by Dan Barry
“That’s to go! That’s to go! Put it in a box!”
“O.K., her Reuben went out. Are the tenders done? This is a crap microwave. This one’s lettuce and mayo.”
“I just spilled ranch all over the counter.”
“I told Ryan I’d be there about 1:30.”
“This have cheese-lettuce-tomato?”
“How much is French toast with scrambled eggs?”
“Four-seventy-nine. How come I only have two sausage links?”
“Hello, Donna’s Diner?”
It can get to be too much, like the smell of toast burning. An unanticipated trigger—a forgotten order, a returned meal, a splatter of ranch dressing—can set Donna off, and her tirades will spill into the dining room like scalding coffee.
“Is she O.K.?” a customer asks one difficult day.
“My mom?” asks Kristy, the waitress.
“Yes,” the customer replies.
“No.”
Sometimes you can see why, as Donna hunches into the desk space she has carved from the back-room clutter and works through the mound of mail. “I’m looking for shut-off notices,” she says, half-joking.
She also examines the income and expense figures she keeps in a brown spiral notebook. Last year, the daily receipts, in terms of hundreds of dollars, were in the threes, fours and fives; this year, they are in the twos, threes and occasional fours.
Meanwhile, the expenses keep coming. Rent, $650 a month. Electric, $1,416 a month.
“My bug guy, my pop guy, my towel guy, my window washer,” she says. Cable. Orlando Bread. Port Clinton Fish.
She tries to lower expenses. When her vexing electric bill shot up a while back, she sold off several appliances and bought a cheaper, more energy-efficient freezer. She spent Mother’s Day shopping for wholesale bargains on eggs and dish soap. She bounces from Rural King to Sam’s Club to Giant Eagle, looking for the cheapest coffee.
She cannot afford health insurance, she says; it would be $1,500 a month for her and her out-of-work husband, Tim, who has congestive heart failure at 57. A while back, she tore something in her left shoulder while pulling a heavy box of bleach down from a shelf at Sam’s Club. Never had it fixed.
Life has become cyclical. Every night, Donna returns to her modest two-story house in Elyria, with its untidy backyard that she never has the time or the energy to reclaim, and stares at the television until sleep comes. Every morning, she awakens to worries, beginning with what to offer for lunch.
Every day, after expenses, there is not much left—though, now and then, she peels off $20 to gamble at a video-lottery place she calls “the joint.” And every week, after lunch, here comes Mark Ondrejech, the affable salesman for US Foods, a wholesale supplier, to provide counsel. He sits with her at a back table, opens his laptop and goes down his list.
“All your dressings are good this week? Meat broth, chicken broth, French fries? Onion rings, sauerkraut? Ketchup packets, crackers, chip bags? Foam containers are good? Dinnernapkins, straws—grape tomatoes. Steak fries, cinnamon rolls.”
But Donna is ordering less and less from US Foods. She has raised her prices ever so slightly—two eggs and toast went from $1.99 to $2.39—in trying to strike the proper balance between fair profit and customer contentment. She is making her daughter and granddaughter occasionally pay for what they eat. She is holding on for better days, amid news that a new Taco Bell is replacing a downtown apartment building once occupied by Sherwood Anderson.
A Taco Bell.
All the while, the Judge’s suggestion—that she consider moving to the courthouse cafeteria—preys on Donna’s mind. “All you’re doing is, you’re working hard and you’re entertaining your customers,” she says he tells her.
But the diner’s people matter to her: Pete, Speedy, the Judge, Gloria and Forrest, Ike, even that unpleasant woman who bangs her walker against the door. The diner matters. It all matters.
“I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing,” she says. “When I get myself to this point, I can’t see a way out.”
HAUNTED BY FEARS
The Elyrian morning is now full-throated. Birds chirping, waters rushing, trains calling, music pounding from the cars stopped for the light just outside the diner. Sunlight paints the treetops of Ely Square.
Gazing at the park through her plate-glass window, Donna is reminded of a recurring image that she just can’t shake: that of a short woman with unruly gray hair, hunting through the park’s garbage for redeemable cans. Twenty years ago, Donna worked with this woman at a nursing home on East Avenue. She knew her to say hello.
The woman, Anna Hallman, redeems aluminum cans to pay a mortgage and make ends meet, getting about 50 cents for every 26 cans that she methodically crushes with her heel. She is 69, and other scavengers have kindly ceded to her the treasures to be found in the garbage bins downtown. And when she has had a good day, she sometimes treats herself to a meal at Donna’s—something that sticks to the ribs, like meatloaf.
Anna’s situation haunts Donna. Too close. Too possible.
How she needs to step away from the grill and take that drive to Lake Erie. No breakfast orders being shouted at her. No bills demanding her attention. Just Donna alone, sitting on a bench and staring into the infinite waters that calm her, help her think. Big decisions.
But now she has customers. The first two members of the Breakfast Club take their seats at the front table. Coffee for both. No breakfast for one, eggs over medium, wheat toast for the other. Orders taken, the owner of Donna’s Diner disappears into the kitchen.
EPILOGUE
The diner’s owner, Donna Dove, tried everything she could think of to keep the small restaurant open—from offering buffet-style service to applying for a liquor permit—but nothing seemed to work. Then her mother in Florida fell ill, which kept Ms. Dove away from the restaurant’s day-to-day operations for prolonged periods of time.
Finally, in December 2016, after one last Christmas party, she hung a “See You Next Year” sign on the door—and that was that. She just didn’t have the heart to tell her longtime customers personally, Ms. Dove said. “It hurt too bad.”
So ended this big-hearted, hardworking woman’s pursuit of success at a corner storefront in the small Ohio city of Elyria. At last report, another entrepreneur had moved into the space. The business plan: gourmet pizza.
PART SIX
Nature
The beautiful, the beautiful river
A Hand-to-Hand Struggle with a Raging River
CANTON, MO.—JUNE 19, 2008
They sandbag by moonlight. The school superintendent and the judge, the police sergeant and the mechanic, the Amish man in a straw hat and the young man in a Budweiser T-shirt, they lay down sandbags as if making peace offerings to a vexed god called the Mississippi.
The only sounds on Tuesday night: the whine of all-terrain vehicles climbing up the levee to deliver more sandbags; the rustle of bags being lifted; the calling mmmf! of those tossing bags into the air and the answering ooof! of those catching them in the chest; the thump of bags dropped into strategic place; and, ever so faintly, a distant aaahhh of rushing, roiling water.
“You sit here and listen,” Jim Crenshaw, a local emergency management official says with an awe just inches short of horror. “Normally you never hear it like that.”
Behind him, the swollen moon sends a charged lightness skimming across the river’s black surface and onto the white sandbags. Each bag tossed and each bag laid seems now to glow, as if containing something more than mere river sand. Mmmf! Ooof! Aaahhh…
And here, along the lip of the town’s levee, remain the torn, whitish remnants of sandbags lifted, tossed and stacked before the disastrous flood of 1993, when the people of Canton somehow managed, almost against the odds, to hold back the river.
The men and boys catching the sandbags of 2008, then, are standing on the successful offerings of the past.
There is something almost too simple, even primitive, about
sandbagging. In an age when anyone can receive a satellite photograph of where they’re standing with the click of an iPhone, and when the river’s southward swell can be tracked like a tagged animal lumbering along a worn path, we still heavily depend on a basic, communal practice: shovel sand in bag, place bag on ground, pray it works, as it often does.
The Army Corps of Engineers offers an appreciation for sandbags on its website; sandbags, it says, are “a steadfast tool for flood fighting.” And by now, people along the Mississippi know the very specific instructions—fill bags to little more than halfway; start downstream and work up; layer bags just so—as well as the irony that their bags are often filled with sand dredged from the very river they are fending off.
But there is an ingredient just as necessary as sand: people. In the small towns along Highway 79, which meanders for dozens of miles alongside the river, people gather at firehouses, garages and street corners to participate in a ritual that combines hope and earth.
In Clarksville, for example, some inmates from the women’s prison in Vandalia spend these days shoveling and packing while under the gaze of corrections officers in sunglasses. In white shirts stamped with “WR”—for work release—they form an assembly line that snakes away from a diminishing mound of sand toward the growing river, whose threat unites them with all those who will not be traveling 40 miles by van back to a prison.
Here are Sandra Miller, 48, and Thalisia Ervin, 40, basking in sweat and in the appreciation of Clarksville. Ms. Miller, who has already served 13 years for “being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as she puts it, says the weight of another bag caught sometimes knocks the wind out of her, but then she thinks to herself:
“This is for the good. This is for our good.”
Still, Ms. Miller looks around, sees the water higher and closer than it was the day before, and she questions that good. “It makes me wonder,” she says. “Does it help?”
“It does, it does,” her sister inmate reassures her. “It’s slowing it down.”
The story is the same in other communities. Inmates and Mennonites, children who should be playing and retirees who should be resting, all answering the mayday calls, all racing against the lowering sun and the rising water. All sandbagging.
Tuesday had begun with the rise of another deceptive sun over Canton, a farming and college town of 2,500. The halcyon days of mere weeks ago, when the Mississippi River was content to be a vehicle of commerce and recreation, were gone; now its greedy waters had consumed the riverside park and a good chunk of the active rail line, and were still agitating for more, rapping against the town’s three-mile-long levee.
The town’s emergency management director, Jeff McReynolds, had issued a statement “highly, highly” recommending that residents east of Seventh Street sleep somewhere other than their homes until further notice. He had also called for all able-bodied men to report for sandbagging and levee duties.
This would explain, then, why a visitor driving through the high ground of Canton at evening time finds tidy homes, the tidy campus of Culver-Stockton College—and almost no people. That is because many of them are downtown, near the river, sandbagging: able-bodied and otherwise; men, women and children, including Dalton, an 11-year-old boy with a dirt-smeared face who keeps pestering local officials with, “What can I do now, huh? What can I do?”
They smile and point him back to the sandbags.
With the moon rising, getting brighter, Mr. Crenshaw, one of the local officials, patrols the levee, swatting away bugs, overseeing the sandbagging operation he helped put together. One night last week he and another man drove about six hours round-trip to Davenport, Iowa, to collect 250,000 empty bags from the Corps of Engineers. They arrived at 5:15 in the morning; by 7, sand-filled bags were being stacked.
First, he says, workers dug a shallow trench along the levee, hammered in stakes, put up a short wooden wall called a “batter board,” laid some plastic sheeting—at this point Mr. Crenshaw is interrupted by the boy named Dalton, looking again for something to do.
“Hang tight, little buddy,” the man says to the boy. Pointing to a cluster of young Mennonite women filling bags at a large sand pile, he says, “Can you help them load over there?”
The boy runs to the pile, and Mr. Crenshaw picks up where he left off, saying that Canton has gone through about 850,000 bags. And they need more in this battle of inches, of guessing how far above 27 feet or so the river will rise.
The absence of the sun lends menace to the river. The sandbagging normally stops at 9 at night, for safety reasons. But few sandbaggers stop; few think they have the time. They’re still there—the civic leaders and local nobodies, those young Amish and Mennonite men tossing 50-pound bags around like pillows, that boy named Dalton.
In the hours to come, well into early morning, workers will race from wet spot to wet spot along the northern stretch of the levee, laying down sandbags to shore up what little separates a river from a people. The shoosh of shovel blade into sand, the rustle of bags, the exhalations of breath, under bright moonlight.
Another day will dawn with disaster averted, and by Wednesday afternoon there will be 50,000 sandbags. “Idle and waiting to be used,” Mr. Crenshaw says, as if confirming that each bag contained more than river sand.
Learning to Love the Sea, Then Torn from It
VENICE, LA.—MAY 3, 2010
Where the world runs out of road and into bayou, and all that is left beyond is the Gulf of Mexico, dozens of docked shrimp boats bob in place, restless. They should be out right now, green nets trawling for cash in crustaceans. But here they sit, their dry nets not even catching the air.
Among these many boats—actually, between the Capt. Andy and the Capt. James—there rocks the St. Martin. And on the St. Martin, there lives its owner, a small, muscular Vietnamese-born American named Thuong Nguyen, whose right forearm bears a tattoo that says, in his native language:
“Life is difficult.”
Now his difficult, amazing life has been capsized by events not of his doing. Again.
Here is where Mr. Nguyen, 50, should be: on another 10-day trip out near Breton Sound, his two deckhands beside him, his lucky hurricane dog at his feet, trawling through the day and into the night, when all he can see is the celestial display he calls a “star soup.”
But in another lesson of how all is connected, an offshore oil rig leased by a multibillion-dollar corporation exploded nearly two weeks ago. Which, in addition to killing 11 workers, ruptured a well. Which caused an ever-mushrooming oil slick. Which led to the closing of the country’s most fecund fishing grounds, from the Mississippi River to Florida’s Pensacola Bay, for at least 10 days.
Which has stalled, and possibly ruined, the livelihoods of thousands, including this diminutive man living on his boat at the very end of a place that calls itself the “end of the world.” All he can do is paint, knock down some rust, and accept his boat’s lullaby sway.
The pause fills Mr. Nguyen with anger, yes, but also guilt. In addition to providing for his family, he takes to heart the job of gathering some of the food you may eat tonight. “And now I cannot help out, so I feel like I’m—fail,” he says. “I cannot bring in more seafood from here.”
To find Mr. Nguyen in his fitful rest, take Louisiana Highway 23 south, the instructive road that bisects narrow Plaquemines Parish. The passing seafood shacks and oil tanks, the boat storage yards and the parked trucks of offshore riggers reflect the shared interests in the gulf’s bounty.
Continue past the Riverside Restaurant, where Hurricane Katrina tried but failed to scrub away the marshland mural painted by an itinerant artist; past the damaged and ghostly shopping center; past the Katrina debris jutting from a landfill. The hurricane that defined 2005 nearly wiped this community away, but the people came back; adapted; are trying again.
The road unwinds and frays at the bottom, with one last strand ending at the Venice Marina. Many of the boats here are owned by Vietnamese men and
women who, some 20 years ago, added a Southeast Asian flavor to the Cajun-Croatian stew of the parish. It took a while, but the stew has settled, mostly.
In 1991, Mr. Nguyen became another unfamiliar presence on the docks, altering the way things had always been. He would go out on his uncle’s boat, chock-full of Dramamine, and hear the Asian slurs of other shrimpers coming across the ship-to-shore radio.
How do you respond? How do you quickly explain: I fled the Communists in a boat smaller than the one you are on now, crammed with three dozen others for 11 days. Little water. Vomiting. People praying to Jesus and Buddha. You cannot imagine.
How do you say: I am an American citizen now. I am married to an American. I have children. I was working at a battery factory in St. Joseph, Mo., when my uncle asked me to help him on his shrimp boat. So we live here now, in Plaquemines Parish.
Time washed away most of the tension. Mr. Nguyen, his wife, Dorothy, and their four children lived in a double-wide trailer in Buras, a few miles north of Venice. Eventually, he raised enough money to buy the St. Martin, a 65-foot used boat found in Houma; the purchase allowed him to promote himself to captain.
Once he was a man whose only maritime experience was a horrifying slog toward freedom; now Mr. Nguyen lived to be on the water. He would joyously tell his wife how, on the first day of shrimp season, the lights of the many boats gathered in the predawn looked like a city afloat.
Katrina hit while the family was out of town. Mr. Nguyen returned to a collapsed double-wide, two dead family dogs, and the absence of irreplaceable family photographs from Vietnam and Missouri. But he eventually found the St. Martin a mile from its slip, damaged yet upright. And he took in an abandoned puppy cowering near the dock; Lucky, he called it.