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Written by Frank McMains
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August 2009. These days in Bay Saint Louis, you have to look harder to see the scars of Hurricane Katrina.
Earlier this spring I was asked to give a series of talks to a group of boarding school students in Pennsylvania. The subject was travel writing. As is the case with most of us who cannot be bothered to prepare a speech, I quickly resorted to taking questions from the audience. Those sorts of events unfold along a predictable enough line, “Have you ever felt like your life was in danger?” “How do you get past the language barrier in a place like Tibet?” “What is the worst thing you have ever eaten?” But, when asked what my favorite place was I had to pause. The talk was about how to write about travel and that question forced out of me a personal reflection; I do not really have a favorite place. I have no favorite place because one of the primary virtues a person should bring to travel writing is the ability to fall in love with wherever you are. And I fall in love very easily.
Stumbling out of a Ford Econoline van after twelve hours of driving with a rock band and finding myself in Cleveland or Iowa City or Harrisburg I have looked around, seen the breeze move the curtains in some cheap apartment’s window or a pretty girl working the counter at a coffee shop and I have known that I could be happy in that place. Sitting in an idling train on some rural siding in Moldova watching a woman herd goats with a heather switch I fall into a dream of renting a little cottage by a gourd patch, throwing some fresh whitewash on the place and making a go of it. I just like the world; it is that simple. Travel writing is about seeing the best in a place, seeing a vision of that spot as those who care for it do.
So, forgive me if I gush, but after a few days spent on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I am still a little in love with Bay Saint Louis. Flowering vines curl around thin porch columns, bright pastel paint covers clapboard houses and eaves hide frilled, Victorian accents. Bay Saint Louis is coastal and Southern and unhurried. The city is wrapped in a stockade of newly planted crepe myrtles, the smell of brine and sand comes in off of the bay. The town is a calm repository of unstrung beauty, like jumbles of thread inside of a sewing basket. It is slightly refined disorder because Bay Saint Louis came very close to disappearing.
Tales of devastation from Katrina would be happily forgotten by residents the closer you move toward the coast, but the impact of that event is, in many regards, what has made Bay Saint Louis the town that it is today. Everyone has a story about the storm, frankly told and in a manner that suggests you are being spared the truly horrible. But, there it is, Katrina changed this place forever and those who have stayed and those that have moved here all know what it means to live with that. Part of loving a place is knowing that it can break your heart.
But, today the starkest reminders of the storm have been reinvented as testaments to how far the town has come. Rising waters drowned the city’s infrastructure, but as the last cubic yards of blacktop are poured and the last forms are knocked clear from the new sidewalks, the impression is not one of destruction but of a well-ordered little town that takes good care of itself. A live oak where guests at a bed and breakfast had clung after the sea pushed them out of a second story window has been sculpted into a monument to the more angelic face of nature. High water marks were left untouched on a set of French doors in a gallery that is otherwise polished to a blinding sheen. You cannot talk about present day Bay Saint Louis without talking about what the water took but, more and more, you have to look to see the scars.
That would seem to be the way people here want to be thought of—moving on from the past. Walking down Main Street, through shops selling vintage Pyrex, antique fishing lures and rare 45s, the only reminder of the storm is the bay, now flecked with tiny sailboats all pulling into the wind of a July afternoon. Further down the block, inside of Bay Books, a writer is signing copies of her Historic Photos of Mississippi. Arts and crafts-inspired, reclaimed furniture is for sale amid volumes by regional writers and a man plays a clarinet tipped with rhinestones outside, in the full, hot sun of the day.
For decades people fled yellow fever outbreaks, the killing heat and the sodden air of New Orleans summers, arriving by daily train at the Louisville and Nashville depot that still stands in the heart of old Bay Saint Louis. The depot is an avatar of its time. It is a tumble of Exotic Revival architecture and the Spanish Eclectic style more typical of early twentieth century construction. There are Turkic, ogee windows set beside twisting columns, the interior flaunts classical, almost Byzantine plaster work. The building looks like a fragment of eccentricity has been borne down the trestle from wild New Orleans to more mellow Bay Saint Louis. Here is the place to start your visit because even though there has been no passenger service since the storm, the depot houses a small museum and the visitor’s information bureau.
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