I took this picture a year ago, on a drive down Highway 90 to survey the damage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, one year after Hurricane Katrina. Growing up on the Coast, the S.S. Hurricane Camille was always a memorable local landmark. The boat was planted firmly ashore by Hurricane Camille in 1969, and had since been turned into the site of a tourist trinket shop.
It's kind of crazy...growing up there, Hurricane Camille was almost this mystical sort of force that we grew up hearing about. It was The Big One, the one that changed everything. The one you thought would never happen again. I certainly hoped I'd never live to see any other storm change the face of the Coast as completely as Camille did.
I wrote a post on my own blog detailing the trip, plus there are many more pictures from the drive on Flickr.
1. I grew up in Gulfport too, and my mom's stories always got around to Camille. She was a young school teacher, a new mom (I was a month old) and it hit the Coast on her 27th birthday (Aug. 17, 1969). It was the defining moment of her life, that is until 36 years later when Katrina came along and plunged her house under eight feet of water. I just got back from a trip to the Coast myself, and the thing that gets me is the absence of landmarks along Highway 90. I had no clue, without visual cues, where I was half the time even though I lived my entire childhood on the Coast, living in Gulfport and attending high school at St. Stanislaus in Bay St. Louis. I wrote about my first trip home to the Coast in early 2006 at my own collection of thoughts and memories The Kindness of Strangers: What Next. Thanks for the picture of the Camille. It always reminds me of getting my driver's license at the Highway Patrol office in that same neighborhood when I was 15.
Posted at 9:46AM on Aug 29th 2007 by steve