Longform - Gulf Coast - Scott Hocker
SALTWATER IN THE WOUND
BY SCOTT HOCKER
SHIP ISLAND HAD A WOUND. A saltwater gash formed in 1969. The first time I visited the barrier island, 11 or so miles o the coast of Gulfport, Mississippi, was June 7, 2015. By then, 45 years had passed since Hurricane Camille bifurcated Ship Island into West Ship Island and East Ship Island and almost 10 years since Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the laceration.
I had been living in New Orleans for only six months; Ship Island had been in the Gulf of Mexico far longer. The sliver of an island was formed 5,000 years earlier, a spring chicken in geological terms. Its wound, then, was fresh. As was mine. This was my first summer in the Deep South, the heat torpid, and my eight-year partnership was fissuring. I tried to plaster the clefts as they formed, when I bothered to acknowledge them. Brandon and I had always been good at roaming. “Adventure Times” we called it. We were better afield than we were at home. The drip and swelter of late spring in New Orleans begged for a jaunt, so the two of us sought open water. Someone, somewhere in a conversation one day had mentioned Ship Island. They noted the water was clear and blue. Not like the brownish murk of the waters along Mississippi’s mainland coast.
I am sitting in a camping chair on Waveland Beach, located about a third of the way between the western and eastern edges of Mississippi’s 44 miles of shoreline. It is late August 2020, five years after my debut summer in the Deep South, and a pandemic rages. My friend Courtney and I drive the lazy hour from New Orleans for an easy beachside respite after months of isolation. We drive the more scenic of the two main roads, Highway 90. It ambles past Bayou Sauvage, over the Rigolets strait and the Pearl River, and into Mississippi. Sometimes we use Interstate 10. That route is more expeditious. Whichever highway we use, I see unfamiliar topography and flora. This is a latitude and a near-country away from the open-water environs I know best, the Pacific Ocean where it crashes into Northern California. There, in the region where I was raised, the trees–tanoaks and redwoods and the Pacific madrone–cede in a steep, craggy instant to the frothy brawl of the cracking surf. My dad is a scuba diver. The ocean is what he does, so it is what our family did, too. In coastal Mississippi, I still lack the familiarity, the language, to name what is around me. Each time I visit Waveland, or Bay Saint Louis up the road, or Pass Christian across Bay Saint Louis’ namesake estuary, I gape and fumble and wonder WWJD: What Would Jesmyn Do? Jesmyn Ward, the bard of this patch of Mississippi. Jesmyn Ward, whose home is inland a few miles to the northeast, in DeLisle. She knows this place, its marsh grass, its swamp myrtle, its saw palmetto, knows her region’s markers and their names. I want to survey it the way she does.
The ferry to Ship Island puttered across the Gulf for 90 slow minutes. Brandon and I gathered our tote bags snug with blankets and sunscreen and rum punch and wine (and, yes, water) and disembarked at West Ship Island. We shu ed past Fort Massachusetts, a Civil War stronghold, in our flip-flops, Brandon ahead of me, down a long, angling boardwalk. Tall grass stretched high and wide on both sides. I later learned its name: shoal grass. At the boardwalk’s end, there was a snack bar and an outfitter where visitors could rent bright blue umbrellas and lounge chairs. Brandon and I decided the Gulf’s waters would be our reprieve when the sun’s scorch became unbearable. We baked and drank until the temperature turned insistent. Then we glided across the torrid white sand and threw ourselves into the gentle surf. The quiet green-blue water was nothing like the raucous breakers of my youth. In Northern California, I avoided the water. It was frigid. At Ship Island, the Gulf’s ease was an invitation, one Brandon and I accepted a handful of times in 2015 and 2016 during the island’s annual operating season from March to October. A recurring reset for two men trying to find their way back to each other. And failing.
It is September 6, 2016. I am unable, again, to use my words with Brandon. They crumble in my mouth. I enlist my default maneuver: active silence. I am in pain so I punish him by escaping New Orleans for the beachfront in Bay Saint Louis. It is a double betrayal: lock him out by muting myself; rove without him, abandoning him when I know he also wants a beach getaway. I park and tromp and stew. A collection of stones, some large as footballs, lines this stretch of the shore near the Washington Street Pier. My love for Brandon remains firm, but the common ground between us slips. Erosion is a slow muck. Second to hour, sameness. Five thousand years, though, can fashion a barrier island; a decade can bind two men. Then each is rended asunder in a cataclysmic flash.
I have been visiting Waveland Beach with Courtney every weekend for five weeks by this point in October 2020. It is two years since Brandon left our relationship, one year since he moved to the other side of the United States. I have not visited Ship Island in four years. Since then, the island has been conjoined into a reunited mass when, in 2019, millions of cubic yards of sand were pumped to fill the gap created by Camille and Katrina. So it goes. So it will happen again. Jesmyn has made me see, and I have begun naming the world around me: Those spiky trees plopped in clusters along Waveland Beach are Washingtonia robusta, Mexican fan palms. Those wispy tendrils are sea oats, native Uniola paniculata L., their panicles turning from green to straw-gold as the summer wanes. The shallows of Waveland Beach extend far into the Gulf, or at least farther than I am used to. The locals around us have moved their lawn chairs into the water itself and speared their umbrellas into the nearshore zone. Courtney, the only Black person in sight, is letting the water wash away, for a spell, her trepidation about being Black in the United States and being Black on this here stretch along the southernmost edge of the Deep South. My dog, Logan, is learning to like open water, provided open water lets his paws maintain contact with sturdy earth. These shallows are a balm, regular life held in bathwater abeyance. Impermanence is permanent here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Wounds erupt; wounds mend.
SCOTT HOCKER is a writer, problem-solver-for-hire and the former editor in chief of Tasting Table and Liquor.com. He is from the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived all over the United States but is now rooted in New Orleans. He is often enveloped by water, ideally in an ocean or a sea or lake but sometimes just his bathtub.
Jared Briere