 GCN Feature Dane’s Story – Part 2 The following is a recalling of recent events as they really happened days and months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Dane St. Pe tells us of just what transpired in his search to survive. (For Part 1 - Click Here) By Mark Proulx - Special to GCN “You have no idea how bad it got, Mr. Mark” - Dane “I had nowhere to go.” Dane’s family - from New Orleans - was stuck in Shreveport, and he was told that it was almost impossible to get north from the coast. Parts of Hwy 603 in Hancock County was still flooded and debris was everywhere, making the road out of the area treacherous. Both bridges leading west (into New Orleans) and east (towards Biloxi) were completely gone. For all purposes, Bay St. Louis and Waveland had become a prison. Water-locked on three sides and with only one road out, many people took it upon themselves to walk the five to ten miles out to Interstate 10. Dressed in the few rags of clothes, oversized boots he had scrounged from some piles of clothing that had been dumped in the parking lot, Dane decided he needed to get out of Mississippi. “Something inside of me told me to go to Florida. I took a guess that
my pastor from New Orleans was in his So he walked to the edge of the Save-a-Center parking lot and asked a couple in a truck if they were going towards I-10. Not-so-coincidentally, they were since it was the only road out. At the intersection of Hwy 603 and I-10 five miles up the road, the couple let Dane out and wished him luck getting to where he needed to go. Dane began walking along the interstate in the blistering post-hurricane South Mississippi heat. “I would not have picked myself up hitchhiking the way I looked. I had on a pair of cut-off jeans, and I was wearing a pair of size thirteen steel toe work boots. (I wear a ten and a half.). I even had a woman’s shirt on. I couldn’t figure out why the sleeves were so short. Covered in that nasty mud from the waist down, carrying a plastic bag across my shoulder with two pairs of jeans a lady had given me at Stennis, not having shaved or bathed in four days, I looked like Dumbo the clown hitchhiking. I wouldn’t have even let myself ride in the back of my truck!” Almost immediately, fortune smiled on Dane and he was picked up by a man looking for gas – but he only went about four miles to the Diamondhead exit, then got dropped off. Dane thanked him for the short ride, laughed and kept walking in the terrible heat and humidity that is Mississippi in August. After dragging himself only about fifty feet, a truck driver in the fast lane saw the rag-tag Dane clomping along and came all the way over to his side of the highway to pick him up. “Do you know that a trucker can lose his license for picking up hitchhikers?" he said. "Come to find out, he was one of the truckers who had been giving out ice in Waveland. As I got into the truck, I leaned into the air conditioner vent and sighed. He laughed and turned the AC on full blast. God that felt good.” The trucker asked where Dane was headed, so Dane filled him in on his plans to make it to Destin. The trucker wanted to take him, but had to get back to Savannah, GA. Feeling sorry for his passenger, the trucker turned on his cell phone, hoping to catch a signal. Communications had been completely knocked out along the MS coast and the trucker hadn’t bothered to turn on his phone, knowing there was no signals anywhere in the area. He took a chance, however, that something would pop up somewhere along the road. About a mile before the trucker had to drop Dane off near Interstate 65, on the west side of Mobile, he got a signal on his cell phone. The trucker was polite enough to allow Dane a chance to call out to see if he could locate his family. “I called the hotel my family was in, in Shreveport, and my sister-in-law answered the phone. When she heard my voice, we both began to cry. I assured them I was okay and that I was heading towards Florida, that I would contact them as soon as I could.” When they finally got to Hwy 65, the trucker pulled over, gave Dane twenty dollars and was apologetic. It was all Dane could do to keep from crying again, and he assured the kind trucker that he would be alright now. Walking along the highway, Dane found more than a few people willing to pick him up and help him along the way east towards Destin. Immediately after the storm, it was readily apparent that many people were completely destitute and motorists were going out of their way to help those in need. A lady and her son picked him up almost immediately after he got out of the eighteen wheeler. She was going to Mobile to look for supplies, and after she heard Dane’s story she said she would take him all the way to Pensacola, about an hour away. Sometime during a trip to Pensacola, the lady driving allowed Dane to use her cell phone to try and get through to Destin. He called his pastor’s cell phone and after a couple of rings - to his surprise - his pastor actually answered the phone! When he heard Dane’s voice, he began to yell, “Brother Dane’s alive! Brother Dane’s alive!” The goodness in people was brought out that day along I-10, as Dane wandered from car to truck, picking up rides all along the interstate. According to Dane, people just seemed to know that he was in desperate need and had to get to where he was going. With every ride and with every closing mile, Dane worried. He had no way of knowing how to get to his pastor’s place. All along the journey, Dane wondered if his trip was for nothing. Dane finally got directions to the condo and made it all the way to Highway 285, north of Destin where the pastor’s son met him and picked him up. Between walking and catching another ride, Dane – mentally and physically exhausted – dragged himself to the door of the condo…where he sat and cried. The pastor’s son opened the door and helped him in. Now in a fog, Dane took the time to shower and put on a fresh change of clothe, and passed out. “I woke up the next morning, and went out on the balcony to look out the prettiest blue water and white sugar sand I had ever seen. It was like going from Hiroshima to Paradise overnight. I had a good breakfast for the first time in days. My pastor took me out afterwards to get some clothes, and his friend’s wife took me to a thrift store to get more.” While Dane was in the thrift store, he began talking to a lady about his ordeal and in how bad it was in Mississippi. He casually mentioned that he was an electrician, and she gave him some company names and phone numbers of people he might want to contact for work. One number in particular interested Dane, for some unknown reason. Something told him to call that person, so he did. The man who answered turned out to be a contractor working for a doctor in Destin, who mentioned he had rebuilt his pier that had been destroyed during Hurricane Ivan the previous year and needed someone to do the electrical work on it. Dane told the contractor he didn’t have any tools or a vehicle, since he lost everything in the storm. “No problem,” the man said. “I’m a carpenter and I did all this work on the pier, but I need someone who can do the electrical work. Can you come over and quote the job? I’ll pick you up, and you can use my tools.”
“The doc said he would do no such thing. He insisted on buying me the tools I needed. As I was picking out the cheapest tools, he was putting them back and grabbing the best tools. He completely replaced my bag of hand tools to do my job. I really didn’t know what to say. Pretty soon, he started to refer me to his friends…all of whom tried to convince me to start an electrical contract company in Destin. I could have, you know, but something just wasn’t right. Here I was in Paradise and all I could think about was back home.” He stayed in touch with his brother, but neither of them could find out where their father was. He had been in a nursing home in New Orleans East, but neither knew where he had been evacuated to or even if he was alive. Dane tried many times to get in touch with his ex-wife to know if his son was okay or not, since they lived in a double wide trailer in Bush, LA, just about an hour and a half north of New Orleans. “I had a drinking problem since my divorce, and with all of this I started to drink more heavily. I believe I went into alcohol poisoning about three days before Christmas. I was more afraid of dying that day than I had been when I was on the roof during the storm. I resolved that if I made it through that night I would never touch another drop of alcohol, but man, what a bad night that was.” In the ensuing weeks, Dane’s brother returned home to the Westbank to find his home was okay. He immediately started to look for their father. Through a series of hospital contacts and many, many phone calls around the state, his brother found out that their dad had been moved into New Orleans before the storm. When the levees broke, he was put on top of a police car and driven out of the flood waters near the river close to the French Quarter, and taken to Charity Hospital close to the Superdome. He had been on a ventilator and a feeding tube. They learned that the whole time their father had a nurse breathe for him with an air bag for an entire day. When she couldn’t do it anymore, as the story goes, the father began breathing on his own. After being in that miserably hot hospital, he was heliported to Baton Rouge. After the nurses stabilized him, he was sent to yet another nursing home. “My brother searched every hospital in Baton Rouge looking for our father. I felt so helpless being stuck in Florida. My brother said he would find him no matter what. We kept in constant contact, just knowing we would find him. I felt certain that we would find him safe and sound, even if it was stuck in the backroom of some ward in some out of the way building. “After about a week of searching, my brother finally found the hospital he was sent to and was given the name of the nursing home he’d been sent to. I was overjoyed! I couldn’t wait to hear from my brother again, because I just knew I’d be hearing my daddy’s voice.” When Dane’s brother got to the nursing home, however, he found out that their father had passed away almost a week before. A nurse that had taken care of the father told Dane’s brother that his father was so worried about his boys that he would not sleep. The nurses found him on the floor of his room a couple of times trying to go to look for them. One of the nurses told Dane’s brother that when Hurricane Rita came into the Gulf, his dad told her that he couldn’t go on anymore. He took her Sharpie pen from her pocket and wrote Dane and his brother’s full names on his arm…and died that night. Heartbroken, Dane went into a depression. So close. So very close. He cried at the fate that cost him his father’s life. More than that, his father died without his family around to comfort him. Had they tried hard enough? Is there anything that he could have done to find him? Guilt and severe depression started to sink in and Dane was on the verge of drinking heavily again. By the end of that same day, Dane was feeling about as low as one person could. All he could think about doing was robotically dialing the phone and attempting to locate his ex-wife to find out if his son, DJ, nine years old, was alive. He finally called through to his son’s middle school and found a a teacher who knew his son. Not knowing if DJ was okay or not, the teacher took it upon himself to drive all the way up into the country to find them and deliver the message that his father was alive and well, and living in Florida. Reaching the property, the teacher was happy to find out that Dane’s son was alive and well, they just had very poor communications. Throughout the Mississippi Coast area, telephone communications was very poor after Katrina. Later that night, Dane was able to finally get through to his ex-wife and get to talk to his son. His son was alive! Relieved beyond comprehension and with his faith restored, Dane decided to meet his life with a fresh attitude and vowed to live his life in the service of helping others. Picking up odd jobs garnished Dane a good reputation with the doctor’s friends. He also worked projects, rather than hourly, and he got a feel for them in a hurry. The doctor’s friends also appreciated the quality of work. Within a very short period of time, Dane realized that he was destined for better things. He made up his mind that he didn’t have to rely on hourly wages, but that he had a knack for quoting jobs, not to mention a good deal of skill with completing complicated jobs, as well. After receiving high praise for his quality of work and work ethic, Dane’s confidence soared. The help he received in getting back on his feet and the amount of people needing good help made him realize that he was now capable of doing far greater things. He began hinting that if he were to start a company, it would be back in Mississippi to help rebuild his hometown - not Florida. Standing in waist deep clear blue water at the end of the work day, Dane felt a calling to go home. In Part Three, Dane’s decision to come home takes him down another bend in the road that he never saw coming.
Contact the author: mxpowerdive@hotmail.com
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Very
quickly, Dane found himself in paradise: waist deep in pretty blue water
in the back bay in Destin with a beach hut, getting a tan and making
money. He made $1800 in three days and bought himself a little work
truck. On one trip for supplies to Home Depot with the doctor, whose pier
on which he was working, Dane asked if he could get some hand tools to
work with, and to please take it out of his pay. 
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