Exactly nineteen years ago

Mississippi State Highway 49 runs along next to the seawall along a fair stretch of miles of the Gulf Coast. As you travel East on a Saturday night from a town like Long Beach towards Biloxi the houses are on your left; some big stately southern piles that you and your family are not likely to get invited into; some little and astonishingly humble, marking those who have lived there for decades, from before you needed much money to have a house overlooking that particular stretch of generally placid ocean; some were no longer homes but merely the outlines of those swept away in the last great hurricane, which for your time means Camille in 1969. There are lots where in the last bits of fading light you can see the concrete front steps that led up into a living room long ago knocked to pieces and swept out to sea.

The sea, or the somewhat un-sea-like part of the sea that is the Gulf of Mexico is on your immediate right, beyond the big flat mostly empty beach, every few hundred yards measured out by the line of a fishing pier extending out over the dark, still water. On a rare evening, some portion of its dim expanse would be illuminated by a church youth group or softball team having a bonfire. On other nights one could sometimes see the yellow lights carried by waders out in the water, gigging for flounder. Tonight, in the wake of a pounding summer storm, there is no one there.

There are no casinos yet. There won't be for years.

The seawall is a fairly recent innovation. So is the beach. Some years ago -- before you arrived from somewhere else, before you were even born -- there was no seawall and no beach, just a mudflat. The Army Corps of Engineers built the seawall and created the beach. Because of the barrier islands ten miles offshore, there is no surf to create one naturally. At the edge of the sand, the water laps with no more force than that of a lake. The water is shallow and warm and murky with the gigantic plume of silt continuously flowing from the mouth of the Mississippi river ninety miles behind you.

Out there on the Sound once you saw a waterspout, like a gray piece of fuzzy wool thread hanging down from cloud. It wasn’t raining where you were standing, by the car in one of the little parking areas by the seawall. It was hard to imagine that the funny thing on the horizon bore any relation to the tornado drills that were a regular feature of Spring in school.

You are drinking Budweiser tallboys, in the back seat of a small car. You are with other people who feel that they don’t really belong here. You are headed to an arcade in a building that was once a hangar for small aircraft. You will play Centipede.

You are listening to Cheap Trick.

Posted by BT at June 26, 2002 06:23 PM