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Like Never Again
I saw the Coast like it will never be again
By RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON
FISHTRAP HOLLOW
Today I am heartsick. In 30 years in the reality business, the newspaper business, I have seen many sad things.
Like any reporter, I have witnessed countless sights I'd just as soon not see again: the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, the stubble left by an Easter tornado, the soggy leftovers after Georgia's relentless Flynt River flood.
I have talked to the Camp Lejeune widows of Marines blown to bits in Beirut, and the loved ones of victims of an Arkansas school-bus wreck. I was there when they brought the gas chamber out of mothballs to kill again at Parchman prison farm.
All of those were achingly terrible things. But I have never seen anything as sad as this. I have never seen anything as gut-wrenching as the Mississippi Gulf Coast devastation, and the wretched conditions of those left behind in New Orleans.
In part, it is personal. Intensely personal. I am only watching from the sidelines as places I love are photographed from the air, too hot to handle up close. Towns with magical, yet familiar, names like Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian have become fodder for trailers on CNN.
I first fell in love with the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1979, on a work trip to Ocean Springs. I was sent to take pictures and write a story about a business called Alpha Optics; after that, you couldn't beat me away from the area.
That first trip I stayed at a Biloxi motel with white lights strung through the live oaks and a replica lighthouse in the parking lot. I ate oysters on the half shell as fast as the man could crack them open, out behind the best restaurant in the U.S., the old Fisherman's Wharf of Biloxi.
By day I drove the entire length of the coast several times, pinching myself. What a paradise. How had I not known about this place?
I could not believe the wondrous, jade coastline, virtually an architectural museum, its lovely mansions and cottages and little shotgun houses all stunningly maintained and facing the Mississippi Sound.
It would be more than a decade before I was able to buy a sky-blue house on Second Street in Pass Christian. I lived there for only a short and wonderful while, sitting nights in a wicker swing on the front porch, pinching myself all over again.
Could it be true I really belonged here, in a town where a sweet little man delivered beer flats full of stuffed crabs to your door on Thursday nights, where the Christmas parade passed by under sail, where millionaires and Vietnamese shrimp fishermen and insurance salesmen all ate their morning grits at the same little cafe, exchanging greetings and gossip?
In the evenings it was an easy walk down Seal Street to the beach where, some odd nights, people were wading out into the Sound with flashlights to fish for flounder. That was an eerie, beautiful spectacle, humans marching seaward, whence they came.
My niece and nephew saw the ocean for the first time on the Mississippi Coast, and I was the one who got to make that all-important introduction. The look of rapture on a youngster's face when she first sees the sea is worth any amount of trouble.
I crossed the Sound hundreds of times to spend the day on Ship Island, to enjoy the big waves on the Gulf side of things. Dolphins more often than not followed alongside the boat, as fine an escort as any head of state ever had.
The light and the colors were just different on the Gulf Coast. Ocean Springs' legendary artist Walter Anderson knew that. He spent a lifetime studying their nuances.
I didn't get to stay; work and circumstance intervened.
But at least I once saw the Coast like it will never be again.
Today I watch the terrible pictures on the TV, the tired and grief-stricken faces, the concrete pads where somebody's home once was. And I cannot help but remember, for some reason, the cheerful jack-o'-lanterns in the windows along Pass Christian's Second Street one Halloween not so long ago, and the sound of a Hank Williams song coming from an old man's screened porch. I remember the distinctive wooden mast of the shrimp boat Corsair rising above all the others at one particular harbor. And, like so many others, I mourn.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson writes from Fishtrap Hollow, near Iuka. Write to her at Iuka, MS 38852. E-mail, rhetagrimsley@aol.com.