Chinese Broccoli

My mental impression of Mississippi was that it was going to be a bad place, Confederate-imbued, somehow full of malice. What I saw instead was one of the strangest things in my life: a town completely decimated, much more so than New Orleans, by the wrath of Katrina and the folly of man.

Driving across Mississippi on the way to Louisiana was dark and alienating, but driving along the Gulf coast towards the east was blinding. We tried to follow US 90 as much as we could, me somehow thinking I was going to dip my toes in the Gulf waters for the first time, enticed by promises of white sand beaches and a heavenly landscape made by a Cobourg, Ontario woman we encountered at a rest area on the way down. She must have been talking about Florida. The white sand beaches were here, it's true, and they were gorgeous—but the ones that weren't overtly strewn with debris were taped off, and the temptation to bask was easily squelched by the desire to not wade through rebar and the earthly remains of an Outback Steakhouse.

I thought I had been fully moved by the pathos of Louisiana's wreckage until I saw Biloxi, at which point I started to feel a bit sick. There's something more comical, of course (and less heartbreaking) about an endless string of destroyed casinos and daiquiri shacks, as opposed to entire neighbourhoods of displaced and needlessly killed poor people, but it's just as visually surreal. Biloxi, or anything like what it used to be, is basically gone. By the time we got to the bridge to Ocean Springs, now half-underwater and snapped in sections like a tossed package of crackers, I could no longer even enjoy the experience for its unreal, once-in-a-lifetime, photographic amazingness.

As we stood alongside the ruined bridge, I had a strange sensation I had heretofore only experienced while exploring abandoned buildings. I used to think that feeling I got—a little sick in the pit of my stomach, a little nervous, a little tired—just came from bad environmental conditions, too many stairs, fear of injury or getting caught, the fatigue of exhilaration—any of those. But standing along the shores of the ruined highway, I felt that same thing, and it reminded me of Jeff and how he hated to see dying trees, because it awakened something in him that made him deeply sad—it was a hint of an apocalyptic vision for him, and he hated to see the world that way. And I realized, standing there, feeling a little light-headed, that for all the beauty I see in decay, it scares me, moves me like that, too. We weren't alone here: two vansful of Amish and Mennonite missionaries were exploring alongside us, the young men spilling out across the broken structure, climbing on the highway's rails like a balance beam, almost dancing, quietly wild and unrestrained.