The Best “Worst State” Ever — Part Four

The Coast: Thank God for Mississippi.

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Editor’s Note: John Branston has been thinking about Mississippi for a long while. What follows is his meditative exploration through what he calls, mostly fondly, the best “worst state” ever. You are encountering his musings in the form of a cover story, but these could just as easily fill a book. (The best stories defy categorization.) The moments that he shares here take place on the road, but you wouldn’t call this a travel story. John allows the unprettier parts to take up space, but neither is this another think-piece about the ills of Mississippi. It’s more like sitting in John’s passenger seat and listening as one of our best storytellers meanders through a state he’s been in conversation with for more than half his life. This is part four of a four-part series. Enjoy the ride.

THE COAST

Disaster tourism was in style in 2006, the year after Katrina, when I visited the Gulf Coast with Memphis developer Henry Turley, whose work in Downtown Memphis and Harbor Town had attracted the attention of the governor and the mayor of Biloxi.

“I think it will take more than one storm to wash out some of these people,” Turley told me. “There’s a line about 200 feet back from that seawall where you have to be pretty bold to build. But beyond that I think it will be repopulated. I think they need a big site to make a statement that says, ‘This is what’s possible if you do it right.’ You have to lay it out, establish what you mean by desirable development. The governor’s office [Haley Barbour] gets it. The real problem, though, is when you get into multiple ownerships. I just don’t think they can press the government’s right to assemble land. They’re Republicans. They’re property-rights guys.”

Fifteen years later, swaths of once-exclusive beachfront property were still undeveloped, including Henderson Point and the harbor of the Broadwater Beach Hotel. Looking back at old issues of the Biloxi Sun Herald, I think the disaster not only brought out the best in people, but it also brought out the best in newspapers. The Sun Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2006.

All Dressed Up and No Place To Go

The Pan Am Clipper and the Captain Pete, which have carried beauty queens and day-trippers since 1926, have been docked far too often lately in the Gulfport harbor. Louis Skrmetta, overlooking Deer Island in Biloxi, is the third-generation captain of the Ship Island ferries.

“The only time we have shut down for anything but storms was World War II,” he told me. “Katrina hit on a Sunday evening and lasted most of Monday. It was forecast to hit near Panama City but took a westward turn. On Saturday and Sunday morning we had 600 people on the island plus 200 or so beach chairs and umbrellas. We got the customers off the island and moored the boats in the Biloxi Back Bay while the storm roared in. Ropes were snapping like gunshots. Our boat held thanks to a very stout nylon rope. I still have it. I call it my $3 million rope because that’s what the boats cost.

“The dock and boardwalk at Ship Island are supposed to be rebuilt by March of 2022. If that happens, and there are no major storms in May through August, then we should be all right. Otherwise, well … we need to catch a break.” (He did. As of May 2022, boats were in service.)

Man plans, Nature laughs. Scenic Drive in Pass Christian is an elegant collection of homes on the Mississippi Sound. Many are owned by rich people who live in New Orleans. In 1965, U.S. News & World Report named it the third wealthiest street in the country after Wall Street and Palm Beach, Florida. Granted, the minimum wage was $1.25 then and Silicon Valley hadn’t been invented, but still. The mansions are replicas of the ones that were there before Katrina, many of which were replicas of the ones before Camille in 1969. The backyards are the size of a par-4 at Augusta National. The porches, ceiling fans, staircases, chairs, swings, fences, potted plants, landscaped yards, live oaks, tennis courts, and swimming pools are first-class. Very pretty. What is missing: people. It looks like a movie set — as indeed it was for a Hallmark movie. You are far more likely to see a hired landscaper in the yard than a resident on the porch.

The Pearl River meanders 444 miles through Mississippi from Neshoba County, through Jackson to the border of Louisiana and Mississippi before spilling its brown waters into the Gulf. The river itself is ugly but its marshes are beautiful, and speaking of infrastructure, how about this vertical lift bridge and its massive counterweights? It takes four hours’ notice to get it in gear, but it is a wonder to behold from a swamp tour boat on a fine sunny day.

The Mississippi coastal seawall was built 100 years ago to protect Biloxi, Gulfport, and other cities from hurricanes. The water in the Mississippi Sound, back in the day, came right up to the bottom step. In 1951, the man-made beach was pumped in. Mother Nature and regular grooming by beach authorities have covered up the lower steps.

As a newcomer to the coast, I thought government beach grooming was a waste and an incentive to personal laziness and littering. Having since seen the piles of sargassum seaweed and dead fish that wash in while the pretty little dunes wash away, I have changed my opinion.

Shrimp and oysters were once abundant in the Sound — now not so much. Shrimp season begins in June but the date is not set in concrete and may or may not coincide with the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony.

If you crave perfect specimens of conch shells, cowries, starfish, sand dollars, sugar-white sand, and emerald waters, then the Mississippi beach … is not the place to look for them. Go to Destin or South Florida or Sharkheads or Souvenir City on Highway 90 instead and load up. Collectibles washed up from the Mississippi Sound will more likely include fishing nets, crab trap floats, oyster shells, catfish vertebrae, more oyster shells, lost beach balls, flip-flops, driftwood, feathers, stinking dead fish, pretty shells housing critters that have to be boiled out, monarch butterflies on their way to or from Mexico, and other stuff that makes you feel like a kid again, which is priceless.

Swimming in the Sound is a little dicey because it is essentially a lagoon fed by the Pearl, Mississippi, and Pascagoula river systems. A number of agencies and authorities monitor the algae blooms, salinity, sewage, toxicity, and invasive critters weekly and post advisories. Closing the beaches is rare, but it happens. The key phrase is “acceptable bacteria,” which means different things to different people. As for clarity, if Destin is a 10 and Lake Pontchartrain a 1, then the Sound is a 5 most days, better or worse depending on the wind speed and direction.

On the public fishing piers, signs post size limits for red snapper, triple tail, mackerel, and cobia, but those are deepwater fish. I have never seen anyone fishing from the public piers or the shore catch anything but speckled trout, redfish (not to be confused with red snapper), mullet, catfish, flounder, drum, and sheepshead. For non-fishermen, seeing leaping dolphin from the beach is a treat.

Shrimp and oysters were once abundant in the Sound — now not so much. Shrimp season begins in June but the date is not set in concrete and may or may not coincide with the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony. The tasty brown, white, and small shrimp (usually served fried in a po-boy or boiled in gumbo) are most likely from somewhere else during the winter months, and the superb “Royal Reds” are caught in the Atlantic Ocean off Argentina, flash frozen, and sold on the docks in Pass Christian, Gulfport, and Biloxi.

In summer, shrimp boats in the harbor fly a blue flag indicating fresh shrimp for sale for a few dollars a pound. Whatever the source, the catch and the buy-it-from-the-dock experience are superb. Oyster reefs are mostly in the western Sound. The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources says the best months to eat them are in winter and spring. Any month with an ‘R’ in its name.

Bay St. Louis

Obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, Old Bay St. Louis has come back strong in the last five years. A 2,000-square-foot house near downtown goes for $600,000. Popular with artists, musicians, and creative locals, along with visitors from New Orleans, it’s a party from Christmas to New Year’s to Mardi Gras to Frida Fest (Frida Kahlo imitators) to Halloween. Any excuse to put on a costume and have a parade will work. (Katrina left 236 coastal residents dead and did $125 billion in damage.)

It’s the Law!

Stamped inside library books in Harrison County: “$500 fine, six months in jail for misuse or failure to return library materials.”

You can buy a margarita at a drive-thru, but you must first exit your vehicle and put both feet on the ground. (There is no need to prove you can walk a straight line.)

U.S. Highway 90 runs 26 miles off the Mississippi Coast. Drive with care because municipalities with 15,000 residents (Long Beach, for example) can set their own speed limit.

You can be fined $5,000 for illegally killing an alligator. A permit and license cost $225.

In Ocean Springs you can drive a golf cart on city streets with posted speed limits of 30 miles per hour or below. In neighboring Pass Christian golf carts are allowed north of U.S. 90 where the posted speed limit is 25 miles per hour.

There is no apparent limit to the number of billboards a casino or an attorney specializing in personal injury settlements can place on Mississippi highways. As a result, south Mississippi may well be the most billboard-friendly area in the country.

The Pods and Beau Rivage

Casinos do not sit still. The word “enough” is not in their vocabulary, not with regard to buffets, glitz, tribute bands, or, of course, profits. And one more thing — nearby amenities, the neighborhood if you will, something to entertain the hardcores and their companions in down time with a bit of cultural tourism.

Beau Rivage (“Beautiful Shore” in French) is the most glamorous casino in Biloxi, and just down Highway 90 going toward the bay you will see “the pods” that house the pottery of George Ohr, the mustachioed “mad potter of Biloxi.” No disrespect to old George, but some (me) say, you see one pot, you have seen ’em all. Pods are another matter; the big shiny ones were designed by famous architect Frank Gehry. The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art might lead you to think it has something to do with artist Georgia O’Keeffe, but it’s named for a benefactor. Biloxi casinos hoped Ohr would do for Biloxi what Walter Anderson did for neighboring Ocean Springs, which has no casinos. But the art museums and their hometowns could not be more different. The Anderson museum is in a modest building downtown with walls covered by elaborate murals painted by the artist for $1. The pods cost $19 million.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

The Barrier Islands

In the spirit of Walter Anderson, for 35 years students from Memphis College of Art made an annual trip to Horn Island to camp on the beach for ten days and forage for flotsam and jetsam to turn into art projects. The annual Horn Island exhibition was a treat to look forward to. Sadly, the College of Art closed for good in 2020.

Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island was built with bricks during the Civil War, but guns were not installed until 1872; only one of the original 17 guns remains. During the yellow fever epidemic that nearly wiped out Memphis in the 1880s it was used as a quarantine station. More recently, the Ship Island dock and boardwalk to the beach were heavily damaged by Tropical Storm Cristobal, wrecked again by Hurricane Sally and Hurricane Zeta, declared off-limits by the National Park Service due to the pandemic, and closed for one reason or another for two years and counting — a shame since it is normally the most accessible of the Mississippi barrier islands.

The washed-up boat on the beach in better days made me expect to see Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins reunite in the final scene of The Shawshank Redemption. Unlike Cat Island and Horn Island, which have marine forests of pine and oak, there are no trees on Ship Island, so bring your sunscreen. I feel sorry for anyone who has not seen Ship Island on a pretty day.

PANDEMIC

Cruise ships do not normally visit Gulfport, but a few of them were surplussed there during the early months of the pandemic before unceremoniously being told to leave. The Port Authority bought three 270-foot gantry cranes for $30 million in 2016 to serve Dole, Chiquita, and Chemours. They are usually idle. Cargo ships eight miles out on the Intercoastal Waterway pass by this little-used link in the global supply chain.

I asked Fred Smith to explain: “There has been a long-term theory that a good deal of the container trade could be diverted from the major West Coast and Atlantic seaboard ports. For a number of reasons, this has never happened despite alternatives such as Gulfport. The scale of logistics infrastructure in LA/Long Beach, Oakland, Charleston, Savannah, and Miami offset the benefits of using smaller ports. I don’t think these trends will be reversed in the near term, and the Gulfport cranes will stay idle.”

Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and it was published in 1722. The thing is, Defoe was five years old when the bubonic plague hit London in 1665. So he edited the journal of someone else, enhanced it with research and fine writing and a story line, and earned his reputation as a famous writer of what is known 300 years later as “historical fiction.” With nothing better to do, I wrote 50,000 words of word salad during my Covid-free Painless Pandemic in the Pass in 2020. No corpses piling up in the streets, no story line, no characters, no fine writing.

The question, at least, was obvious: What is acceptable risk? Smoking, driving, helmet, no helmet, mask, no mask, reopening, flying, waterfront property, insurance with a named-storm deductible, open container, open carry, scaffold, ladders, 75 mph, 55 mph ... (answer: it depends). The experts in the risk business — Gulf Coast casinos — closed for two months then reopened and prospered in 2021 in a climate of hedonism, stimulus checks, and people with time on their hands.

The obsession with the pandemic death count reminded me of the hot summer of 1980 in Mississippi when the United Press International regional bureau chief in Atlanta decided that all state bureaus should begin reporting a daily count of “heat-related deaths.” Wage slaves like me dutifully began calling medical examiners, hospital spokesmen, state officials — anyone who might provide a number. Many eventually did but just as many did not. The criteria were, well, who knows? But because UPI was an international news agency, the story was “news” that spread like a virus, you might say, until the “deadly summer of 1980” turned into fall. Lesson: Reporters and editors are not scientists, and vice versa.

A FINAL NOTE

While living in Memphis, I bought a house in Pass Christian for $179,000 in 2016. I closed on August 29th, the 11th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I was aware of that but bought anyway. The house is one long block from the beach but out of the flood zone — cold comfort when a 120 mile-an-hour wind knows no such boundaries. So what?, I figured. When you are 67 years old, what are you waiting for? It was a good house at a good price in a good location in a good town in a neighboring state.

Pass Christian is 400 miles from Memphis, a fairly easy seven-hour drive. There are no casinos and no high-rise buildings. A comparable house near the water in Alabama or the Florida Panhandle would have cost two or three times as much.

Two months after we bought the house, our daughter died at the age of 29. The restorative power of living near water after traumatic loss can’t be overestimated, especially when you can look over that water and see shrimp boats, sunrises and sunsets, pelicans flying in formation, wild weather, rainbows, and an island. Such visions, I learned, can be revelations if you let them.

You cannot write and think your way through grief and life. You must take action. You have to lift a shovel, break ground, hammer a nail. A fixer-upper can be just the ticket. One more reason Mississippi is the best “worst state” ever.

Editor‘s Note: This is the final part of a four-part series.