Recycling Katrina

David Wheeler sits on a bench made from Katrina wood

A retired construction worker on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is turning recycling into an artform. MPB Arts Reporter Ron Brown has the story.

David Wheeler is rummaging through the wood pile outside his home in Henleyfield, Mississippi on a typically hot June afternoon. He’s not looking for something to burn. He’s looking for something to make.

“That’ll be an end table. This is cedar that comes from Waveland. And there’s a Mimosa right there, that’s a real nice wood but it’s hard to work with.”

Wheeler is a one man furniture making operation. One man, one chain saw.

“I make beds and tables and chairs, end tables and whatever people want. And plant stands. And I get into carving frogs and egrets and whatever, whatever people order I can usually do it.”

Every piece of Wheeler’s handmade furniture is unique. And he’s proud of the fact that all of his materials are cheap. That doesn’t mean they’re not sturdy, it means he gets his wood for free.

“It’s any type of wood that I find. I don’t ever buy any wood. I find it on the beach or a ditch or somebody gives it to me. And I use all kinds just to see what it’ll do. Probably Cyprus is becoming my favorite. I never knew about Cyprus. But now it seems to be easy to work, and it’s not hard and it’s not soft, so it’s pretty nice wood.”

Nice wood is something that Wheeler finds in abundance around his home near the coast. It’s free because Wheeler has never cut down a single tree. He finds them that already down. The reason is simple.

“Because of Katrina. We used to live in Claremont Harbor when it got hit directly so we had as many as two hundred trees on our property on the coast. Well it took everything. It took our studio. We had a tree house and it took our house. Everything. We had nothing left, absolutely nothing.”

A team of biologists at Tulane University in New Orleans estimated that the number of trees lost or damaged by Katrina was 320 million. Ellen Blue was in New Orleans just before Katrina hit in August 2005, so there’s a personal connection to the disaster. She and her husband Jim Wilson evacuated the day before the storm hit land. They recently visited Gallery in 220 in Bay St. Louis where Wheeler sells his Katrina wood furniture.

Like most people who see Wheeler's furniture, they not only were impressed, they were moved.

Ellen Blue: “It’s lovely. It really is beautiful. I think it’s wonderful in several different ways. I think it’s a use for the material, which is good on its face, but I think it’s much more helpful for the people who do the work and who buy the work because it’s a way of valuing the past but also having an opportunity to bring a new use and a new way of looking at things out of it.”

Jim Wilson: “It brings tears to my eyes. To think of the beauty that can come out of that devastation. The whole idea that humanity is not bound by one storm. But that we’re free to find beauty even in the ugliness.”

In Wheeler’s woodshop, debris from one of the nation’s worst natural disasters becomes something not only useful, but also beautiful once again. One table, one chair, one tree at a time.

“Yeah I’m all right for wood. I’ll find some. I’ll see some in a ditch or somebody will tell me about it.”

Rather than dwell on what nature took from him, David Wheeler says he busies himself with what nature has given him.
And that’s likely to keep him busy for a long time to come. For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown