Stan Tillinghast is a retired cardiologist who, when Hurricane Katrina hit, cashed in some miles for a plane ticket to Jackson, Mississippi, rented a car, and started driving until he came to people who needed his help. He started a blog, Dr. Goodheart (he means your heart, not his) to record his experiences.

This is one aspect of what the web is all about: if you want to know what things are like on the Gulf Coast, you can still read and watch the MSM if you want to. But you can also get first-hand information from people who are there, direct and unfiltered. In this case, the information comes from a very smart and extraordinarily good-humored physician. He describes the physical devastation along the Mississippi coast:

[T]he team took me down to the waterfront, where we gaped at the huge, hotel-size casino barges that had been thrown up on shore by the raging waters. One collided with the old Tivoli Hotel (which was just being restored after years of neglect), and knocked off a front corner of the Tivoli. Sad to say, this blow was fatal for the old gal.

Only later did I get more of a feeling of the terrible sense of loss suffered, even by those Biloxians who had not lost their homes in the storm. As Anita Toodle (yes, that IS her name, and don’t you dare laugh!) explained to me that night in the hospital: all the landmarks of their memories were gone. The Ring Oak with the trunk grown in a ring, and the legends of the lovers associated with that; the skating rink where she might have had her first kiss; all the sites of her youth were gone. Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’ home—gone. All the beautiful old Victorian homes here in downtown Biloxi’s historic district (in which the hospital is located)—gone. And, whatever rebuilding is done, these are gone forever.

More important, though, Dr. Tillinghast describes the indomitable spirit of the people he encounters--both the rescue workers and physicians who assembled from all over the country, and the Mississippians themselves. One such is a Vietnamese immigrant named Billy:

The night Katrina came, Billy took his family into the attic of this one-story home. As the flood waters rose (they eventually reached to 9 feet, just below the ceiling of the first floor), Billy was afraid the whole family would die. So he smashed a hole through the sheetrock, dove down into the water and somehow came up with an ice cooler. He and his wife put blankets in the cooler and set the baby inside. They thought that they would die, but there might be a chance that the baby’s cooler would float and that—like Moses in the bulrushes—the baby would be found and saved.

The family didn’t die, but everything they had was destroyed.

There's no "point," no agenda, no political moral; just one man's observations, with lots of photos. (Although I can't help wondering why the Mississippi coast seems so free of the whining and recriminations that have characterized New Orleans, seemingly from the moment the wind started to blow.) You'll meet, among many others, two New York firefighters who came to Mississippi "to 'pay back' for the help the rest of the country sent New York after 9/11."

Check it out. Read it all. You can do that now, thanks to the web.

UPDATE: Dr. Tillinghast writes:

I've been a fanatical Powerline reader since before the 61st minute, and saw you on C-Span. I love your blog, and am delighted that you have connected us to the Powerline!

As a result, many people have sent great comments; an attorney in New York is going to try to get her parish to 'adopt' the Vietnamese Catholic Church; and a production company wants to include me in a National Geographic documentary. Not bad for a nod from you guys!

All the best!

Posted by John at 07:23 AM  |    |