 "Photo: Mark Mulligan")
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Editor's note: This is the second in a series of photo essays documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region.
The ground surrounding the trees was strewn with rubble, apocalyptic heaps of twisted metal, splintered wood and frayed power lines.
Hanh Nguyen pointed toward the branches from which he hung in the dark hours of Monday morning as the hurricane's biggest surge ripped off his clothes and flung him crashing against trees, building wreckage and violent waves.
Hanh had nearly drowned in the Vietnamese convenience store where he sought shelter. The pressure from the neck-high floodwater held the doors shut, and Hanh was certain he was going to die trapped in darkness until the strength of the storm obliterated the building, allowing him to escape. The waves flung him to nearby treetops, which he clutched as the full brunt of Katrina's indiscriminate wrath tore at him.
"My arm's getting tired, you know," Hanh said. "I can't even hold no more. The wind, the waves hit me, and I just fall down in the water."
Each time Hanh fell from the battered branches, he waited for a swell to propel him upward to the next limb and higher ground.
"I have to hold my breath. I gotta wait for the wave to come behind me. When the wave come behind me, it hit me, you know, and I had to lift."
The only reason Hahn survived, he said, was because of his experiences living on the sea as a child in southern Vietnam.
Hanh came to the United States in 2000 and to Bay St. Louis five months ago to work on the crabbing boats that stipple the waters along the Mississippi Gulf. The storm's devastating fury took his boat and everything he had built for himself.
After 11 hours of riding the waves from tree to tree, the only refuge in sight was 100 yards away - a neighbor's stranded boat from a nearby marina thrown up next to the twisted remains of his own empty boat trailer. Realizing he couldn't survive much longer without shelter, he decided to ford the treacherous current of the receding floodwater - an arduous journey that took more than two hours.
Hanh lay in the boat for two days, unable to move. Eventually, he searched the cabin and found two blankets, a pair of shorts and, in a trash bin, a plastic water bottle filled to its fourth ridge.
With sticks and some tattered blue fabric he built a canopy shelter which shadowed the necessities he had scavenged: a two-burner propane stove, pots and pans, a bottle of soap, a bottle of shampoo and a pillow.
Periodically during the next three days, Red Cross patrols on search-and-rescue missions came by, each time urging him to leave his makeshift home so he could get medical attention. Each time Hanh refused. On Saturday, relief workers forced Hanh to go with them.
"They see my body like that. 'You can't hang, man. You've gotta go to the doctor.' I tell them I'm fine. I don't want to go to the doctor. Because somebody told me that too many people waiting in line. I'm tired. They made me go."
Morning light fell softly from a window above Hanh's head Sunday, illuminating the basketball court where 10 or 20 people sleeping on scattered blankets were beginning to stir.
The 2nd Street Elementary School became a temporary shelter for hungry, homeless victims of the hurricane after they entered the building and broke into the kitchen to offer food to other desperate survivors.
Hanh won't stay here long. He's quiet and uncomfortable among people after a week alone with Katrina and her aftermath.
Clad only in a pair of shorts he found and carrying a half-empty pack of Kool cigarettes, Hanh returns to his makeshift home. He gestures to the mangled boat trailer, his only connection to life before the storm. He flexes his bandaged, healing arm.
Wrecked boats straddle the land, blocking streets and jutting out of houses. Hanh's is there somewhere.
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