Hide and Seek

No matter how old I get, or how many times I have suffered, there is one mistake I make on a near-habitual basis: I underestimate the sun, and overestimate my ability to thoroughly apply sunscreen. 

 

I took myself on a date

 today. Me, myself, and I went to Gulfport, Mississippi, a shore town right on the Gulf of Mexico and only about 70 miles from my Loyola summer home. I sat on a completely isolated, brilliant white sand beach for about two hours. I saw and spoke to no one, spare an older man, Tom, an Ohio resident and truck driver, who introduced himself to me... we yankees can spot each other, I think. The rest of the time I drifted lazily between the last chapters of a book, taking pictures, and dips in the Gulf, which felt a little cooler than a warm bath.  

I felt very patriotic today. Maybe it was the fact that every single lamp post and street sign in Gulfport had a flag attached. But mostly, I think it was because of how mysterious, beautiful, and diverse this country is. Within one hour I left the mansion-lined streets of Uptown New Orleans and landed on a deserted beach looking out over blue Gulf waters. Since living in Michigan I have seen beautiful lake shores, beaches and forests. On the drive down here, we saw mountains, rolling hills of vineyards, rivers, and national parks. We of course also saw strip malls, billboards in bad taste, desolate towns, and a lot of fast food restaurants. But what's great about this country is none of that seems out of place. It all fits together like one of those 1,000 piece puzzles; the hard parts of it make you think, make you angry, drive you crazy, the easy parts are soothing and reassuring, and when you finally get it all together, it just makes sense. 

But my drive to Mississippi was also confusing. Everywhere down here- the radio, the lunch conversation, the newspaper, the walls of restaurants- I see and hear about Katrina. I hear sentences that begin with "Since Katrina," or "Because of Katrina," or "Before Katrina." I remember the pictures of the flooded streets of the city and its poor neighborhoods, the roofs blown off houses, and the horrible images brought to the world from the Louisiana Superdome

 (I'm including a picture of it from my window). I was anxious to get here and learn about the storm, the aftermath, the recovery. But being new to the area, finding evidence of Katrina is not easy for me. Which is creepy. The media coverage of abandoned buildings, FEMA trailers, ruined neighborhoods... all of that is weirdly missing if you are a visitor to the city. This is both disorienting and unnerving.  

I expected that on my drive to Gulfport, as the MS coastline was hit incredibly hard, would yield signs of the storm and recovery efforts. I was wrong. After my day in the sun, I stopped in Bay St. Louis for a cool drink and a snack at a small coffee 

shop called the Mockingbird Cafe. After

 a fresh scone and an ice-cold strawberry lemonade, I made a quick trip to the restroom- its walls were adorned with newspaper articles-turned-plaques of the recovery of the house and area where I stood. The article spoke of how the cafe had been like the living room of the community after Katrina, whose wrath closed 100% of the businesses in the community. People gathered in Mockingbird to comfort one another, to mourn their losses and to rebuild the one most important thing the storm had taken from them; their community. 

Bay St. Louis was hit by a 34-foot high wall of water during Katrina. There is a twisted oak tree that still stands in the town facing the Gulf- seven people and a dog survived the storm because they were able to cling to this tree. I drove right past it while I was downtown and only learned of its significance after I got home and began thinking about this post. It is incidents like this and others that make it feel as though I'm in an eerie game of hide and seek here; sometimes I am looking right at Katrina's ghost, and don't even realize it.  

Just as my travels are helping me better visualize and put together the unique puzzle of our country, so is this experience in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I am slowly piecing together the pains and the stories of this region, and hope that before I leave, I will have gained an understanding of what happened here that I can share with my own community.