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The first weekend of May, I was able to take some time off and clean beaches on the Coast. When I got home, I posted this diary. Since oil yesterday was sighted in the Mississippi Sound I grew up playing in as a child, I don't know that I have it in me to spend time and emotion telling you what I'd planned on - a trip to Long Beach one March when there was snow on the azaleas along Highway 90. Instead, I'll recycle a bit, and hope you won't mind. There are pictures in the original diary, should you want to see the things I reference here. And there are many links, as well. (A special note to jnhobbs and land of enchantment - you just saw many of the places mentioned and pictured here. I'm so glad you got to go. So very glad, indeed.)
It Looked Right but Smelled Wrong: The Mississippi Gulf Coast
I grew up half an hour inland, but for 10 years my summers were spent as a student at "Project Marine Discovery: Sea Camp" and "Sea and Sail". Sea Camp taught kids from 7-15 about the native flora and fauna. Little ones learned to tell Spartina from Needle Rush and got to hold horseshoe crabs in touch tanks. Older students went seining and sieving on East Beach in Ocean Springs and at Ship Island. I was the happiest 16 year old in existence when I pulled on my "PMD STAFF" shirt that first summer of volunteering with the 12 year-olds, and I worked two camps a summer until I graduated from High School. "Sea and Sail" was a different camp - one that hewed more closely to my love of history. It taught students the history of Mississippi's seafood industry, and its schooner building traditions. We learned about constructing schooners, hand-tied cast nets, and could describe both the First People who lived on the bounty of our waters and the thousands of Slovak and Slovene immigrants who built the region through their sweat in our seafood canning operations and dedication to their adopted country. We went out on a modern trawler and spent a full day on the decks of the schooner Glenn Swetman, one of the most beautiful boats in existence.
On Saturday, I spent the day at Jazz Fest, and unsurprisingly the shows I saw this year were incredible. I got up Sunday, ate breakfast in The Marigny, and drove East on I-10. I got off the Interstate at Waveland and when I got to Highway 90, I smelled such a strong "burning" smell I panicked. My husband was a good 9 hours north, my Mom and sister one hour north and in church, and I had no idea where things were after Katrina. I rolled down my window and hung my head out in the rain to listen and smell better. And that's when it hit me: a nauseating, eye-watering fog of burnt rubber. As I rolled the window back up, I sank back in my seat, the tears coming for real now. This nightmare I'd read about, dreamt about, worried over? It was here. I could smell it.
I drove toward the new Waveland bridge, turned right down the waterfront to see the old St. Stanislaus grounds, and turned around in their parking lot. A right back on to the mural-ed, post-Katrina bridge, and several miles later I stopped on the water in Pass Christian. I put my flip flops in the sand by the seawall and walked down to the choppy water. By now the rain was coming down in earnest, but it did nothing to wash away the scent. The clean smell of rain on hot and humid pavement and sand couldn't cut through the oil.
I stopped several times as I drove east: in Long Beach, to walk around the snaky lot formerly occupied by my favorite restaurant (Chappy's, now in Nashville). In Gulfport I pulled in sideways at the gutted site of the Public Library, where Joseph T. Jones surveys the town his railroad built, and William Hardy, who lost the road in scandal and insolvency, sits to the east. In Biloxi, I stopped in one of the many parking areas that abut the seawall and chuckled at the memory of my first kiss there, when we gaped at the still-new casino lights and spring's first humidity washed into the open windows of my boyfriend's car while Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band played quietly in the background. I passed Mary Mahoney's Old French House and the foundations and pilings from McElroy's Seafood Restaurant; cruised past the Beau Rivage, Callivet Street, the seemingly forgotten construction for the Margaritaville Casino, the foundation for the Mississippi Maritime Heritage Museum, and Mable Street, where I used to turn my bike down into "the Point" to ponder the Slovene Brotherhood building before having a crabmeat poboy at The Schooner.
In Ocean Springs, I got out again. I turned right off the OS bridge and made a quick right before the used-to-be-a Citgo. The rain had caught up with me here, fat drops smearing my glasses and wetting my face, as if Mother Earth was trying to help wash away the noxious fumes. I stopped just past the Yacht Club and got out for a minute, slapping on a large-brimmed hat to keep the rain off the camera.
I tossed the camera in the car, traded my shrimp boots for river shoes and grabbed trash bags and my trash spike, then spent a few wet, stinky hours roaming Front Beach from the Yacht Club to the boat launches. Styrofoam cups and clam shells, green mesh baskets undoubtedly from someone's Ponchatoula strawberries (they were very delicious this year, yes), and even a pair of adult-sized board shorts all went into the bag. Anything glass, metal, or numbered 1 and 2 went into one bag and everything else went into the other. By the time I couldn't see to avoid spiking my foot, I had a dozen altogether.
I slumped into the car, tired, vaguely hung over from Jazz Fest, and ready for dinner with my Mom and a shower to scrub off the eau de crude. After driving past my old house on Beach Hill Road, I made my way to Rouse's for poboy bread, shrimp, and olive salad, then I turned the car north and let it drive itself to Wiggins.
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The storm cleared overnight, and Monday dawned clear and hot. I had breakfast with my Mom and sister and headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College campus in Gulfport. JD as it's called, for Jefferson Davis Campus, is a commuter campus just barely inside the Gulfport city line. I made my way to the classroom where some sort of pre-spill-arrival training was set up and sat down with a book to wait.
Training was, in a word, a joke. It was likely very useful for any non-locals, or those who'd forgotten the basic rules of beach cleanup, but I'd done many. When I finally left, it was to slap on some Bullfrog, park my car at the Biloxi Small Craft Harbor and walk the beach with my river shoes, my spike, and my trash bags. Humans are disgusting creatures. We foul our beds, our most beautiful and inspirational areas, with refuse both indescribable and unidentifiable. I couldn't bring myself to photograph the first dead Green Turtle I saw. I cried, even after I called the animal recovery hotline and waited for the scientists to come take his body away for autopsy. By the time I'd walked by the third one, I didn't cry any more, but I still couldn't bring myself to photograph these majestic, beautiful, peaceful creatures as they lay dead and still on their backs in the baking sand. After two dozen bags of trash and a trek from the small craft harbor almost to the I-110 loop, I poured myself into the driver's seat and hit Highway 67 home.
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Day two went better. Without the inane training, I was in a far better mood when I hit the beach. This time, I went to East Beach in Ocean Springs. Just a stone's throw from Walter Anderson's old home at Shearwater Pottery, where Peter and the children still throw beautiful pieces to this day, and not far from the Gulf Coast Research Lab maintained by my alma mater, East Beach is one of my favorite places in the universe. I went over it with a fine-toothed comb, picking up bed sheet-sized pieces of plastic, cups, bottles, hunks of foam, and three miss-matched flip flops (none of which, by the way, had suffered a blow-out). East was beautiful. I played tag with a horseshoe crab in the still edge of a little inlet and flipped him over to marvel at his book gills and "boxing glove" claws. The water was still as glass, the sky blue, and the orange and yellow booms stuck out like lines of neon on the water.
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Day three (Tuesday) became my short day. I made a quick pass over East again, but I wanted to visit the marshes before I left for Kentucky. The beauty of East Beach, again, was striking, even in the 90+ heat. I saw my languishing Master's Thesis reflected in one scene: pine trees growing in sand, just feet from the lazy, brackish surf and silty bottomed Sound. Timber men who came here at the turn of the century noted that our sandy soil grew huge pine trees and very little else.
The incomparable bon vivant Bobby Mahoney, son of Mary Mahoney for whom the world-famous restaurant is named, will often remind tourists who eat at his table that the silty bottom of our Mississippi Sound might not be what's expected on a beach, but "there's a lot of lovin' goin' on in that mud," and when it passes through his kitchen, it tastes divine. I saw much of what crossed his white linen-covered tables in the first few hours as I walked along the surf. Blue crabs and menhaden (bait fish for just about everything larger), and cute little fiddler and hermit crabs, too. I kept a bag out for the new trash arrivals overnight, but there weren't all that many. The reclamation people had been out after I'd left and they'd stirred up the sand a bit, so I was able to get a few things I'd missed, but for the most part the beach was as lovely as I'd ever seen it. With the wind blowing out, the only reminder was the boom cutting through the water.
I left East after a quick tour and drove over to GCRL to talk with an old friend about their plans. Much like during hurricane season, they were waiting. Waiting for the oil to come. But they were busy, with students and faculty assisting the Department of Marine Resources in looking at an odd menhaden kill in Pascagoula, the aforementioned turtle deaths, and an unusual number of larger fish deaths - big drum and groupers were washing up in Biloxi.
I made a leisurely trip to the Gulf Islands National Seashore at Davis Bayou. Our marshes are the most biologically diverse resources in the southeast. Every kind of gulf seafood that lands on your plate either was born here, lived here, or ate something that did. And the great beds of needle rush and spartina that grow in the silty soil serve to filter much of the gulf. I saw periwinkles, blue and fiddler crabs, menhaden, and more birds than I could remember names for. My shrimp boots got pleasantly mucky when I met a volunteer park worker and asked if he'd mind my pulling some chip bags out of the water. We chatted about our shared experiences at Sea Camp; he was there far after I was, but little has changed in the hundreds of animals and plats with whom we share our coast. So, in spite of years and geography, I sat and talked with this 17 year old park volunteer about the beauty surrounding us and the fear we had that his generation could very well be the last with any first-hand memories of it. We remembered fondly the early mornings spent pumping yabbies so we could catch tilapia and pompano to show the kids. We remembered - not so fondly - the layers of sunscreen, the one kid every year who would step on a jelly or a dead catfish, no matter the exhortations by teachers and volunteers to watch your step. We remembered crawling on our bellies in the hot, white, clean sand of Ship Island, hoping to find just one more shark's tooth for a necklace or a ring. And through it all, we wondered: Would memories be all we had, or would the stench of "progress" cloud our memories like it did our nostrils?
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