TBO.com News

Isolation, Anxiety Bond Survivors

By BAIRD HELGESON bhelgeson@tampatrib.com

Published: Dec 22, 2005

LONG - BEACH, Miss. - The stress of Hurricane Katrina is killing J.T. Staten day by day. The 78-year-old retiree marks the details of what he believes are his final days on a calendar he uses to note the recovery in his corner of the world.

After the storm, he recorded days without power, phone service, cable, and days when his 49-year-old girlfriend called him late at night.

"We were without power exactly 18 days," said Staten, who has been hospitalized several times since Katrina because of a fluid-choked heart and soaring blood pressure, worsened by stress and an addiction to nicotine patches and unfiltered cigarettes. "We were without cable even longer."

Said Staten, who has had two massive heart attacks in past years: "My doctor told me the next one will be it. But that's OK. I'm ready to go."

The Tampa Tribune first caught up with Staten in September, a few days after Katrina roared ashore, scouring everything within about a half-mile of the Gulf of Mexico. He has shared a unit in a tiny, pink duplex in Long Beach since May, cared for by Sam and Susan Dunnavant, who call him Papa.

In some ways, life is better now.

Sam Dunnavant, a 31-year-old wisp of a man who excels at climbing trees, is working regularly for the first time in years. Recovery and cleanup companies are bidding for his services; he just took a job with a painting company for $13 an hour, $2 an hour more than the previous company. "They even tried to hire Susan," he said.

Life is worse for his wife, who takes care of Staten in exchange for his cantankerous friendship and part of his Social Security check.

Susan Dunnavant, 44, was engaged in a tumultuous battle with mental illness before Katrina, and her condition has worsened. Since the storm, she dyed her hair auburn, but it has grown out, revealing her graying roots.

Emotionally, she is a roulette wheel. She flashes between euphoria over a Reba McEntire country music video and paralyzing anxiety.

Those are good days.

In bad times - and there have been many since Katrina - she spends days locked in a soul-crushing depression, unable to get out of bed or face Staten or her husband.

Sometimes they confront her and she snaps out of it; other times, she lashes out.

"Once when Papa was in the hospital, I nearly killed Sam," said Susan Dunnavant, who lately has gone days without eating or sleeping. "I just started beating him up."

But she is most unhinged when Sam is away, at work or running countless errands. She calls him repeatedly, sometimes several times an hour.

"He's my rock," she said after one of the calls. "All I have to do is hear his voice ... and I am fine."

Susan hopes to get back on antidepressants soon and planned to get a psychiatric evaluation this week. But she is doubtful she can fit it in around Staten's many trips to the doctor.

The Dunnavants, like many along the Gulf Coast, are in a predicament: The money is good, but home life and everything else is hard and uncertain.

"There's just nothing to do," Sam Dunnavant said.

Staten uses curmudgeonly outbursts to keep everyone in line and on task, knowing it's never more than a fragile peace.

"I don't know how much longer I've got, but I want to enjoy it," he said.

About an hour away on Dauphin Island, Charlie Meyer takes a nap in his ice cold home.

His house pokes out of the sand, resting on stilts, tucked amid dozens of homes ravaged by the eastern edge of Katrina's storm surge. Meyer's home - which he designed and built himself - is among the few that survived on the western half of the island.

Meyer, a retired engineer who helped design a hatch on the International Space Station, is the only resident within two miles. The only road remains washed out, making it impossible to get closer than a quarter-mile to his home without four-wheel-drive.

His only visitors are occasional stray dogs.

That's just the way Meyer likes it.

"The cops know I am here, but that's about it," said Meyer, eyeing a tiny shrimp, the lone survivor in his 100-gallon aquarium. "It's really not that bad out here, except for the cold and the sponge baths."

He spends his days making trips off the island for bottled water, wood to rebuild his stairs and batteries to power a tiny television, his only link to the outside world.

He spends the rest of his time reading library books and designing a tiny sailboat he hopes will replace his last sailboat, which Katrina wrecked and deposited on a beach 25 miles away. The boat he built in two years took a couple of hours to cut up and haul away.

Meyer thought about renting a home along Lake Superior to think and regroup, but he said the owner balked at renting to a 46-year-old, unemployed single man from Alabama.

Now he is committed to staying in his one-bedroom home through the winter, knowing utilities won't be hooked up before March.

Even a loner such as Meyer needs companionship.

He plans to go to California in February to pick up a puppy, a Saluki, the speedy Sighthounds bred to hunt small deer in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

"There will be so much room for her to run since no one is out here," Meyer said.

Bubba Turner has a front-row seat to watch the island's struggle over whether and how to rebuild. Just off the island, Turner and his mother, Gloria Wilson, own Gloria's Produce, a tiny roadside shack famous for Cajun boiled peanuts and the freshest vegetables around.

Many of the homes on the island, or leading to it, are for sale, owned mostly by seasonal residents who have lost their nerve for living so close to the water.

Most of the heavily damaged homes appear untouched since Katrina hit, torn open, roofs sheered off and steeply raked on their stilts, as if a shifting sea breeze could send them crashing to the ground.

Turner's business is down 70 percent since Katrina, he said.

"Instead of people coming to the island for Christmas, people are leaving the island for Christmas," said Turner, 36. "I just hope and pray that they come back."

Meyer hopes they don't.