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Standing on the grounds of a museum in Biloxi, Miss., Randy Silverman saw history strewn like trash in the dried-out grass fields.
There were bits of pottery from Gulf Coast American Indian tribes as well as 17th-century nautical instruments used by early French explorers. On the museum grounds, history is layered, just like garbage at a city dump.
Silverman, a conservator who works as a preservation librarian at the University of Utah, describes what has become the "collection fields" of Biloxi's Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum, ever since the forces of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the building and its collections. But even his trained eyes couldn't pick out what's important.
"You can see various surprises," Silverman said, sitting in his office at the Marriott Library this week and explaining details of a photograph he shot outside the nearly gutted museum. "A phonograph record next to a brick, next to a folding chair, next to a piece of corrugated steel, window frames. And then next to all of this, there's a small ceramic object, some bit of historic pottery. Out back of the museum, there's the rubble of a whole wall, and a pink toilet and a pink bathtub and bricks and a water heater."
Preservation mission: Silverman is one of thousands of Utahns who have donated dollars, blood and volunteer muscle since Hurricane Katrina hurled its 140-mph winds at the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. Most helped victims find physical safety after what is considered one of the largest natural disasters in the country's history.
But Silverman's mission was to assess the damage to stuff, the kind of priceless historical artifacts that wouldn't qualify for immediate attention. He joined a second wave of volunteers in the first national effort drawing upon trained preservation experts to help museum and library curators in Mississippi and Louisiana salvage what is left.
No federal agency is responsible for the recovery of historic documents after a disaster, and that's why the U. agreed to donate Silverman's time and expertise, said his boss, Joyce Ogburn, U. library director. Fieldwork by the experts - nicknamed HEART for History Emergency Assistance Recovery Teams - is sponsored by the American Institute for Conservation and paid for by the American Association for State and Local History.
The scope of the damage to books and photographs and other detritus of history? It's way too early to attach a price tag or even sentimental value to the region's losses, said Cindy Gardner, field services curator for the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, Miss.
Though the musical legacy of New Orleans is well-known, Gardner said it also is important to preserve the history of the rest of the hurricane zone, including smaller Mississippi beach towns, a region explored by early Spanish and French adventurers.
"Some of our most historic structures, national landmarks, are simply gone," Gardner said. "And some of the museums that did survive now don't have operating funds, and so they're closing. It's heartbreaking, really."
Saving history: Silverman's team worked with Gardner and officials at 12 other Mississippi institutions, including county courthouses and libraries as well as public and private historical and art museums. Traveling from Jackson, they camped in a borrowed RV. Once Hurricane Rita had passed, they ventured along the coast to public libraries in Gulfport and Biloxi.
Sometimes the field work required donning respirators and gloves to battle mold, or helping shell-shocked volunteers - some of whom were homeless - dry out sodden books and photographs. In other places, such as Biloxi's Seafood Museum, emergency response was a fancy way to talk about sifting through historical litter.
On the road, working from their RV, the conservators hammered out grant proposals, helping institutions apply for $1 million in emergency funds promised by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help restore collections.
In Gulfport, the first problem was finding the library. Road signs and street addresses had been wiped out. A fallen steeple marked a damaged church, but the two-story library nearby was harder to identify.
Walls had been ripped off the first floor, leaving the building exposed on all sides. No books in sight, no shelves, no furniture, no signs. Just the Gulf breeze blowing sand through a handful of structural columns, hanging wires and the Escher-like absurdity of what remained, a carpeted circular stairway sweeping upward.
At the top of those stairs, Silverman read the sign for the "catalog," and that was the first time he was sure he was standing in a library. Here the books were orderly in the stacks, a stand of four computers awaited users, fat wooden chairs were pushed under wooden tables, even a Styrofoam coffee cup and a water bottle sat upright on a desk. It felt a little Pompeii-esque, he said. Life upstairs seemed like it had stopped, preserved, while downstairs, everything had been transported into another dimension.
At the Biloxi Public Library, just east on Highway 90, the floor was layered with pine needles, mud and books, and staffers described the snakes they had seen indoors. Despite the muck, most of the collection seemed intact. Except in the Special Collections room, a closed space where mold grew wildly, especially in the plastic envelopes that were supposed to protect the rare books.
Disaster relief: Silverman, whose field is based on defying the chemistry of deterioration, has helped out at disaster scenes before, responding to flooding that damaged a 425,000-book collection at the Colorado State University Library in 1997, and volunteering at the University of Hawaii after a hurricane in 1992 and a rainstorm in 2004. But he had never witnessed the degree of destruction that lingered on the Gulf Coast.
Along the beach towns that line Mississippi's Highway 90, physical evidence hinted at the storms' power. Massive casino boats remain overturned and stranded blocks inland. Some standing churches were impaled by their own steeples. Silverman said he got used to seeing bags, clothing and other debris hanging from the trees like heavy fog, but was surprised by the site of a piano, lodged about two stories high, festooned with a randomly placed Confederate flag.
A heavy odor hung in the air, which some observers have compared to the smell of death. But Silverman described it as stranger, more complex. More like the stench after a fire, only without the soot, he and his colleagues decided - a foul, thick brew of salt and humidity and degradation and mold.
Between museum stops, driving from building to damaged building, Silverman saw personal history, acres of stuff, refrigerators, books, all exposed and stacked in piles along the beach highway.
"Six-foot mounds of stuff everywhere we went," he said, "like how we pile snow alongside the curb here in Utah."
For all that damage, Silverman said he hopes his volunteer stint will be a part of something bigger, an international effort to stockpile best practices to preserve historic relics after future disasters.
What he saw in Mississippi is already a part of history. "What's telling is the meaning," Silverman said, describing the Ship Island lighthouse lens, crafted in Paris in 1826, considered one of the most valuable pieces in the Seafood Museum's collection.
The light was crushed in the storm, but museum officials think they have found all of its pieces. After the lens is painstakingly rebuilt, the cracks will become another part of its story, another layer of history, a tangible reminder of this year's hurricane season.