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Thanksgiving in Waveland

When we left Fontainbleau State Park, we made a stop in the town of Mandeville at the local Ace Hardware store to pick up some spare parts for the camper (they had an RV section because this is RV country in a big way), including a small level so we can make sure the trailer is, well, level. Then we got just a little lost (we missed the road we were looking for), but quickly figured out an alternate route and headed east, back to Mississippi.

Our destination was Waveland, Mississippi, about an hour away. We wandered through a detour for all campers and trailers, to avoid a railroad crossing that probably would have scraped the bottom of our trailer right out of existence, but eventually found our way to the beach road. Which was kind of a misnomer, there’s not a lot of beach—the road is right on the edge of the water, there’s no beach most of the way.

We found the campground, in Buccaneer State Park, and checked in for five days. All the campsite loops are named for famous pirates or piratical locales, and we camped in the Long John Silver loop. It was more crowded than I expected, but it’s a very big park, so there were still plenty of empty campsites. Lots of families apparently have a Thanksgiving tradition of camping on the Gulf, though. There were big groups all around us, but though they did whoop it up during the day, they were mostly quiet at night, so not a problem.

They also seemed to be having a contest to see whose campsite could most resemble a carnival. Riding my bike around, I saw all sorts of blow-up, wooden, and flag decorations with a Thanksgiving theme, and walking at night, there were lights everywhere, designating the perimeter of a site, outlining behemoth-sized campers, hanging from trees, under trucks, all over the place. And the big screen tvs set up outside were a bit much for me.

A clean, well-lighted campsite (not ours)

The music that was often a little louder than was really polite didn’t bother me much; classic rock and old outlaw country hits were the usual choices, and I was fine with that. One fellow rode around our loop on an adult tricycle with “Stairway to Heaven” blasting several times. Mike thought he was part of a group of disabled campers on the other side of our loop—in any event, he was having a good time and I applaud his musical tastes, even if they were a bit prosaic.

We discovered that the state park where we were staying was originally known as Jackson’s Ridge—it was used by Andrew Jackson as a staging area/base camp for the Battle of New Orleans. Before that, the pirate Jean Lafitte and his fellow buccaneers were partial to the area when they were smuggling and raiding along the Gulf coast. That explains all the pirate names for features in the park. We passed a historic marker on the beach road that mentioned the nearby “Pirate House” inhabited by Lafitte, and Andrew Jackson’s nephew and adopted son had liked the stretch of coast so much he established a plantation named Sea Song there.

We made our way to the commercial part of town, a mile or so north of the beach, to visit the local Walmart. We went on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, hoping to avoid the rush, but it was already pretty darn rushed. We got what we needed for a minimalist Thanksgiving feast then headed back to the camper. We tried to figure out as we drove why there were big gaps between the houses, and also noticed that most, if not all, of the houses on the beach road were quite new.

A little online investigating led us to find out that Waveland, Mississippi, was ground zero for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The counterclockwise movement of hurricanes meant that the coast here was slammed by a 27-foot-high storm surge, which explained why all the buildings in the park were raised on pilings. Most of the houses on the beach road were raised, too; as we drove into the commercial part of town, we realized that the railroad line that caused us to detour was also probably what stopped the surge from flattening the whole town; the rise to the railroad bed sapped some of the energy out of the wave.

How you can tell a town has been hit by
 a hurricane's storm surge--all the electrical
elements are on platforms 20 feet in the air

The day after Thanksgiving, I went into town to get a pedicure (camping is hard on the toes if you insist on wearing sandals in November, as I do), and both of the ladies who worked at the salon as well as the lady sitting next to me who was getting a pedicure told me stories of living through Katrina. Or, even if they evacuated during the storm, living through the aftermath of Katrina. They all lost everything, and had no love for FEMA, but long story short, apparently the Amish are right up there with the Cajun Air Force as a force for good in the aftermath of catastrophes along the coast. Two of the three women told me they never would have gotten their houses rebuilt without the “Amish church group workers” who came to help wherever they were needed. They also wished me well in our decision to live in a camper for a year; they had lived in FEMA campers that were still the stuff of nightmares for them. I read a story about how FEMA housing was inspected. Or, more precisely, how they were never inspected. It was really something to listen to people who had been here, not just news reports of what happened.

Most of the houses around Waveland are up
on pilings, too--and they are all new

We got to be old hands at finding our way through Waveland, but on Saturday evening we ventured up the coast toward Bay St. Louis to find a nice seafood restaurant. What we found instead were large crowds gathered for an annual Christmas parade. Bad timing on our part; there was not going to be anywhere to park, and the parade route passed right by most of the beachfront restaurants. So, back to Waveland, where we had a nice dinner at the Knock Knock Tavern, along with a few of Bay St. Louis’s police officers, who we figure were fortifying themselves with shrimp and crabmeat before going back to deal with the aftermath of the parade.

After dinner, we avoided the traffic and headed back to the campground, admiring all the Christmas lights that people must have put up in the past couple of days. The night before we’d heard a song titled “Don’t Put No Mistletoe in My Thanksgiving Turkey Gumbo” on WWOZ radio out of New Orleans, about rushing the Christmas season. Well, around here they waited till after Thanksgiving, but then they brought on the season full force. Ho, ho, ho.


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