Photo by Dale Irvin

April 2011. Marlin's marlin, and a tale of two trees.

Two trees stand at the center of Biloxi’s Town Green. One has marked this spot for hundreds of years, and somehow survived the full frontal assault that Katrina brought to bear upon it.

The other did not—but has now been reincarnated.

“That is one of two dozen trees here in Biloxi that were killed by the salt water storm surge,” explains Vincent Creel, Public Affairs Manager for the City of Biloxi. But here’s the cool part.

“What we did was instead of chopping the trees down, we decided to have a wood carver come in and carve the trees.” And then out of the blue says Creel  “…a guy calls us from Ft. Walton Beach, Florida.”

“We had gone through Hurricane Ivan, and a lot of people came in from the outside to help. It’s so touching,” explains that guy from Ft. Walton, sculptor Marlin Miller.

Creel goes on to recall Miller saying in that first phone call, “I’ve always kinda wanted to repay the favor. I was wondering if I could come and sculpt one of the trees. I want to do it for free as a way of paying back the people of Biloxi.”

“I thought I’d go there and carve a couple of trees,” recalls Miller. But instead he did fifty carvings. “It was so fulfilling for me to go back there. And when I saw how much it touched the people I just kept going back.”

Miller recalls how time after time people would pull over in their cars while they were working to thank him, then burst into tears.

“Everything was just so depressing in the year after the storm,” said Creel of how much Miller’s efforts meant to the community. “To think that he did that out of the kindness of his heart. He didn’t charge us a nickel.”

This sculpture on the Town Green features one of the Gulf’s noted gamefish leaping skyward, and has now come to be known as “Marlin’s Marlin.”

When we spoke to Miller just before going to press, he was in Fairhope, Alabama, up since dawn putting the finishing touches on what he says will be his last Katrina sculpture. It will serve as that community’s Katrina Memorial.

If you’d like to know more, there’s now a book out.

Details at marlinmillergallery.com. 

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