Biloxi Bound

The Mississippi Gulf Coast offers unexpected wonders.

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On September 8, 1965, Walter Anderson lashed himself to the tallest tree on Horn Island. Anderson frequently rowed out to the sliver of land 12 miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast to paint watercolors inspired by the natural beauty surrounding him. On this particular day, Horn Island was in the path of Hurricane Betsy, a Category 4 monster that was hurtling toward the artist’s hometown of New Orleans. Instead of leaving for the relative safety of his cabin in Ocean Springs, he decided to “welcome the hurricane and feel nature’s wrath,” says Julian Rankin, executive director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

Anderson survived the chest-deep storm surge and 100-mile-per-hour wind, only to succumb to lung cancer two months later. He left behind a body of work that would, over time, burnish his reputation as one of the greatest artists America ever produced. The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs began life as a community center where Anderson painted what Rankin calls his “magnum opus,” a mural that fills the four walls of a modest banquet hall. The city paid him $1 to create the mural in 1951. Anderson never cashed the check.

“He felt that artists had an obligation to the community to do civic-minded work like this,” says Rankin. “But he also felt that the community had an obligation to the artists to allow them to go on their own adventures.”

Anderson’s trips to Horn Island were not mere idylls. They were a troubled mind’s attempts to find peace. Rankin says Anderson was a mystic who believed “… you’ve got nature and humanity, and art is this third thing whereby you transcend; you see beyond your mortal coil and try to capture this fleeting instant of beauty.”

Today, Anderson’s work and words continue to inspire. The artist had enduring connections to Memphis. The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art was one of the few galleries to show his work during his lifetime. Every year, musician Luther Dickinson performs a concert of music inspired by Anderson in the community center. For 35 years, Memphis College of Art students made pilgrimages to Horn Island to camp on the beach and make art en plein air. In 2019, on the occasion of the final Horn Island exhibition, MCA professor Don DuMont told the Memphis Flyer, “All of these people who participated feel that it had big significance in their lives.”

The Sound

Captain Louis Skrmetta understands the lure of the ocean. He is the third generation of his family to ply the waters of the Mississippi Sound, the 90-mile stretch of water between Waveland, Mississippi, and Dauphin Island. “My grandfather came here in 1903 from Croatia — the Dalmatian Coast, the island of Rab,” he says. “At the turn of the century, there was a shortage of labor. Industry was booming. They were catching and steaming oysters, canning and shipping them all over the country.”

After 20 years on the water, the elder Skrmetta worked his way up to captain. “He had a diesel engine on a 65-foot boat and started hauling people out to the barrier islands in the summertime as a sideline.”

In 1932, the family set up shop near a protected harbor on Ship Island. The French landed there in 1699, establishing the first capital of Louisiana at Biloxi. In 1814, 60 British warships and 6,000 Redcoats staged their ill-fated invasion of New Orleans from the island. During the Civil War, Admiral David Farragut (a Tennessean) used Ship Island as a base. The red brick Fort Massachusetts, which stands on the southern shore, is named for the Union gunboat which chased away the Confederate garrison. Efforts to preserve the fort eventually led to the establishment of the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS MCCOY

The stingrays at Ocean Adventures Marine Park are very friendly.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS MCCOY

Dr. Moby Solangi’s Institute for Marine Mammal Studies rescues sick and injured dolphins from the Gulf of Mexico and returns them to their natural habitat.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS MCCOY

Inside the 360-degree tunnel at the Mississippi Aquarium at Gulfport.

“The islands are very special for their undeveloped beauty,” says Skrmetta, who still runs the family business, Ship Island Excursions. “You have green, clear Gulf water, surf, high-quality natural sand beaches, as opposed to the muddy Mississippi Sound, with man-made beaches and traffic on Highway 90 and all the development. It’s just a totally different experience when you go 12 miles offshore.”

Ship Island Excursions’ day trips to the protected beaches were curtailed in October 2020 when Hurricane Zeta severely damaged the docks. “The ferry service will resume, with all the facilities rebuilt, in April 2022,” Skrmetta says.

Meanwhile, Ship Island Excursions is helping people experience the wonder of the Mississippi Sound’s teeming sea life with sunset dolphin cruises. It’s prime territory for marine mammals, says Dr. Moby Solangi of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies. “We have one of the largest dolphin populations right here in Mississippi. … The estuaries that have developed from the Mississippi River, and all of the river systems emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, are very fertile. It’s also a nursery, where baby dolphins are born.”

Solangi’s institute monitors the health of the dolphin population, a leading indicator of the state of the area’s ecosystem. “We have one of the primary facilities in this state to respond to sick and injured dolphins, turtles, and manatees,” he says.

Next door at the Ocean Adventures Marine Park, visitors can get close to sea life without diving into the sound, with dolphin and sea lion shows, and an exotic bird encounter area. The stingrays in the petting tank are very friendly.

Over in Gulfport, the Mississippi Aquarium opened in August 2020. Its most stunning feature is a state-of-the-art, million-gallon tank teeming with fish from the Gulf and beyond. A transparent 30-foot tunnel takes visitors straight through the center of the aquatic action. In all, the aquarium boasts more than 200 marine species across 12 habitats.

Captain Mikey Moore’s Biloxi Shrimping Trip gives you a visceral experience of the community’s historic relationship with the ocean. You will find no better shrimping ground than the Sound. The nets Moore casts into the muddy sound return teeming with fish of all sizes and sorts — most of the “bycatch” is thrown back. The most prized catch is the Royal Red, a decapod crustacean that tastes like lobster.

The oyster habitat, once one of the biggest in the world, was degraded by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill; then, in 2019, a surge of floodwater was released into the sound by the Bonnet Carré Spillway, changing the salinity of the water and decimating the oyster population. As Captain Skrmetta says, “We’ve had some bad luck down here.”

The Food

“Imagine if you took a desert and covered it in sea water,” says Bobby Mahoney. “Now, imagine you took the Mississippi Delta and did the same.”

The bottom of the shallow sound is covered in thousands of years’ worth of Mississippi silt, which accounts for the estuary’s fertility. As Mahoney says, “There’s a lot of lovin’ in that mud.”

Mahoney is the proprietor of Mary Mahoney’s, which Emeril Lagasse called the best restaurant on the Gulf Coast. The restaurant was founded by Bobby’s mother, a fierce Mississippi fashionista whose many accomplishments include being the first president of the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce. A few years ago, when Jimmy Carter stopped in for a meal, Bobby Mahoney reminded him that Mary had once cooked for him at the White House, as she had for several presidents. “He said that’s about the only bipartisan thing he ever did.”

Fresh seafood from the Gulf is the heart of the area’s thriving culinary scene. Not far away at The Half Shell, a Biloxi restaurant that has spawned a chain reaching from Baton Rouge to Tuscaloosa (though it has no connection with the Memphis Half Shell), the redfish is king. The beach is lined with “seafood on stilts” establishments like The Reef, where you can get your Red Royals served as an authentic shrimp boil.

Some of the best restaurants in the region are associated with the casinos that rise above Biloxi’s waterfront. Inside the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino is Stalla, a stylish eatery that artfully incorporates the area’s seafood into its Northern Italian cuisine. The main attraction at BR Prime is high-end steaks for high rollers, but you can also find seafood such as South African rock lobster and Alaskan king crab.

Gambling has been a part of the Biloxi attraction for decades, even before it was legalized in the early 1990s. During World War II, soldiers training at bases nearby streamed into the city on paydays to play craps in tavern backrooms. The Beau Rivage is a far cry from that tucked-away past. Built beside the water where a seafood cannery once stood, the hotel is the tallest building in Mississippi. From the sprawling gaming floor to the full-service spa to the massive pool, where cocktail waitresses weave between bathers, the resort supplies everything you might need to have a good time. When you tell locals you’re visiting, the hotel’s local-landmark status becomes clear as they inevitably ask, “Are you staying at the Beau?”

The Mad Potter

Hurricanes are a fact of life here, but both the physical and psychic landscapes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast are shaped by two traumas. The traces live on inside Mary Mahoney’s, where Bobby will show you the signs indicating the high-water mark of Hurricane Camille in 1969, and a man’s height above it, the crest of Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 storm surge. Along the beach, pelicans rest on a double line of pilings where the wooden boardwalk was wrenched away by Katrina’s winds. Nearby, a new concrete fishing pier promises to be more resilient against storms like Ida, which narrowly missed the area on Katrina’s sixteenth anniversary this August.

Pieces of the old boardwalk now form the dock that connects The Shed BBQ and Blues Joint with the Old Fort Bayou. Sister and brother team Brooke O. Lewis and Brad Orrison founded the restaurant to serve travelers staying in their parents’ campground, and it has grown into a destination of its own. The indoor-outdoor eatery is decorated with finds from thrift stores and dumpster dives — as Orrison says, “The only difference between me and a hoarder is that I have a lot of land!”

The Shed’s barbecue has a legit claim to be some of the best in the world. Their team were Grand Champions at Memphis in May in 2015 and 2018, and they have won trophies in almost every category — except, ironically, seafood.

The area’s most distinctive structure is the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, designed by superstar architect Frank Gehry. The fluid stainless-steel shapes of the galleries reflect the twisted work of George E. Ohr, known as the Mad Potter of Biloxi. “Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Frank Gehry were all big admirers of Ohr,” says Bobby Mahoney. “They figure he was the first abstract artist in the United States.”

At the same time the Skrmetta family was arriving in Biloxi, Ohr was firing impossible ceramic creations in his kiln. The same pots and bowls he was hawking to turn-of-the-century tourists for $20 now go on the international art market for tens of thousands. His museum’s permanent collection, proves the mad potter’s genius, and the galleries provide contemporary artists from all over the South with a place to show their works.

The $25 million museum, with the majority of building funds donated by the Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe family, was built in a four-acre stand of live oaks, many of which were destroyed by Katrina. The Beau Rivage sponsors one of the Ohr-O’Keefe’s galleries, and public relations director Mary Cracchiolo Spain says the hotel once displayed several of the potter’s pieces. As Katrina approached, the irreplaceable artworks were secured in a sturdy cage. But when the storm surge tore through the casino’s lower floors, the cage was swept out to sea.

“I like to think they’re still out there somewhere,” she says, underneath the waters of the now-placid Mississippi Sound