and sit in the ambulance. The sun is beating down hard now. The AC barely holding its own. On the radio, other cars are getting called. Nothing going on in our area.

There are some interesting bits in the paper. A family five miles inland has a three-foot shark in their front yard pond. The areas gold courses are chewed up, but a few have opened for nine holes. The local birdwatcher says birds are just now starting to return to the beach. The third oldest house on the Gulf Coast was completely destroyed.

The radio is reporting another hurricane brewing in the Gulf that by Wednesday should be due South of us.

At four my partner requests a post change and they send us down to a central area. The stores here are battered. On the main road, which is lined with strip malls, shopping centers and gas stations and fast food stores, there is hardly a tall sign that is now blown out. I see a chick-Filet Restaurant, which they do not have in the North. I savor their sandwiches, but they like most of the restaurants are closed.. An hour passes with no calls and they send us in. Instead of going right back to the base, my partner takes me down to the shore and it is there where I see what it is all about.

The destruction, particuarly along the waterfront was astounding. Miles of beachfront homes, apartments and businesses were no longer there. Further inland were homes crumpled into piles of lumber, others with roofs torn off, windows blown out.

It wasn’t the wind, my partner says, but the tidal surge. I later hear a tale of a man who tried to ride out the store in his newly built mansion. He had to climb to the fourth floor, where in the middle of the howling a neighbors boat appeared, and he and his wife got in it, and when they rode out, they were above the telephone wires.

I have often fantasized that is I lived in a shore town, it would be interesting to ride out a storm, to say you had withstood a hurricane, but a force like this – my lord. I think of people whose houses exploded in the surge and of those farther inland that filled with water drowning them in a matter of minutes.

The remaining houses were spray painted with Xs by searchers, noting the time and what was found. If a number appeared under the X, it stood for the number of bodies found in the home's rubble. A medic found a regular patient, known and loved by the local crews, drowned in her home. That house got a "1" under the X. They took a house sign from her destroyed home and posted it back at their headquarters with a note in loving memory of the woman they all had cared for.

No one picture could describe the devestation. The lense isn't wide enough to encompass the breadth. What you need is a video camera, and a slow drive along the beach road, recording the miles of destruction. A casino was ripped in half, with one half ending up a half mile down the road in the middle of the street.

Giant hundred year old trees ripped out of the ground, crushing cars. Entire apartment complexes obilterated.

Where banks once stood were now only concrete slabs and the giant cement vaults. Nothing else. A church showing only its beams and steeple.

As we drove along the road, my local partner pointed out what was once there: a good place to get $1 breakfasts, a bar that people went to on Friday nights, an expensive condo complex, a historic home. All of it vanished.

In thinking about what kind of force could make that damage I thought of Robert Johnson's famous blues line. "A hellhound on my trail."

Back at the base, they have dinner for us. They have hired a chef from one of the destroyed casinos and his lasagna is fantastic. As other crews come in from the road, I learn it was a slow day all around. The local operation normally handles the area with 14 cars. They have had upwards of 40 on post storm. People are worried things will start to get busy as people with chronic diseases run out of their meds, and when rebuilders come in and start getting on roofs.

The schedule comes on. I’m on 9-2100, which will give me a chance to sleep until I wake up. I stay up watching the news on a TV with bad reception. The sports is all about college football. No baseball scores and only two NFL games.