Eerie drive, stifling sands
I wasn’t aware of Joan Didion’s short book South and West before setting off on my trip to the Deep South. But what I had in mind was an American version of Paul Theroux’s Deep South, a book so lengthy I had to take frequent breaks from it, using it as a spiritual guide for my first-ever road trip. Theroux and Didion are vastly different writers—an adventurer and a poignant essayist, the former inspiring, the latter purely reporting.
The drive from New Orleans to Orange Beach, via Biloxi and Mobile, had been a breeze. Seemingly endless stretches of highway, peppered with pro-life and religious billboards, proud Confederate flags decorating front porches, the humidity rising from the tarmac, and sturdy concrete bridges connecting sagging chunks of land.
Stopping in Bay St. Louis for lunch, Didion’s words kept ringing in my head. At the café, the people sitting at the table next to ours were embroiled in a heated discussion about why certain American states are square-shaped. And why did they decide to make Texas so large? Who actually created the map? I looked down at my sandwich, then out through the French doors of the café. Two policemen were sipping iced coffees, lazily leaning on their car, their guns peeking out from holsters under the Mississippi and American flags fluttering in the strong wind. Maybe unease is what the “Deep South” is meant to evoke in outsiders.
I had to keep driving. The bridge connecting Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian was yet another soulless structure splitting a bay in two. But once I reached Pass Christian, the white sands of the Gulf Coast started to stretch out before me, for miles and miles ahead. Miles of white sand kept me company as I drove along miles of black, sun-ruined tarmac, which, in all its straightness, violently severed the majestic summer houses to my left from access to the beach. The joys of American urban planning, I suppose, were still difficult for me to fully grasp, especially when, as children back home during scorching Italian summers, we could walk everywhere; the worst that could happen was getting pinched by crabs, not run down on a highway.
The sense of unease only grew stronger when I reached Gulfport. The sun-reflecting white beaches made the Gulfport Terminal stand—perhaps even float—dark and ominous in the distance, like a threatening crow among a flight of doves. Is going to the beach still enjoyable when you see industrial, brutalist architecture rather than approaching boats and neon-coloured inflatables? The cries of seagulls intensified as I neared Gulfport Marina, where a number of them were happily soaring over the yachts parked in the harbour. While admittedly mesmerising, the stench of exhaust made me shiver, and I realised I couldn’t stay there, watching so much life being slowly destroyed. I had to, as usual, keep driving.
My next stop was supposed to be Biloxi, but all I could see were the casinos, or signs pointing to them, or people dressed up for a night at the casino. I was so accustomed to reminiscing about my recent trip to casino-town Cripple Creek, Colorado, that I didn’t want to waste a minute trying to find out if Biloxi was also a casino town. No, I had come for the white sands and the steamed seafood, not industrial seaports and sleazy casinos. Was this the Gulf Coast everyone had raved about? Was I, once again, doing travel wrong?
All I wanted to do was keep driving, but what was the point? Was I ever going to stop and enjoy what I was looking at? On never-ending American roads, it’s probably the easiest thing to do—to escape disappointments and broken expectations. The names of the towns I drove through—Spanish Fort, Fairhope, Magnolia Springs—felt like they might harbour some dark secrets. But I had no desire to stop and look for them in these seagull-infested, sleepy towns—well-named but destined to disappoint once they woke up. My destination was Orange Beach, after all, a supposedly perfect slice of paradise along the uneven, slowly sinking shores of the Gulf Coast. The fact that these resorts would eventually be engulfed by their own foundations didn’t seem to faze the local population or the government. From what I could gather, it’s best to enjoy things while they last, until they’re gone. Is this the American way of living?
A few miles from my hotel, I had to pay five dollars to enter Gulf Shores. Five whole dollars to enter a resort town, probably built on land that had been stolen more than once. Privatisation at its worst. Everything in the US seems to revolve around money—never mind that children wanting to visit the beach are breathing in exhaust fumes instead of fresh sea air, or that the land these massive resorts and casinos are built on is slowly sinking. I paid for the entrance, and for once, I didn’t want to keep driving.
