Free Beginning by Michael Farris Smith

1
    THE FIRST YEAR that the hurricanes tunneled through the Gulf Coast it was assumed that the string of storms was little more than a historical anomaly. A series of natural disasters like the world had not seen in thousands of years. A fluke. The perfect combination of elements that caused twelve months of almost ceaseless devastation. Nothing to do with anything else.
    When the storms finally broke and the water receded, the rebuilding began, the aid arrived, most returned, insurance paid up, the officials said the right things and signed the right documents, and the region vowed that it would be better than it had ever been before. A hard-willed people gathered themselves to do what they had always done in the wake of Mother Nature.
    Months of normality passed. The casinos appeared almost overnight, money-making anthills that opened the gaming floors before the restaurants and hotel rooms were completed. Around-the-clock opportunity for those who had already lost everything to continue to lose everything. The Beau Rivage offered a free lunch on weekdays. Treasure Bay rolled a mobile Laundromat into its parking lot and provided free washing and drying. The Grand Casino gave away a $100 chip to any person who walked in with a valid Mississippi driver’s license, and the offer was good for however many days in a row you could stroll through the automatic doors. From the outside it was charity. From the inside it was simply pulling them in a little closer. In the night sky the casinos’ lights shined like purple and red neon beacons, and the grand structures stood along the broken-down Biloxi and Gulfport coastlines like ancient lookouts for a coming invasion.
    The FEMA trailers stretched for miles north of Gulfport along Highway 49, along strips of Highway 90 between Ocean Springs and Gautier, and dotted between D’Iberville and Biloxi. White, boxlike communities of the downtrodden, of those struggling to maintain a Gulf Coast home or business, of those who had nowhere else to go. But it gave the region a population and a work force and an opportunity to return to its former self. Buses arrived each morning and carried workers to construction sites, carried children to makeshift schools under tents, carried the sick to the Red Cross. The coast had been crippled more severely than it had ever been, but there was life and hope, and as the weeks stretched out a resurrection seemed possible.
    And then they came again. Four more hurricanes. All in succession. Only a month separating one storm from another, as if they had gathered out across the ocean and decided on a schedule of wreckage. All four were plodders, sitting on top of the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines and pounding and pounding. The water rose in south Louisiana and chunks of the bayous and bays simply disappeared. Lake Pontchartrain swallowed Mandeville, Metarie, Kenner. Severe wind damage occurred in Mississippi as far north as Columbus and Oxford, several hundred miles from the coast. The torrential rain caused rivers and lakes to rise and create muddywater flooding that carried away communities and reshaped the geography of the Delta and the Tombigbee Waterways of northeast Mississippi. Along the Mississippi River the water rose and swept away vast chunks of earth and buckled bridges and carried trade and cargo ships out into the Gulf without their consent. Oil rigs gave and crumbled like shaky stacks of children’s blocks and pieces of steel and iron and then men washed onto the shore in the brief time between storms.
    Whatever had been built in hopes of restoring the region went down again. But even after the four storms were over, the proclamations returned of standing strong, meeting the force of destruction with gusto, we will build it back again, better than before. But fewer proclaimed, and fewer believed.
    Weather forecasters now examined the patterns and declared that the fluke was over and the trend had begun. The Gulf Coast had