The Fearless Journalist

The sanctuary of St. Thomas Catholic Church in Long Beach, Miss. after Hurricane Katrina. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright)

[Originally written June 28, 2010. Sorry for posting two weeks late. It was hard to write, harder to edit. These things take time.]

Oil hit Biloxi tonight, and I wasn’t there. For weeks, I’ve stalked the Mississippi shoreline with my camera, trying to preserve the beauty, trying to stave the inevitable. I spend my days linking stories on Twitter so the world knows what is happening to the Gulf Coast. I spend my nights pacing the beach, betting the future on the Nikon in my hand. I write about the spill. I dream about the spill. I talk so much about it, I’m sure my friends are tired of listening.

They’ve seen the pelicans, stared into those great, golden, unblinking eyes, sighed, and agreed that it’s awful. Heartbreaking. Mind-numbing. How many adjectives can you throw at one news story before fatigue sets in? The World Cup is fun. There are winners, losers, and vuvuzelas — a word none of us knew a month ago. After a while, one dead bird looks like another. It was like this after Katrina as well — an endless stream of concrete slabs and gutted homes. I contributed to the flood of images. Some of those were from Biloxi.

I’d only been there once before Katrina, right after I left the Gazette and went freelance. It was a whirlwind, 1000-mile job search that took me from the Roane County News to The Biloxi Sun-Herald. The Sun-Herald wasn’t hiring; I don’t even know what led me there. But I was blown away. I’d never seen a real beach before. Colorful flags waved in the breeze, and people crawled across the white sands in giant, cartoonish sand buggies. I wanted to hang glide. I wanted to swim. I wanted to make sand castles. I wanted to live there — forever.

Self-portrait, 2006. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright)

Then I started stringing for national publications and forgot about Biloxi. I hopped planes and trains and traveled the country. On Nov. 18, 2006, I landed in Baton Rouge. After that, nothing was the same.

I made a bad choice that cost my body, my soul, my photo equipment, and nearly my life. I bought a new camera, but the click of the shutter, the distinctive Nikon “ca-clunk,” was so twined with memory that it evoked instant nausea. I learned to loathe shooting. I let the new camera gather dust.

That might have been the end of my career, but journalism is the moon to my tide, the lure I can’t quite break.

In February, I heard about a Pass Christian police chief who was trying to run his department from a trailer, struggling with hand-me-down cars and a skeleton crew. They were ragtag and determined; I was broken and damaged. They needed to heal, and I needed to forget. I headed back to the coast.

The desolation suited my mood, and I shot stark, scoured landscapes that spoke of isolation, despair, violation, violence. At night, I sat on the beach, stared into blackness, and tried to write.

Hwy. 90, between Biloxi and Pass Christian, one year after Hurricane Katrina. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson

There are no voices. There are no people. There are no houses. There are no lights. There are few street signs. Whatever remains does so in crooked defiance. The storms will come again. They always do. Yet I’m drawn to this lonely place.

I have no history here. No past, no present. But it feels so hauntingly familiar, touches some echo inside of me, and I mourn a nameless sorrow with such wild grief I feel I may never be whole again. If there are past lives, one of mine was spent here. Something ended. Something, someone, was taken, replaced with a howling misery.

It took an oil spill to understand why that barren stretch of land called to me after Baton Rouge. It took an oil spill to understand that the loss I grieved was innocence, and the person I sought — the person I seek each time I’ve returned since then — is the strong, confident, brazen photographer I was before my feet touched Louisiana soil.

It took oil hitting the hallowed ground of Biloxi for me to finally feel the anger, violation, shock and fear that I could not — would not — let myself feel after Baton Rouge. It took oil hitting the hallowed ground of Biloxi for me to finally cry, not only for the people and the wildlife, but for myself. For the raping of innocence. The defilement of purity. The desecration of sanctity. The unfairness of life.

Three years ago, on a dirty hotel floor in Baton Rouge, I lost my passion for photography. A few months ago, in Nashville, I accidentally glimpsed the still-glowing embers.

And tonight, as I cry, I also growl, “How DARE they?”

The next time I step onto Biloxi Beach, I suspect I won’t find the same shattered girl who stood there before. My soul has come home, borne on a flood of tears and a firestorm of anger, carried by a black tide, and bathed in the white light of redemption.

There is much work to be done. I’m ready.