Mississippi

The cab dropped Debbie at Amtrak and me at Enterprise. I took my little red Hyundai and headed east. In a few short hours I was in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. I drove straight down Washington Street, parked, and dashed across the sand to put my feet in the Gulf.

Three weeks ago I’d had my feet in the cool, stingray-filled waters at Bahia Kino, and today I stood in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I love them both.

When I could pull myself out of the water, I called my friend and asked instructions to his house. Easy. All I had to do was take the main road east out of downtown and turn right after crossing the second bayou.

I love instructions like that! Cross the second bayou and turn right. I repeated that little mantra to myself as I drove the eight or ten minutes out of town.

I kept my eyes peeled for a decent gas station. The first one I saw was Exxon (as in Valdiz), and the second one was a BP station. The BP station was packed. I was irate. Have people no memories? It was just a year ago that the death of the Gulf was weighing heavily on every mind. 

I crossed that second bayou and hung a right. My friend and I took a little outing so I could see his boat, the one he calls his project boat. This is the one he picked up for a few hundred dollars, and it needs lots of “beautification.”

Then we stopped by the marinas in both Biloxi and Ocean Springs trying to find some fresh shrimp for dinner but ended up having to buy some from a vendor along side the highway. Six dollars for two pounds of fresh shrimp, heads intact. Better prices than Kino.

We boiled it all up, made some cole slaw, sliced up some fresh tomatoes and broiled some fresh trout. I gorged.

After dinner we rowed out on the bayou and watched the golden full moon rise over the pines. 

Sudden splashing. Small fish glowing silver in the moonlight lept from the water, dozens and dozens at once. Then the real shocker: they weren’t fish; they were shrimp!

When I shined a light on the water the jumping frenzy increased. Turned the light off and it subsided. My friend said that in his years on the bayou he’d never seen anything like it.

Was it the golden moon? Was it the lunar eclipse not visible in North America but that maybe shrimp could feel? Was it the low tide? Or had the shrimp merely gone mad?

A small stretch of woods sits just east of Ocean Springs. It’s a designated wildlife preserve, and amazingly, the wildlife being preserved is the sandhilll crane. There are around one hundred nesting pairs of the birds, and they live there year round. Why is it the cranes in the Sulfur Springs Valley are only wintertime visitors? Our cranes head northwest as far as Russia for the summer. But the cranes in Ocean Springs are permanent residents.

Then again, the cranes in Mississippi number only a few hundred, and the Valley wouldn’t likely be able to support a year round flock of 30,000 cranes.

A short visit to Mississippi and a chance to get updated on each other’s lives, then back to New Orleans with the rental car.

Last thing as I headed west out of Biloxi, I ran across the sand to put my feet in the Gulf’s waters.