Aftermath (install. 2)

I had walked from Railroad St., down Jeff Davis keeping a close eye out for spectacular damage, I think. I pushed down a surge of disappointment, feeling guilty. I was not a voyeur or vampire. But for a short second I felt like I had been short-changed.. I was south of the tracks. I had been informed that EVERYTHING south of Railroad St. and Highway 90 was gone. Most everything was damaged to greater or lesser extent. A few buildings were bad enough that I had to think for a second what part of them were gone, but nothing gut-wrenching.
It was when I got to what I guess was 4th or 5th St. I couldn’t tell because as the land begin to lazily drop to the water’s edge there wasn’t a building or sign in sight. The scene left me feeling disoriented and I began stepping in lose rock that I hadn’t seen. Stumbling a bit, I caught myself and realized I had walked into ground zero of what had been the Rite-Aid Drug store. I was standing at what must have been the back of the place. The strip mall had been about a hundred yards long, housing the drug store on the east end and a Dollar General Store on the west. A bank had occupied the southwest corner and my favorite liquor store the southeast. There had been a Chevron gas station on the opposite corner of Jeff Davis and the beach road. Along with a neat apartment complex I had lived in a few years before leaving, it had book ended a Chinese restaurant that had been convenient but with crappy food. Cars had sat in waiting behind the gas station. On the other side of where the apartments should have been, a gas/food station was to hold that spot.
All of these places should have blocked me from seeing the spot where the Sav-a-Center shared a two city block chunk of real estate with K-Mart and McDonald’s. None of that was there,so my line of sight to the absence of the rest was unfettered.
Bits of the foundation of the building I had wandered into,jutted upward like broken jagged teeth. I sat down and surveyed the sight slowly, swiveling my head back and forth. I was trying to what went where. The larger places were fairly simple but there were little niches and parts of the landscape that had held significance that I had no idea where they were supposed to be. No points of references that I could base from except the streets. I thought of how my driving had been more about landmarks than any sense of direction. Looking east or west, I could see the land dip into the horizon because nothing stood us.
Cars traveled Hwy 90 in both directions. The road was about hundred fifty yards away and the noise pulled my attention toward them and the beach. The pauses in traffic made the whole area appear a bit like a empty beach on a deserted island. No lights. No cars. Not a single luxury. A lot of the pavement was cracked and buckled in places where it wasn’t supposed be. I remembered the news reports that said the winds and surge had been so forceful parts of the beach hwy had flipped up and over like shingles blowing off a roof. The city pier where I had spent a lot of time with my lady was now just parallel lines of brown pilings extending several hundred yards into the Sound. Following the beach west I saw nothing but water and sand and though those spots weren’t missing anything because there had been nothing there, it had the same weird deserted island feel as the rest.
Down the beach from where I stood I could see the Taco Bell sign that had stood higher than most signs in town. Some people had thought it was unsightly and detracted from the quaintness of the center of town. No one could argue that now. Although it was still erect, it leaned in at least three different directions. It was rusted and blown out and looked like a skeleton that wouldn’t fall.
I began to walk east on Hwy 90. I had to pay close attention to where I stepped, small pieces of debris were everywhere but the street. There were larger piles of debris and trash as I made way toward Gulfport, but they looked more like the leftover piles from larger ones that had been cleared. Like the last little circle of raked leaves left behind at the end or the handful of remaining dust that won’t get over the lip of the dust pan that we sweep under a chair. Only these remnants contained thousand pound hunks of red brick and mortar columns that had supported antebellum homes. Splintered wood and timbers leaned and poked out of the piles like fractured long bones. A little experience and common sense told me that the random debris didn’t necessarily come from the destruction of what had occupied that space. It could have come from miles away and what had been there was just as far away in some other unknown direction. The wrong pieces of incomplete puzzles in the wrong boxes.

I knew the builders of a few of the more recognizable blown out structures. I passed a crew working to get a new apartment building constructed. I found it ironic that the columns being used for the iron fencing was of the same size and color as the pulverized ones I had seen earlier. The pool had already been dug, pored, finished, filled and its decorative water spouts shot jets of water skyward. It was back dropped by several acres that looked like those pictures of Japan after the atom bomb attacks. Most things blown totally away, what remained was naked, stripped and barren. The destruction here was complete and total.
Most of the lots that lined they highway were for sale. I thought it was funny that quite a few of the phone numbers carried area codes for places well away from the beach. Any beach. Iowa, Ohio, Arkansas. The property for sale was probably the most expensive in the state. Much of it had been in the hands of the same families for generations. Quite a few had even survived Camille in ‘69.