SMITH COUNTY, Miss. — In a town with no name, 10,000 dying chickens scurry about what's left of their farmer's broiler houses, desperate for food and water. Some are wingless, others legless. Since Hurricane Katrina tore through this chicken farm, all are worthless.
A man approaches on a decades-old tractor. His name is Wilbur Brown and these are not his birds. Perhaps, he offers, the farmer went out looking for gasoline. Shame about these chickens, he says. It's just not worth the time it'd take to kill them or the money it'd take to feed them.
Brown, however, is more concerned with the dead power lines in the swamp than he is with somebody else's dead chickens in the road.
A timber farmer for more than 30 years, Brown has a small generator keeping his catfish, vegetables and venison frozen. But it's not enough to run a stove, which means he can't boil the dank, milky water that comes out of the faucet.
So the 78-year-old drinks warm Dr. Pepper from the can and fumes about his electricity.
"I told them I was going to take the chain saw and turn those poles into new fence posts," Brown says.
Hurricane Katrina also ruined Wilbur Brown's fence.
Two weeks after Katrina, living without electricity and other basic services -- and struggling with Katrina's destruction -- is a daily challenge for residents in rural communities stretching from Jackson southward to the ravaged Gulf Coast. This is especially true of the tiny little towns of southeast Mississippi, including this area some 50 miles from the capital city.
Ten miles from the nearest town, the farmers here aren't a priority for the emergency management crews or rescue workers who descended upon the Gulf Coast.
Nobody brings food. There are no shelters. Even if someone wanted to go to a refugee camp, the logistics would be ridiculous. It took Brown a day and a half just to clear enough debris so he could drive his pickup truck 100 miles to buy gas for his generator and tractor.
"We got hit just as bad as people farther south," said Roger Hayes, 51, of Four Points, Ala., a small town just over the Mississippi border. "But it's just so far out. We get left out a lot."
Hayes, who rode out the storm in his trailer, is using a blue tarp as a roof. He heard the Federal Emergency Management Agency was going to be in town soon, but he can't find out more. The phone number is always busy.
Most people out here aren't counting on the government anyway, Hayes said. People raised out here are independent. Their needs are simple.
"All I want is somebody to come move this tree. My goodness," said Tomeka Collins, 25, of Taylorsville, an inland Mississippi town that, with 1,200 people, isn't seen as far-flung.
Collins, who works at the local Wal-Mart, has lived for more than a week with a huge tree on her roof, obstructing her front door and buckling her kitchen ceiling. She said she's beginning to wonder why.
"Nobody cares," said Collins, a black woman with two children. "I don't want to be racial, but if this tree was on a house in a white neighborhood, it'd be gone."
Less than a mile away, a tree fell on the home of retired police officer Charles McKinley, who is white. Work crews quickly removed the tree and his insurance adjuster has already been by.
Collins just shrugs it off, however. If it's not gone by Christmas, she said, she'll put reindeer figurines on the tree trunk, leading up to the roof.
That's the attitude seen most frequently at the various Farm Bureau stations. In Raleigh, bureau workers said they've had about 500 claims filed in the past few days. The number grows each morning because residents who found their way to the office after hours just leave their name on the door and head back home.
