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       Six months after Hurricane Katrina put it on national news, the area around Gulfport, Mississippi is still overwhelmingly a mess.  The inland town that survived the surges of water and 180 mph winds is still a patchwork of the blue tarp roofs that FEMA and Samaritan’s Purse put up as a temporary relief measure, and the coast for miles in either direction is still obscured by tangles of abandoned wreckage.  Branches of the scraggly trees which survived the high winds along the coastal road are weirdly festooned with loops of what looked like shredded bedclothes.  Piles of garbage, some with poignantly personal fragments like smashed hand mirrors and tattered children’s books, still overflow into the streets.
       A few of the chain stores are beginning to straggle back, (The Waffle House has reopened in a new location and has become a stop off place for relief crews.) but the majority of the lots along the main strip are empty, some with pieces of their signs still hanging in strips on eerie skeleton frames.  Those that have been replaced are mostly advertisements for building supplies and roofing companies, although there was also an enormous poster of Billy Graham, and, curiously enough, engagement rings.  
       Agencies like World Hope have had groups of volunteers come through continually since the storm.  Sometimes as many as a hundred volunteers a week bunk on air mattresses in curtained-off corners of the Little Rock Baptist Church in Gulfport.  The mission brings together people from all kinds of backgrounds.  Our student group from Houghton spent the week of February break working with mid-western construction workers and self-described hillbilly flatlanders from Maryland.  Every day teams go out to install new shingles and gut moldy ceilings and walls.  The cases are less urgent than the first weeks after the storm when volunteers were cutting fallen trees away from doorways using chainsaws so that FEMA could get close enough to inspect the damage, but the work is steady and shows no sign of slowing.  
       Lisa Moran, whose family of five has been sharing a tiny FEMA trailer with an unreliable toilet since the week after the storm, tells me that she is still finding pieces of her grandmother’s silverware in lots more than a block away.  “The cleanup has been slow,” says Moran, surveying the blocks near the ocean where most of the lots are still empty, but she shrugs her shoulders when I ask her why.  “It will probably never get back to the way it was before.  I’m guessing it’ll take two or three years before it even feels normal again.”  
        The people here will not forget quickly.  Some lost everything.  Some, like the hitchhiker we met outside of town, have had to leave their families with relatives until the prohibitively high cost of rent caused by the demand for housing stabilizes.  This stranger came back to the area to earn the money to rebuild his own house by rebuilding other places.  Living in the aftermath of this kind of disaster creates all kinds of ironies.  For some, however, the extent of their loss has created a kind of resilience.  They seem to have the sense that living in a hurricane zone is just one of the risks of being human in a world where so many elements are out of our control.  
       “I thank God every day I wake up.,” Nate Hawthorne told a group of World Hope volunteers in a discussion of the inevitable next hurricane season at a barbeque hosted by his brother to celebrate his new World Hope roof .  “I’ve seen people die right in front of me, standing there one minute, dead the next, and when He comes to get you, you can’t say ‘no, I ain’t going.’”. “As long as my daughters are fine, nothing else matters,” agreed his cousin who called himself Phat.  
       Six months after hurricane Katrina, the town of Gulfport, Mississippi turned out to celebrate Mardi Gras.  Beach chairs were set up on the patches of boardwalk that survived the high winds.  Floats from New Orleans drove slowly down the coastal road, filled with cheering people.  There is something strangely daring about throwing Mardi Gras beads onto roadsides that are still cluttered with rubble.  There will always be those who, for the sake of family or sense of place or the sheer thrill of living on the edge, will decide that the beauty is worth the risk.    For them, the shiny plastic mixed with the trash is a symbol of the gamble that is an inherent part of existence, whether or not we come face to face with it in the aftermath of a storm.