WAVELAND, Miss. – Gus McKay slides out of bed at dawn, tiptoes across his family’s government-issued trailer and slips into the bathroom, slowly turning the doorknob so he doesn’t wake his two teenage daughters in the adjoining room.
He has only a few minutes to shower and dress before staking out his customary spot next to the kitchen sink. That’s the safest place to be when his wife and daughters squeeze past, scrambling to get ready for work and school.
Every morning is the same: The McKays wake up in shifts, rotate through the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen, take turns showering, primping, dressing and eating.
Gus McKay stays out of their way. He brews coffee and microwaves pancakes. He leans over the sink to brush his teeth and shave. He keeps an eye on Chipper, a Maltese puppy prone to chewing on shag rugs and women’s underwear.
“It’s not that different than everyday life,” Gus McKay said, “other than you condense it down to 180 square feet.”
This is what the McKays call their “new normal” – a numbing combination of drudgery, frustration and worry that’s governed their lives since Hurricane Katrina demolished their home more than six months ago.
The new normal is the norm for many others these days. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided travel trailers or mobile homes to more than 36,000 families in Mississippi since Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. Most families have their trailers set up on the remnants of their hurricane-battered property – just like the McKays.
The McKays are living in two FEMA trailers in front of the skeletal remains of their 3,000-square-foot, ranch-style home. Gus McKay, a city official in nearby Bay St. Louis, shares one with his wife and their two daughters. Their 23-year-old son, Gus McKay III, a policeman, shares the other with his 79-year-old grandmother.
Sure, it’s crowded. But that’s only a fraction of their problems.
Before the storm, the family’s days were a blur of work obligations, school functions, softball games and cheerleading practices. Now, on top of all that, they have a home to rebuild and refurnish from scratch – and not nearly enough money to do it.
“I’m exhausted,” confesses Gus McKay’s wife, Lori. “I’m the most patient person in the world, but I’m starting to feel the stress.”
This morning, the family is running behind. The clock reads 6:40, and 13-year-old Michelle McKay is still in pajamas.
“Michelle, start getting ready,” Lori says as she sits at the breakfast table and dabs makeup.
“It takes you 30 minutes to straighten your hair,” Gus McKay chimes in.
Michelle’s ears ache. Her throat is sore. Getting ready for school in a FEMA trailer is hard enough, but she’s really not in the mood this morning.
“I don’t feel good,” she mutters as she trudges to the bathroom.
Ten minutes later, Michelle is out of the bathroom and changing in her parents’ bedroom.
At the opposite end of the trailer, her 17-year-old sister, Danielle, tries to steal a few more minutes of sleep. She finally climbs out of her bunk bed and staggers into the bathroom.
“I lay there and try to sleep, but it doesn’t happen,” she explains later.
* n n
Gus McKay III grew up around here, but he often gets lost as he patrols the hurricane-altered landscape in Bay St. Louis, a city on Waveland’s eastern border.
The hurricane washed away familiar landmarks, but finding his old neighborhood is easy. He has driven his cruiser through it many times since the storm.
McKay taps the brakes when he spots the pile of red bricks on the side of the road. The front steps are all that’s left of the seven-bedroom, three-story house he shared with his girlfriend and her mother.
Katrina turned the police station in Bay St. Louis into an island refuge, surrounded on all sides by raging storm surge. At the height of the storm, McKay was stranded there with the rest of the city’s police force when his cell phone rang.
“The house is gone. We’re losing everything,” the voice said through static.
It was his father. “Big Gus,” a 52-year-old New Orleans native who bears a striking resemblance to the actor Martin Sheen, had stayed in Waveland to look after the house.
His wife and daughters went north to ride out the storm at a friend’s place. He’d begged his mother, who lived in a smaller house on the same property, to join them, but she refused.
Big Gus McKay is an aide to Bay St. Louis Mayor Edward Favre, so he had a police radio with him at home to monitor the storm, which struck Monday morning. By 9:30 a.m., the radio chatter told him his house was in trouble. Neighborhoods that had never flooded before were under water.
Around noon, the elder Gus McKay heard what sounded like a jet engine roaring outside his house. He turned just in time to see a tornado rumble through his back yard. Seconds later, a wall of water slammed into the side of his house. Within minutes, the water was up to his chest.
It was a desperate scramble to get out. McKay kicked out the boards that covered a bedroom window. Once they wiggled their way outside, McKay saddled his frail mother on his back and started to swim. The fuel in the water burned his eyes.
At one point, his mother slipped off his back and started to drift away. “I grabbed a handful of gray hair and pulled her back up on top of me,” he said. “She hung on like a cat.”
They swam about a block before they reached a neighbor’s house on higher ground. They stayed there until the storm subsided. That night, police took them to the station, where he was reunited with his son; his wife and daughters didn’t know what happened until the next morning.
“We cried in each other’s arms when I first saw him,” Lori McKay said.
For days, Waveland was buried in debris; food and water were scarce; and shell-shocked residents wandered the streets like zombies. Crazy as it sounds, those were happier times for the McKays. They were in “survival mode,” Gus McKay explains, with no time to dwell on their plight.
“At the beginning, you were running on pure adrenaline,” he said. “The frustration is now starting to set in because we have no control over it whatsoever. None.”
The day after the storm, Lori McKay’s husband returned to the house. Virtually all of their belongings floated away or were completely sodden.
Wind and water damaged the roof and frame of the house and wrecked the contents. The house had to be gutted; the carpet and tile ripped from the floor; the soggy wallboards pulled down; the wiring unthreaded from the studs.
It will take $200,000 to fix everything. Their insurance company gave them only $27,000, and FEMA cut them a check for a mere $5,200. They can’t afford to fix everything right away. Not with monthly $1,500 mortgage payments to make.
“If we don’t get some financial assistance, this house will not be put back together for many, many months,” he said.
* n n
Still, the McKays feel oddly blessed. They survived. Their house, though gutted, still stands. They have a trailer when thousands in Mississippi are still waiting. Many of their neighbors have nothing but the concrete slabs where their houses once were.
“It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself,” Lori McKay said.
But it’s also hard to live this way. Gus McKay III and his girlfriend are engaged, but wedding plans are on hold. “With all that’s happening now, it’s really not a good time for it anymore,” he said.
Plans have changed for his sister Danielle, as well. This was supposed to be the best year of her life – homecoming, cheerleading competitions, a class trip to Disney World, senior prom.
Katrina took it all away and gave her a room the size of a walk-in closet to share with her sister, trailers for classrooms, and a new wardrobe filled out at Wal-Mart.
Their parents occupy a bedroom at the other end of the trailer. Even with the doors closed, sleep doesn’t come easy for Danielle. Her sister snores and talks in her sleep. When her mom rolls over in bed, it rattles the trailer and jolts her awake.
God forbid somebody uses the bathroom at night – a toilet’s flush wakes everybody up.
Danielle is always the last to awaken. When she had her own room, it took her 90 minutes to get ready for school. These days, she’s dressed and ready to go in less than a half hour.
“I was spoiled,” she said. “Now I’ve learned to appreciate things.”
The McKays are fortunate to have a so-called “rollout” trailer. Theirs is slightly wider than the standard FEMA trailers, which are eight feet wide and either 28 or 32 feet long. The McKays jokingly refer to their temporary home as a “FEMA mansion.”
That doesn’t mean there’s enough space. When Lori McKay comes in with groceries after one of her twice weekly trips to Wal-Mart, the dozen or so white plastic bags cover most of the trailer floor.
It took Lori an hour to negotiate the lines and buy food at the only grocery store in this ravaged city, but she can only buy so much before the small cabinets and refrigerator fill up. The rest goes in coolers outside the trailer.
“I’m not in a good mood,” she warns her daughters.
They’re jockeying for table space to do their homework; the tight quarters make it tough to concentrate. When friends call, a private conversation is impossible.
“I’ve always been open with my parents, but now they know everything,” Danielle said.
Gus peeks his head into the trailer and greets her tentatively. Lori hands him a six-pack of imported beer. Wal-Mart just started carrying it this week.
“You’re a good woman,” he says with a smile.
Family members take turns eating dinner because their table only seats two comfortably.
Barbecue and microwave dinners have become staples of their diet since the hurricane. It’s much easier than trying to cook a meal for six in the trailer’s tiny kitchenette.
Once the kids are fed, the dishes are cleaned and the laundry is started, Lori can finally relax. Danielle and Michelle take a break from homework – and bickering – to join their mother watching “American Idol” on television.
“I have more stress now than right after the hurricane,” Lori McKay said. “Living like this makes my skin crawl. I want to get out. I want to get back into my home.”
Outside the trailers, a string of Christmas lights is wrapped around a clothesline. At night, they illuminate the front yard as the McKays walk their three dogs or trudge from the trailers to their gutted home.
A dim glow comes from the interior of the house, which the elder Gus McKay has rewired for electricity. They sit on patio furniture and watch television while the washing machine churns. When friends or neighbors come over to visit, the adults sip cocktails and trade horror stories about FEMA and insurance companies.
The McKays have a guest house behind their home, next to their swimming pool. Gus hopes to have it fixed up soon, so his daughters and mother can move out of the trailers. Gus and Lori, however, are resigned to living in a trailer for at least another year.
Gus used to dream of retiring and touring the country in a mobile home. Not anymore.
“I don’t ever want to see one of these campers again,” he said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
