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America's pulse, taken by bus
By STEPHEN BUCKLEY
© St. Petersburg Times,
An American flag billowed from her front porch in Ponchatoula, La. The flag was not here a few mornings ago, but then the world fell into pieces and the flag only seemed right. "They killed working people," said Allen, a 43-year-old homemaker. "Mothers no longer have daughters, sons no longer have fathers, grandparents no longer have grandchildren." Her son Steven, 5, played Superman on the porch, a Peter Pan knife tucked in his brown leather belt. He put a steady hand on his mom's left shoulder. "I'm taking this all personally," Allen said. So is the rest of heartland America, where people are suspended between mourning and outrage, between helplessness and defiance, between a longing for justice and a lust for revenge. What is America feeling? Ride by bus, across 1,600 miles, to the pocket of plainspoken charm that is Valdosta, Ga., on to Bay St. Louis, Miss., where the star-pocked midnight sky seems close enough to touch, and through Ponchatoula, a town so tiny the bus stops only if someone in the station flags it down. End up, finally, in Oklahoma City, where they remember New York firefighters as the first rescuers in town that day six years ago, when the Murrah building came down. The nation is awash in patriotism; flags appear on bridges, in store windows, on all manner of clothing. "God Bless America" is on church bulletin boards, fast-food signs, car dealerships and city halls. But with the surge in national spirit has come an equal measure of confusion and loss. People are choked up, from sorrow but also from thanksgiving. They grieve for the dead and for those who mourn the dead, and for a country they now realize is bedeviled by the same horrors of faraway places they've known only as news items in the morning paper. At the same time, they are thankful for their own simpler lives, and for loved ones in New York and Washington who survived the nightmare that was last week. They are eager to see America use bombs, in the words of one businessman in Valdosta, "to make some glass out of all that sand" in Arab countries. Those blistering words fall against the quiet but equally passionate pleas for thoughtful action from American leaders. What people cannot shake is the sense of violation, not just of their land but of their values. These towns and cities are places where children still answer "yes sir" and "no ma'am," and where work is as holy as church. That is what baffles and horrifies people most: How can you get killed just for going to work? * * * At 1:20 p.m. the day after, the bus pulls into Valdosta, where 15 weary passengers descend into the sunshine of a place so green it nearly hurts the eyes. Population 50,000, Valdosta is a mere 15 miles inside Georgia from the Florida state line. "The Azalea City" is flush with pine trees and colonials, and ubiquitous church steeples spike its skies. A lot of New Yorkers have moved here for refuge from the bustle and stress of their city. Downtown, Carlton Outdoors sells hunting and fishing gear: flannel shirts, Gore-Tex jackets, rods and reels, bows and arrows, knives, holsters and guns. They move 3,000 to 4,000 firearms a year, from sleek AR-15 rifles to pump shotguns to punishing Glock pistols, guns called "the Peacekeeper" and "Raging Bull." Walk into Carlton Outdoors and you are greeted by: "Know where we can find some bin Laden silhouettes?" "It's a desert in here today!" Clint Carlton shouts, surveying a sea of quiet aisles. "That thing that happened yesterday scared everybody off." Carlton is mad, and not just because business is off. He is mad because he nearly lost a friend in "that thing that happened." A buddy since grade school who works for the Secret Service was in the World Trade Center, Tower No. 1, when the first jet hit. He got out and threw himself under a parked FedEx truck just before the skyscraper crumbled. "These things just do not happen in the United States," said Carlton, who is 32. "They happen in places like Libya and Iraq." He is mad because terrorists kill and aren't punished. He is madder still because he wants a massive act of retribution from the American government -- and he's not sure he's going to get it. "This kind of thing ain't gonna stop happening until people know that if they get caught, they'll get their necks stretched," he said. "After we put a missile in Gadhafi's a--, you haven't heard anything more from him." It's a seven-minute ride from Carlton Outdoors to an unusually quiet American Legion Post 13. The night before, the place had been crammed with veterans analyzing and re-analyzing what had happened that morning. Now the TV in the near-empty bar is tuned to the news: "America Under Attack." On one side stands makeshift bartender R.D. Martin, 65, a Vietnam veteran. On the other side of the bar, literally and figuratively, is Charlie Miley, a retired sergeant major who fought in Korea and did two tours in Vietnam. Miley wants to bomb the world, today. Martin preaches caution. "I hope they wipe Afghanistan right off the map, and I hope they wipe Iraq off the map while they're at it," Miley said, sipping Budweiser on tap and chain-smoking Dorals. "I believe we ought to give these countries 24 hours to turn over to us all terrorists, and their supporters. And if they don't, we should bomb the hell out of them." "But you're stereotyping," Martin said. "It's like saying they're guilty before they're proven guilty." "I'm just saying, tell those countries, 'Get the terrorists out of your country,"' Miley shot back, his voice hard. "I just can't say we should go and attack a country when we don't know -- " Martin said. Miley went back to his beer, and Martin got quiet. They turned their attention back to the TV news. * * * The bus snakes along Mississippi's Gulf Coast until, about 4:30 a.m., it pulls into an Exxon service station in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The sign says: "Our heart goes out to the victims and families. God Bless." Just outside of Biloxi, Bay St. Louis is a breath away from the Stennis Space Center and Keesler Air Force Base. "It could have happened here," said cashier Carol Kararick as bus passengers filed past to buy candy, coffee, gum, cigarettes. "It was innocent people, working people, everyday people," she said. "It was our people. Somebody came in and did that to our people." Five hours later, slicing through roads built through swamps thick with alligators and cypress, the bus groans into Ponchatoula, population 7,000. The name, pronounced pon-cha-TOO-la, means "flowing hair" in Choctaw. It is the self-proclaimed "Strawberry Capital of the World" and its annual strawberry festival draws 300,000 people. But the sight of city folks in town is still unusual enough to draw questions. "You folks acquainted with strawberries?" residents will ask strangers. They feel a special kinship here with what happened in New York because they, too, are well-acquainted with grief. A train derailment last year cost five townspeople their lives. Three or four years back, another train accident killed a half-dozen residents. That is why Paul Pevey, restaurant owner and volunteer fireman, felt such a connection to the firefighters in New York that he could not help himself. He wept. "In the fire service, you're trained to do whatever it takes to save people," said Pevey, a volunteer fireman for 25 years. "Whether it's a small town or all the way up in New York, you save people's lives. I wouldn't know how to help those guys fight a fire in a 20-story building, even a 10-story building. But it's a fraternity. You feel the connection." Men don't cry much here. This is a four-stoplight, red-hydrant town, where the deli is named Bootsy's and the laundry My Three Sons. Fear has strangled stoicism. People are afraid not just that terrorism has transformed life in America, but that their town is about to end up in tears again. Men such as 48-year-old Kenneth Ballard worry for their military sons who are being hustled to New York to help with search and rescue efforts, and who may soon be fighting a war. His 21-year-old boy, Bobby, left the naval base in Jacksonville for New York on Thursday. Bobby's hulk of a daddy, a man with pale blue eyes that match his mechanic's overalls, isn't feeling very brave today. "Everything is so unstable," said Ballard, who owns Ballard and Sons service station, which his family has owned for 39 years. "The biggest problem is the safety of the building. I just worry about his safety as far as going in there." Then, to reassure himself: "Aw, he's going to be all right. He's a tough kid." The blood bank here normally is lucky to get four or five pints on a good day. Hundreds of people have been lining up. The Wal-Marts and Kmarts had runs on Old Glory. On televisions around town, silent headlines speak to the horror: Port Authority missing as many as 200 employees. WTC businesses cannot account for 1,500 people. Giuliani: 4,763 people missing in New York. Most everything in town came to a stop. Ballard said he usually gets 100 people a day in for gas or tuneups or whatever needs doing to their cars. After the attacks, he was getting half that. "Everybody's inside watching the news," he said. * * * "I'm taking this bus!" a young woman shouts, playing hijacker just outside of Houston. "That is not funny," another passenger mutters from his back-of-the-bus seat. The bus returns to quiet. It stays that way through a string of small Texas towns -- Buffalo, Marshall, Denton -- until a pink sky greets groggy passengers in Oklahoma City at 7 Friday morning. It was April 19, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and 168 people lost their lives. A rescue team from the New York City Fire Department managed to arrive the day of the bombing. A Washington, D.C.-area squad got here the next day. Somebody tacked up a sign at the memorial to the 1995 victims: "You stood with us in our darkest hour, now we stand with you." There were candlelight vigils and prayer services and blood drives. Some people hoped to go to New York to volunteer. Public schools canceled extracurricular activities. College football games were postponed. So were Friday's high school football games, a rite especially beloved in this part of the country. By Friday, people in Oklahoma City had enough of watching the news. They flocked to the Oklahoma State Fair, which opened as scheduled, and turned to Polish sausages and Indian tacos, to Racing Pigs and Wild West Dogs. "We just wanted to get out and get away from the TV for a while," said Marian Dickson, 54, who has been coming to the fair since she was 10. "I found myself feeling more depressed as the week progressed. I'm hoping this will help." Even here, though, they could not escape the shadow of fear and sorrow. The fair opened with a special prayer and flag-raising. Security was everywhere, with police on foot, in cars and on horseback. As was the case all over small-town America, everyone seemed to have some connection to the attacks. A woman named Linda, who supervises all the food stands at the fair, said she had a cousin who had been killed at the World Trade Center and two relatives who were still missing. She didn't want to give her last name because she said some people in her family still don't know the bad news. Linda came to work at the fair crying her eyes out. "I just couldn't stay home and watch TV, waiting. My friends are here. I needed a distraction. I'm on pins and needles." Eight friends from India sat on the grass outside the main gate to the fair, waiting on more friends to show up before going in together. They are college students, and they are scared. They know that people will mistake them for Muslims from South Asia or the Middle East. They expect stares and harsh words. "We're not so confident, but we believe that Americans won't take drastic measures," said Suman Nuthalapati, 25, who, like all of his friends at the fair, is a Hindu. "We understand that, for right now, maybe people will stare at us or be suspicious of us." "We hope and pray that sanity will prevail," added his buddy, Phani Daggubati, 25. Downtown, at the memorial, about 1,000 people gathered to honor the dead in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. They included babies and businessmen, seniors and teens. Many wore American-flag lapel pins or T-shirts. Pastors and priests, rabbis and imams pleaded for justice for the terrorists and mercy for their victims. With eyes closed and with gentle voices, the crowd sang Amazing Grace. As they sang, a breeze swept over the memorial's reflecting pool, sending rippling circles through its once-still water.
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