“We Really Have No Place Else to Go”

They had no place else to go, some residents of this proud old fishing village explained. So they weathered Katrina in their boats.

Two weeks after the storm, dozens of families are just as matter-of-fact when they discuss why they are living in tents or their cars or on battered couches in their own backyards.

“Well,” said Mark Zirlott, a 44-year-old fisherman, “we really have no place else to go.”

Scores of homes in this seaside community of 2,300 about 15 miles south of Mobile remain uninhabitable, reduced to rubble at one extreme or cursed by black mold at another. Power has come back sporadically, sometimes on one side of a street but not the other. The water level in more than 800 homes was 4 feet or deeper.

The town might have understood had Katrina confined her wrath to living spaces. But the hurricane hammered out the heart of the seafood industry, Bayou La Batre’s economic mainstay since its founding in 1786. The hurricane destroyed fish processing plants and marine repair centers. It took 85-foot fishing boats and tossed them ashore, depositing some in deep marshes or thick pine forests.

Katrina also churned up the water where residents fish for crabs, shrimp and oysters. The markets for these fish already had been buffeted in recent years by imported products and high fuel prices.

Nearly 80% of Bayou La Batre’s workers had been involved in the seafood business.

The storm brought that to a halt, putting nearly everyone out of work.

The town is the hub of a seafood industry that contributes about $350 million a year to Alabama’s economy. No one knows yet if the jobs will return, or what level of help the government will provide to help rebuild the industry.

The success of the fishing establishment helped draw many Southeast Asians to Bayou La Batre. Nearly a quarter of the town’s population comes from Vietnam; another 10% hails from Laos or Cambodia. Almost all new immigrants are involved with the seafood business.

“We are seafood. It is who we are,” said Susan Shattuck, 34, a crabber. “This is how we make a living here -- the only way we make a living here.”

Bayou La Batre, which was the hometown of the Bubba character in the movie “Forrest Gump,” treasures its humble isolation.

Shattuck said many longtime families in the town got a good laugh out of a Northern developer’s plan to transform it into a French-style fishing village. Those plans, which had received tentative approval shortly before Katrina struck, called for brick streets instead of dirt roads; high-end condominiums to replace mobile homes and wooden shacks; quaint shops in lieu of the town’s lone grocery store, and, as if the market for massages might suddenly skyrocket -- spas.

“It’s just a crazy idea,” said Shattuck, camped out with her large extended family in tents in their backyard. “This town is about seafood.”

Like many others in Bayou La Batre, Shattuck said she had been through hurricanes her entire life. She said that by the time she and her husband, two children and other relatives realized they should flee Katrina, the water had engulfed their trucks.

“We went swimming,” said her 13-year-old daughter, Ashley Marie Burris. “It was that or drown.”

Miraculously, no lives are believed to have been lost in Bayou La Batre, although Alabama has recorded two deaths from the storm. But the economic consequences are immeasurable. “A lot of people think the biggest part of the destruction was in Mississippi and New Orleans,” said Donna Jane Bates, 51. “But on the coast here, we suffered too. It is really going to devastate the fishing industry. Our oyster industry might not come back.”

Bates’ husband, Harley Dean Bates, 58, owns half a dozen rental properties along Jernberg Avenue, not far from the house where the Bates family remained during Katrina. As he helped his tenants with repairs, Harley Dean Bates said he could understand why they opted to pitch tents instead of bunking down at the local hurricane shelter.

“They don’t want to leave their homes and their possessions, what few they have left,” he said.

Among Bates’ renters is Zirlott, who said he could not imagine asking his family to leave the home they were furiously cleaning.

“You got your privacy here. You’re not going to lay your head next to a total stranger,” said Zirlott, who works “one of them big shrimp boats, the ones you see in the bushes now.”

The sight of families using Coleman lanterns and flashlights as they prepared to sleep in tents gave Bayou La Batre the odd air of a communal campsite. The Zirlotts and other families cooked elaborate meals on gas grills.

Around the corner, 83-year-old Hilton Barnes was stirring a pot of ground beef and rice on his barbecue.

Barnes and his wife, Louise, rode out Katrina by climbing into a small boat tethered to their house. They brought their eight dogs with them, and watched as mattresses floated out the door.

Back in the almost-destroyed house after the storm, Louise, 71, returned to her sickbed to nurse several broken ribs and other ailments.

Hilton Barnes said he worked on fishing boats until a few years ago, when he took up oystering.

“I’ve got Social Security, so I know we can make it,” he said. “But some of these folks, fishing for crabs or shrimp is all they have ever done.”

Another neighbor, Charles Milton Lyons, began working on a shrimp boat almost 30 years ago, when he was 14. After his mother died and his wife left him several years ago, Lyons moved back into the house he grew up in on 3rd Street. Since Katrina, the place is such a wreck that he now sleeps in his black 1996 Honda Accord.

“I’d rather stay here than go to some shelter,” he said. “Where else can I go? Anyway, this kind of feels like home.”

Lyons said he had been washing his clothes in a bucket and subsisting on food donated by church groups and the Red Cross.

At the VFW hall Sunday, a Baptist church group from Montgomery handed out 40-pound bags of rice and 50-box packages of noodles, and to those families who wanted it, a bottle of fish sauce.

“These people have lost their jobs and in some cases their property,” Pastor Daniel Tran said. “But only a very few seem about to give up. I think most of them are very strong. Remember, they have been uprooted before.”

Some in the village have deep roots here.

For three generations at least, the Clarke family has never lived anywhere but Bayou La Batre. Brothers, sisters, children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts -- all have worked in the seafood business.

Most have lived at one time or another in the gray wooden house on Noilon Street that a grandfather built almost 100 years ago.

The house withstood so many hurricanes that no one thought Katrina could harm it. When the storm’s full fury began to become apparent, 10 family members -- ranging from 16 to 70 years in age -- piled aboard the 78-foot fishing boat Country Girl.

“We didn’t have nowhere else to go,” said David Clarke, a 46-year-old shrimp fisherman. “We all grew up on the water, so we thought it was one of the safest places we could go.”

His sister, Wendy Clarke Weaver, 41, said the family watched houses slide off their foundations from their aquatic vantage point.

She said the turbulence was bearable, and that other families rode out the hurricane aboard other boats.

When the Clarkes returned, they found a neighbor’s bedroom parked in their frontyard. Their own house was smashed beyond repair.

The giant sycamore tree from which all the Clarke children and grandchildren had rocked on a wooden swing was upended, revealing a root span that stretched nearly 20 feet in diameter.

Although they say they had yet to receive help or useful information from FEMA or other relief agencies, the family hopes to rebuild the house.

David Clarke said he had spent his days since the storm trying to find temporary housing for his 64-year-old mother, Emma. He said he would return to shrimping as soon as possible.

“This is just a little seafood town, and we’re all a part of it,” he said. “Soon as I get my momma settled, I’ll be gone again.”