The day Trent Lott became a tree hugger, and other surprises from Katrina

Hurricane Katrina turned Trent Lott into a tree hugger.

And it soon had him working with Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois.

Those were just two of the surprises Wednesday night at the Biloxi Civic Center as Lott took the crowd behind the scenes in his role in post-Katrina recovery.

His talk was part of the Katrina +10 remembrance that continues at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi and elsewhere along the Coast.

Another surprise was a present from a woman in the audience.

"It's my Senate pin," he said as he opened the small ring box she handed him. "It has my name on it."

Louise Stanley said she found it in her backyard on Washington Avenue in Pascagoula, quite a ways from where Lott's beachfront home was destroyed in the 2005 storm.

"I wiped the mud off and polished it," she said. She had been waiting 10 years for the opportunity to return it.

The "old momma oak" was about all that was left on Lott's property the day after the storm.

"We gave her a hug and had a little cry," said Lott, who served a total of 35 years in Congress before he retired from the Senate in 2007. "That was the first time I learned I was a tree hugger."

When he got back to Washington, it wasn't long before Obama crossed the aisle to offer Lott the help of a medical team from the Chicago area.

The team wound up in Bay St. Louis for a few weeks.

But by 2007, Lott said, that spirit of bipartisanship that had allowed the federal government to do so much to help Mississippi and Louisiana had started to fade.

Lott, who said he wanted to retire before the storm hit and convinced him he was needed, realized "the problem is us."

"We had become hard-line partisans," he said.

He then advised the current leaders of Congress, all but one of whom are in their 70s, "it's time to go to the beach."

Still, even though that partisanship Lott experienced has hardened even further, he said he believes a disaster would unite America just as Katrina broke down those barriers.

"There is a unique character to America," he said. "A disaster would shake us awake."