The Superhero’s Journey – part 2
continued from this post
I woke up early Saturday morning, gathered my gear and a McDonald’s breakfast, and headed south. Mapquest said it was a 2 hour drive, and it ended up being almost exactly that.
For about the first hour and fifty minutes, my friend who’d said to expect nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be pretty much on the nose. The drive though Mississippi, into Louisiana, and back into Mississippi was beautiful, with trees lining both sides of the interstate corridor. Once you get about 30 minutes away from the coast, you start to notice a little bit of trash here and there in the trees. Once I got about 10 minutes away, I could see a few trees knocked over.
I took the exit off I-10 for Bay St. Louis. Immediately I saw a gas station and thought “Well, they’re obviously doing okay if the gas station is up and running.” Then I saw the gas station a little closer. The windows were all blown out. The massive roadside sign was shattered, with only a few pieces of the logo remaining. Just down the road, another gas station sat in worse shape. A nearby building had a car through the front window. It looked like the hurricane had hit yesterday.
As I made the five mile drive to Highway 90, the road that runs east and west along the bay, it just got worse. I saw a car wrapped around a tree, leveled houses, and more destroyed businesses. The first real sign of any kind of rejuvenation came when I reached Highway 90. The K-Mart was boarded up, and so was nearly everything else, but the Sonic was open for business. I later found out that the Sonic and the Waffle House were the only two places in town that were back open. Expect a wait of an hour to an hour and a half to be served.
It was amazing to me that the town was still in this kind of shape. The only businesses that seemed unaffected were car dealerships. But really, with the complete lack of any media attention since the weeks immediately following the hurricane, the general scenario projected onto the non-gulf-coast US population is that everything’s getting back to normal. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The town looked like it was still in the middle of a hurricane, only the sky was sunny and dry.
Back to my mission: I was looking for five high school students, riding bikes, dressed as superheroes. My plan of action was to just drive around through town, hoping to spot them or some sign of their presence. If that failed, and I felt like I’d covered everything, I’d stop in at any open business (the Waffle House, Sonic or a car dealership, I guess) and ask if they’d seen or heard of the superheroes.
I turned onto Highway 90 and headed east into the town of Bay St. Louis. After several miles, I came to the bay itself. I’d seen the picture before – row after row of concrete pillars, once holding up the Highway 90 bridge – extending out across the bay. The buildings in that area were levelled unlike any I’d seen so far. I later learned that a tornado had passed through that part of town. All this meant to me at the time was that I’d be turning around. I backtracked west on 90 until I reached the point I started.
Ten minutes into the mission. No superheroes. This was where it was going to have to either get interesting or frustrating. I imagined myself at noon, still driving around looking for them, wondering when panic would set in and how it would affect my judgment.
I picked a random side road and started driving south toward the coast. It was narrow and winding, curving east while passing through a wrecked residential area. Old Spanish Trail was the name. I drove slowly, scanning up and down the streets it intersected, looking for kids, bikes and capes.
No kids, bikes or capes, but something did catch my eye: a yellow school bus with Oregon plates and bio-diesel stickers (I remembered that detail from the newspaper story), parked next to a campsite. This can’t be it, I thought. I’ve been looking for fifteen minutes.
I parked and walked up to the campsite. At the very least, these people might have heard of them.
A woman in a bright, multi-colored pullover walked out. I asked, “Is this where the group from Eugene is staying?” She replied, “The superheroes?”
“Yes!” I found them. Almost, I guess. They had already gone out, helping build a park. But a few more of the superheroes were still there. I was introduced first to Velvety Black Earth Tongue (she had driven the bus). I was told I needed to talk to Blazing Echidna – he had started the whole thing.
This was shocking to me – I was meeting a bunch of adults in superhero costumes. A quick conversation with Blazing Echidna later (he was joining the group building the park as well), I learned that this superhero community had existed for a decade, that they travel around helping people and getting in adventures, there were more than thirty of them there in Bay St. Louis, and their roster includes more than 300 superheroes across the United States.
Blazing Echidna gave me directions to the park, where the superheroes were helping build a new playground for the children of Bay St. Louis. I’d been on their trail 15 minutes since entering town, and through the most amazing luck, managed to find them right away. I quickly made this post from my cel phone, and followed the Blazing Echidna to the park.
to be continued…