Storm Clouds: We arrived at the Bay Breeze Guest House after dark, or more precisely after an six-piece chicken meal (on my plate alone) at Lambert’s Café in Foley, Alabama, where the wait staff chucks hot rolls across the room (kind of amusing actually) and roams around dishing up scoops of macaroni & tomatoes, black-eyed peas and fried okras from the “pass arounds, “ AKA, big stainless steel bowls (kind of gross actually). We got to Lambert’s right before closing time, so the wait staff thought we might want to take a pile of pork chops, chicken fried steak, catfish, hog jowl, corn and sweet potatoes “back to the hotel,” instead of “having to buy breakfast.” That was a sweet gesture/ridiculous assumption on their behalf. Besides, with all the houses of the holy down there, aren't there some hungrier, more deserving and certainly more thankful folks to indulge themselves on the gluttonous pile of fried meat stuffs? Is there not a gumbo kitchen to be found?
Since we got to the Bay Breeze late, neither of us noticed that the planks on the pier were new as we sauntered out on a moonlight stroll. Nor did we notice that all of the other piers in the area were gone. Freestanding wooden posts stood strong, but functioning walkways, docks and fishing spots were few and far between. This was our first introduction to the southern winds of change. Walking along the beach, there were piles of wooden remainders and our host Becky advised against swimming in the Gulf of Mexico because, “you never know what’s going to be floating ashore or resting on the bottom.”
Naturally, I didn’t listen. While tiptoeing amongst the foreign substances in the shallow, greasy, muddy water, I wished I would have. I’m fairly certain I stepped either on a dolphin skull or a diaper genie.
There was a major construction boom along the roads to I-10. Homeowners along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay seemed undaunted, defiantly going about their business of retrofitting dwellings before the upcoming hurricane season hits Alabama. Granted, it’s been more than nine months since Katrina, but when we reached Mississippi, the all-encompassing wrath of the storm had a different feeling altogether. The dividing line was clear. As Roy noted while helping us map out a route, “Normally, I’d recommend you take 90 across the Ocean Springs Bridge into Biloxi, but the bridge was wiped out.”
Mississippi Yearning: The apocalyptic belief system of certain churchgoers made a lot more sense after seeing the destruction in Mississippi. The aforementioned bridge looks like a god smashed it in a fit of anger, stacking up huge concrete slabs like dominoes. An ardent “man of science” could explain in detail how Hurricane Katrina wiped the Gulf shore areas clean, but describing the scene requires Biblical, or at least Spielbergian, imagery. The damage is breathtaking in its expansiveness and thoroughness. Buildings, casinos, cars, boats, shopping centers, neighborhoods and homes are vanquished, leaving only remnants. Poof.
Instant ghost towns, just add a 25-foot wall of water.
There are still plenty of folks trying to rebuild, some surviving with a concrete slab, a white FEMA trailer and a sheet of plywood spray-painted to denote a home address. Trailers are done up with Christmas lights and patio furniture and there are even a handful of vibrant little communities in the hardest hit areas. A Vietnamese neighborhood was alive and kicking in Biloxi, even though most of the homes are abetting large piles of everything reduced to nothing. I saw a lot of older Vietnamese men rebuilding the exteriors of their domiciles. I wonder if some of them are no longer that far removed from the bombed-out country they left behind.
There was a steady flow of traffic into the handful of casinos that have opened back up and to take people’s money. One casino’s video screen proudly waves a digital American flag, proclaiming “We Will Rebuild!” And it will be one flip of the river card at a time. So do your civic duty and roll some craps down in Biloxi. Momma Mississippi needs a new pair of shoes.
Oddly, touring the barren Mississippi landscape reconnected me with a long-forgotten memory. In 1994, I spent three-days interviewing for a job at a Catholic boy’s academy of some sort near Biloxi. The administration wanted me to get a full sense of all the teacher/counselor/den mother/mentor responsibilities, so I spent three days there. I think it was mutually understood that it wasn’t going to take. Yet, I found myself seriously wondering what became of the students, faculty and campus after the storm, even though it was twelve years ago and all I remember is monitoring a study hall, playing some basketball with seventh-graders and drinking beer by myself at a smoke-drenched casino on Saturday night when kids and faculty were allowed to leave. I asked around a bit, but since I couldn’t even recall the name of the school or where it was located, I didn’t get too far.
Strange what we remember and forget. The idea that I would hold a position to help shape the minds of impressionable southern Catholic boys doesn’t make a lick of sense and I have zero recollection of how I was introduced to the job in the first place. It was a blip on my radar, but now I’m thinking that since those seventh-graders are in their mid-twenties, some are probably married, some with kids of their own and some with mortgages on homes reduced to rubble. My connection to the area doesn’t even rise to the level of tangential, so I can’t imagine what it must be like to have deep roots and ties to a town like Biloxi, a town that in many ways, no longer exists.
Hard to comprehend, I bet.
These Little Piggies: We bedded down in Ocean Springs, Mississippi at the Wilson House Inn, which is a 1923 log house that had formerly been part of an orange grove owned by the family Wilson. The grove shut down and the land got sold and somehow the home was going to be torn down for a car lot or something, so some family members got together and decided to turn it into an inn. The entire thing was moved in three pieces to a spot right alongside the Interstate. What goes down must come up. The new home of the Wilson Inn wouldn’t be an ideal locale except that it's just up the road from the Shed BBQ where devotees of swine come to praise the porcine god.
The Shed is the only restaurant I’ve ever been in that had a big sign declaring that obscenity and “racist language” would not be tolerated. It started out as a small smokehouse and keeps expanding and expanding, but just picnic-table-by-picnic-table, not in an urban sprawl sort of way. It’s got a hippie Yaweh vibe, like if the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar had a giant cookout. They play a mix of bluegrass, reggae, zydeco, funk, blues and classic rock and there are live bands on the weekends. Half the tables were filled with church groups wolfing down sustenance before another long day of lending a hand. A bartender told us that the Shed is so popular with the volunteer groups, government workers, military types, laborers, engineers, construction workers, etc. infiltrating the Gulf region, that business is booming since the storm.
“Get fed at the Shed.” You bet your tangy ass. When life gives you lemons, make pulled pork sandwiches. 
Basically all you need to know about the Shed is that an order of ribs is about four feet long, comes wrapped in aluminum foil and puts a literal spin on the expression “the whole hog.” We ordered enough for eight, ate enough for four and gave the rest away to a table of locals who availed themselves of a free short rib appetizer. The matriarch at the table asked where we were from, which led to the "Which Was Worse: 9/11 or Katrina?" discussion that more or less became an inevitability with each passing conversation, no matter how polite or cursory.
In this case, the woman said September 11th was much worse because it was an act of man and some people never recovered. She went on to reveal to Kim that her troubled son was one of those who never recovered. He’d been an art student in New York in 2001 and his mother believed that witnessing the trauma of 9/11 was the ultimate trigger of his suicide. Although it kept coming up, trying to figure out which was “worse” after learning of the woman's son became futile and unimportant in the scheme of things. Maybe a tangential connection, a few minutes of listening to a stranger and sharing a plate of barbecue is enough.
At least that’s what I tried to take with me from Mississippi as we woke up and hit the road, bracing ourselves for New Orleans.
(Thanks to Kimmy Sauer for all the fine photography.)
PART FOUR COMING SOON
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