Meg Perry, left, and Nate Brimmer pet Carson Brewer’s miniature poodle Fifi while talking with him at his home in Bogalusa, La. on Monday. Brewer, 77, rode out Hurricane Katrina in his home and by Monday, he was running low on food so Perry and Brimmer gave him a box of food. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
The early morning sun peeks through the trees, many of them splintered and broken, at Land O’ Pines campground. Inside the Veterans for Peace encampment, a ragtag collection of 50 or so tents of all shapes and sizes, the morning meeting is under way.
“Are there any new arrivals? Any of you just get in last night?” asks a woman with a three-ring binder under her arm.
Nate “Iggy” Brimmer, Meg Perry and Julian St. Laurent, all just in from Portland, Maine, wearily raise their hands.
“Welcome!” the woman says with a smile.
Nate “Iggy” Brimmer and Meg Perry, both of Portland, repack a van to make space for more relief supplies on Monday morning at a campground in Covington, Louisiana. The two were among eight people from Portland who traveled to the South to provide hurricane relief. The sign on the ground was used by the group during the drive down to help solicit money for gas. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
They made it. Six days after they and five others left Portland in three vehicles stuffed with diapers, toilet paper, water and food for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, these young volunteers are ready – no, make that eager – to pitch in and help an area still reeling a full three weeks after Katrina left it in virtual ruins.
They are not with the Red Cross or the Salvation Army. They appear nowhere on the radar of the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency. Like the dozens of others who somehow have found their way to this camp full of grassroots relief workers, they came here because something told them it was simply the right thing to do.
“Get enough people,” says Perry with a quick smile, “and you can move a mountain.”
How it all began depends on whom you ask. For Brimmer, 29, the light bulb went on about a week after Katrina struck.
“I was looking at it on (a friend’s) computer and I was like, ‘Wow! All right, I’m going down there. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m going down there.’ ”
Nate Brimmer and Meg Perry talk to a man who rode out Hurricane Katrina in his home on Warren Avenue in Bogalusa, La. Luckily, this large oak tree that stood at the side of his home fell away from his house instead of on top of it. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
He asked Perry, 26, one of six people with whom he shares a house in Portland’s West End, if she wanted to come. She did – despite her family’s worries for her safety.
“I promised my mother I wouldn’t drink any cholera soup,” she says.
As word of their plan spread, support for it grew. A friend of Brimmer’s donated a 1992 Chevrolet van to the cause. Others contributed money. And still others, hearing about the trip through the People’s Free Space, a community center on Cumberland Avenue, said they’d like to come along.
“It’s not the first thing people think of: ‘Oh, a disaster zone! I think I should run right down into the middle of that!’ ” said St. Laurent, 20, who works for Port Resources as a direct support provider at a group home in Buxton for people with special needs. “But the people I work with were extremely supportive in letting me go and taking my shifts.”
They spent days getting the vehicles up to snuff and then stuffing them with whatever relief supplies they could get their hands on. Finally, at 6 a.m. a week ago Wednesday, the three-vehicle caravan set out with eight people aboard.
Carson Brewer, 77, carries a box of food back to his home in Bogalusa, La. that was given to him by Nate Brimmer and Meg Perry of Portland. Gregory Rec/staff Photographer
They drove first to Philadelphia, where they picked up two “street medics” who needed a lift, along with their medical supplies, to a makeshift first-aid clinic in New Orleans. From Philadelphia they headed to Atlanta, where they decided to split into two groups of four – one headed for Mississippi, the other for Louisiana.
Along the way, whenever they stopped for gas, they hung signs on their vehicles saying, “Katrina Relief Convoy – Please Help Us Buy Gas!”
And at every stop, people did.
“One woman in Massachusetts works for an animal rescue shelter and asked us ‘Are you going to help the animals?’ We said. ‘Sure! We’ll do that,’ ” recalls Brimmer. “And she got out her debit card and bought us $70 worth of gas.”
Arriving in Louisiana on Sunday, Brimmer’s group dropped off the medics and their supplies and headed northeast to the Veterans For Peace encampment in Covington.
An emergency back home forced one of their foursome to peel off and take a bus back to Maine – leaving St. Laurent, Perry and Brimmer standing in Monday’s morning sunshine, itching to get to work.
The daily camp meeting begins with a litany of places in need of help. St. Laurent learns of a shelter where mental health workers are in short supply and immediately volunteers for the day.
Brimmer and Perry, meanwhile, hear that many people to the north in Bogalusa are still without basic necessities – particularly those unable to get to the Red Cross shelter or the FEMA distribution center.
Julian St. Laurent of Portland rolls up a sleeping pad and bug net at a campground in Covington, La. on Monday. St. Laurent is one of eight people from southern Maine that came to Louisiana to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Having no tent, St. Laurent slept in the back of his 1995 Volkswagen Jetta, using the bug net spread over seats to keep the insects at bay. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
They pack the van with even more supplies – a case of Ramen noodles, a box of Beanie Babies and children’s books, more bottled water – from the Veterans for Peace supply depot. Then they check the van’s springs to make sure it’s not bottoming out. Finally, their shirts already soaked with sweat, they drive slowly out the gate.
Thirty miles later in Bogalusa, they meet up with Barbara Schulz. She’s come from California, where she owns “Equine Sports Massage Therapy by Barbara,” to do what she can to help with the hurricane aftermath. Like Perry and Brimmer, she’s affiliated with no one.
“We’re the renegades,” Schulz says, smiling at her newfound friends.
So . . . now what?
“Follow me,” says Schulz, climbing into her SUV.
Heading out into this city, where Katrina’s winds left countless houses entombed beneath fallen trees, the makeshift convoy crawls through a neighborhood where life, just like the 150-year-old oaks, has been completely uprooted.
Their first stop: the new home of Tess Starnes. Her condominium in Slidell, where she lived with her boyfriend and their 1-year-old daughter, was destroyed. Her parents helped them find this rental home, but they came with next to nothing.
“I have one or two diapers for the baby, and we got some toothpaste and toothbrushes and a roll of toilet paper, but that’s pretty much it,” says Starnes, tears welling in her eyes.
Brimmer and Perry open the back doors of the van with the Maine license plates and out come the Huggies, the canned food, the baby toys . . .
“Oh my God,” the young mother says, holding her hand to her mouth as the supplies pile up on the porch. “Thank you . . . thank you so much.”
While Meg Perry watches from the back of the van, Nate Brimmer checks the springs to see how they’re handling the load of donations piled into the back. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Across the street, Antoine Atkins watches from his front-yard fence. He’s an officer with the Bogalusa Police Department and he’s been waiting for a chance to meet his new neighbors.
“I’ve tried calling over to her, but she seemed kind of shy,” he says. “At least now we know each other.”
Watching as Brimmer and Perry paw through the van in search of baby wipes, Atkins listens to the story of how they got here. Shaking his head, he smiles broadly.
“That’s awesome,” he says. “Just awesome.”
A few blocks away, Carson Brewer, 77, stands outside his home in the shadow of an uprooted oak tree. A miniature poodle named Fifi jumps at his legs – Brewer’s wife, Nobi Fae, adored that little dog until the day she died from cancer last January.
“Now Fifi keeps me company,” Brewer says with a grin, picking up the tiny animal and stroking its pin-curly fur.
Brewer, it turns out, is just about out of food. Within minutes, the two young strangers from Maine present him with a box full of rice, beans, peas, canned fruit, juice . . . and a roll of toilet paper.
“Hmmm,” Brewer says, holding up the roll of tissue with a twinkle in his eye. “Guess I might be needing some of that after all.”
Across the street, Delton Reeves, 86, shuffles out of his tarp-covered house. He too gets a box of supplies, as do the two mothers a few houses down. A young man named Perry Laurant shows up on a bicycle and, moments later, peddles unsteadily back home with a full banana box perched on his handlebars.
“God bless you people,” Laurant calls over his shoulder. “God bless every one of you.”
Brewer, watching it all, speaks for the whole neighborhood as Brimmer and Perry carry armload after armload out from the sweltering van.
“I sure do appreciate it,” he says. “Y’all are some fine, fine people.”
It will be dusk before the van is empty. Schulz had to meet someone in the next town over, but Brimmer and Perry are more than willing to continue their goodwill tour unguided.
Not everyone needs help, but those who don’t invariably know people who do. People like Bob Tannehill, 73, who has terminal cancer and sits in his home (without running water) hooked up to an oxygen machine.
“It makes you feel a little bit better about the world,” says Tannehill as Brimmer, drenched with sweat, hauls a box of food through the living room and into the kitchen.
Brimmer smiles. “We do what we can, buddy,” he says.
“I know you do,” Tannehill says. “Y’all deserve a lot of credit.”
Brimmer and Perry plan to remain on this mission of mercy for at least a month. They know they left things hanging at home – she worries about the People’s Free Space, which she helped organize; he tries not to stress out about the Portland Democracy Project, a fledgling community service organization he recently founded – but they have no second thoughts about coming here.
Nor do they care much about the debate still raging over how long it took to get help where it’s needed most – and who’s to blame. They’re too busy handing out food and water and diapers.
“The government, good or bad, competent or not, is overwhelmed,” Brimmer said. “This kind of direct aid is needed.”
On this day, in this place, nobody disagreed.
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