Go get a hose. Now!

Day Four-Biloxi


What a day! I am fairly certain that I could write a book about today. But given the time and the fact that we have an amazingly early flight and, as Rascal Flatts say, “those planes, they don’t wait”, I hope to keep this entry to be much shorter and use many of the other ideas for future essays.

I will continue my tradition of making you wait for the good stuff and just tell you the basics today. Yeah right. ;)

Once again the group from Bonaventure split up. However, unlike a normal essay, I am going to start off by writing about what I know the least and have no first hand stores to share with you. I am going to talk about the tree crew. Why? Because I have heard so much good about the work of Andy, Annie, and Bridget that I felt they deserved more credit than I have been giving them.

I have been hearing many good things from those who have worked with them, how even “the girls” were hauling huge logs and how Annie even got to drive a tractor.

But perhaps the best came from their group leaders, who independently came and “begged” us to stay an extra day because they felt that the Bona students were irreplaceable. This despite the fact that 40 members of the Air Force are were working with the Tree people tomorrow and probably at least ten of them on “Trees”.

So while I may not know much about the tree teams, I do know that the tree teams have been doing a wonderful job of cleaning up yards so that FEMA trailers can be brought in for those who are (or should be) still homeless. And from absolutely everything I have heard from the top down, Andy, Annie, and Bridget have played incredibly important roles over the last few days in this effort.

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And now back to your regularly scheduled update on what the Interior team did today.

Wow. No Double WOW (uh WOWWOW?)

I keep myself pretty busy. Between teaching, doing research, blogging, working out, working at “the store”, renting out four apartments, and ordinary things around the home, I consider myself quite productive. But today was probably the most productive day of my life and I never opened a book, taught a class, did a grocery order, and only ran once.

Our first job was a duplex to be gutted. Ben and Jeff were again team leaders and allowed us to self-select into which side of the house we were going to concentrate on. The Bona contingent of Christine, Meghan, Sean, Mary, and I went left.

The job got off to a sort of slow start as our side of the building was still full of furniture, clothes, and other personal items that had to be cleared before the real gutting could begin. However, like most jobs—and all good stories, one thing led to another and before we could really empty the house, we had to clean the yard to allow for a path to the street.

Shortly enough however we got started at actual gutting and almost immediately after the first crow bar clang, I heard “S**t not again” echo out to the yard where I was still trying to clear the front yard. Any seriosu gutter need not even ask why the profanity. Yep, layered walls.

At first I made only occasional forays into the building as I was still not happy with the way the garbage was being piled. Yeah you read that correctly. Sure, you may think that any pile of garbage is just as good as any other pile, but now working on house #7, I had learned better. As Sean pointed out, there is a learning curve to almost everything in house gutting. It is suffice to say that I moved much of the early pile to make it “just so.”

Once correctly positioned, the pile grew with amazing alacrity. Trash buckets and people carrying furnitures, house fixtures, armful of mildowy clothes, and actual garbage made countless trips in and out of the small house as people began pounding walls on each sid eof them. Add to this mixture the fact that it was hot. Probably the hottest it had been since we came down. The sweat was pouring off of the workers.

You couldn’t pay people to work in conditions like this. No, you couldn't pay these people becasue they had all volunteered and traveled from a far to help people they did not even know.
Just were do these people come from? I made it a point today to ask just that question. Some of their answers? Arizona, Northern Virginia, Florida, Memphis, New York and Vermont (that is not a typo, she answered both!), New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Arizona. Ron, who hails from Arizona and hence knows a thing or two about heat, called a mandatory water break.

With everyone out of the building, I went back into see the progress and to take some pictures. The right side was largely cleared while the left side was progressing more slowly but nicely as some walls were now totally down.

Refreshed with the water break, the team went back at it with a vengeance. Quickly the dwelling was a cacophony of pounding hammers, walls boards hitting the ground, grunts, groans, jokes (“hey fatty”), comments on how excited each would be to really see Donny Osmond, comments on the heat, and requests to trade tools. It was a masterpiece.

And we flew. In almost no time, it was nearing completion. When we realized we had failed to empty the kitchen counter cupboards. How? I have no idea. But we had. So since I was doing nothing at the time but watching others work, I decided to empty the cupboards.

The next thing I heard was Sean’s raised voice almost yelling “you are leaking!” The race was on. It was a three way photo finish.

The results, when finally in, may make useful fodder for a study of human reaction times to various sensory shocks. I think the correct order of finish was: Hearing, Touch, Smell. Milliseconds after hearing Sean’s “almost scream”, I felt a liquid running down my leg, and a little bit later I smelled truly the worst smell I have ever smelled. I do not know what it was. I do not want to. But oh how it smelled. Worse than bad . Unbelievably bad. Worse than unbelievably bad. Unimaginably bad.

Even before the contestants could be called the line, the second feature of today’s race card was how fast everyone could race away from Jimmy.

I was left to wallow in the stink. As I took the remainder of the garbage from under the sink, the usually quiet Ben gave me a direct order “go find a hose. From anywhere. Knock on the door of a neighbor, just get the smell off you!”

As I walked up to the neighbor-with-a-hose’s house, two dogs started howling. I am not sure if it was that they were being protective of their home, or they were in severe pain. After all a dog’s nose is much more powerful than a human’s. Poor dogs.

The hose, plus some Lysol found under the sink, worked. I could go back to work.

It was almost lunch time. Donnie Osmond time. Ben said we had to finish. He was cutting us off in three minutes. The rooms, already busy, turned into a maelstrom of shoveling, throwing debris out windows to parked trash cans, wheel barrels, and waiting hands.

And like that, we were done with the duplex.

It was Donnie time!


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Sorry, I really do have to get some sleep. I will try and write more tomorrow. However, it is a travel day and I am not sure how much time I will have.

But I will definitely write more when I get back to Bonaventure. I just counted, I have at least 25 more stories that I want to write up.

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