Blog

Anniversary Of Katrina, That Witch

“A love affair with Pass Christian

and Darn that Witch, Katrina”

No one taught us more about the complicated love affair we can have with a place than William Faulkner. When I was eighteen and heading off to college, I wrote Mr. Faulkner a letter and told him I was coming. I said if he ever saw me walking across the campus of the University of Mississippi, it would be all right to introduce himself. Because, I wanted to be a writer too. And I knew he knew a lot he could teach me.

Shortly before I arrived, he died, which I thought was a rather drastic way to avoid me. But it didn’t interfere with my long and complicated love affair with his place.

It was the gulf coast of Mississippi that heated my blood. I visited it in dreams. I thought about it on trips to other coasts. I lived with it in my imagination for years, and it really caught heat when my son was born there. I may have lived on that coast only a few years, but I found I needed to keep it with me in the only way I knew. I wrote a novel set there. I centered it in Pass Christian, a town whose name is a secret. Spelled as though it should be pronounced Christian, you have to visit to really know how to say its name. PASS CHRIS-TI-ANNE. Roll it out on your tongue like the name of a seductive woman. And then sometimes shorten it to simply, “The Pass.”

How eerie it felt to be putting the final touches on my novel, THE ASSIGNED VISIT, as Hurricane Katrina was barreling down on “The Pass,” just as Hurricane Camille aimed its eye across it thirty years before. Because THE ASSIGNED VISIT, set in the Vietnam era, is all about that time when Pass Christian bravely struggled to heal from Hurricane Camille. So now, like an old friend, who I have heard has been deathly ill, I have to follow the little city’s recuperation from Katrina.

The bed and breakfast, where I liked to stay, is gone. It was a grand old house built in the early l800s. And though it has survived many hurricanes, it did not make it through Katrina. Once when I was there, the owner told me in great detail his adventure of staying in the grand place while riding out Hurricane Camille. But during Katrina, the historical old house collapsed and crushed my friend.

Katrina’s wrath has changed the place I love. The grand houses that for decades looked out into the gulf like a line of naval officers in dress whites—yes, the grand old houses that had once been refuges from heat, yellow fever and war, places designed for summer fun with a festive air—were almost all stolen by Katrina. Even now, those that remain still wear the gaunt hollowed-eyed look of the desperately ill.  Each year, I either visit or call to learn how the place I love is healing.  Each year, just as this one of 2008, more of the city's outward character is visible.   It's the love of place that is hard to measure.  THAT is best seen in the tenacity of those who stick.  And love is more readily touched in the words we write and the stories we tell.

Thank goodness love encourages the sharing of memories. And thank goodness memories remind us love has the power to heal.