On Horn Island
A journey to the island where Walter Anderson sought refuge and found inspiration.
Our first glimpse of Horn Island is the pine trees rising from the horizon out of the brown/green waters of the Mississippi Sound. The pines are tall and their shapes unique: their lower and middle branches pruned by the gulf winds so that their tops are flat, almost resembling bonsai trees. With the motorboat’s speed, it is only a few more moments before the island’s sand dunes come into view; and we are struck by their height, which makes them easily visible even three miles away.
So begins our overnight sojourn to Horn Island, to see firsthand the retreat and workplace of artist Walter Anderson’s and, ostensibly, to find for ourselves what has changed with this barrier island since Mississippi’s “most famous unknown artist” made it his home for weeks at a time during his most productive period from the late 1940s into the early 1960s.
While changes in currents and storms have altered the topography and shape of the island, it has mostly remained, geographically, the same undeveloped place that it was during Anderson’s time. Credit for this can primarily be given to its protection as part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore in 1971.
It was this wild, unpopulated landscape within which Walter Anderson sought refuge, having spent a good portion of the previous three years in mental hospitals coping with numerous breakdowns arising from mental illness. He traded psychology and medicine for the secluded sanctuary of Horn Island, where he would live primitively, sleeping under his boat, eating canned goods and boiled rice, and bathing in lagoons all while recording in drawings and water colors the “symphony of animals,” as he called it, that shared his island home.
Top: A view of Horn Island, 2013, by Dave Carner. Bottom: "Pines and Dunes" by Walter Anderson; courtesy of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
Free of distraction, Anderson could devote all of his energy to creating innumerable images utilizing his distinctive style composed of specific simplified forms (spiral, circle, half-circle, wavy-line, zigzag and straight line). His chosen media were pencil, ink, and watercolor, all rendered on letter-sized typing paper lent itself well to the conditions under which he labored, being quite portable. The logs of his island stays give evidence of the singularity of his mission: they are filled with details of explorations of the island until it provided him a scene to “realize,” a term he regularly used to describe the process by which he assimilated his subject onto the page.
We arrive at the island in the mid-afternoon of a perfect early-August summer day. The sun is high and the clouds are few, but the constant breeze makes for a comfortable time on the water. We’ve plotted our initial course to the island’s very eastern tip, a sand bar formed by the tide’s movement around the island. The half-mile-long stretch of pristine white sand is crowded with boaters out for the day, many of whom have erected day tents and set up grills on the beach, while others have just anchored to swim in the shallows. Though Anderson’s logs recount numerous run-ins with other visitors to the island, I doubt he encountered this many people on a regular basis, even on the weekends.
Wanting to sample a variety of the island’s terrains we head west, following the shoreline on the Sound side. We’ve passed the midway point of the island, now home to a ranger station manned full-time since the island was placed under the control of the park service. From what we gather, the only real cardinal rule the rangers enforce on the island is to ensure that visitors do not disturb the areas designated as osprey nesting and hunting grounds.
Our first on-shore excursion is to visit Big Lagoon, located just to the west of the ranger station. The tide is low, so we beach the boat and wade through the ankle-deep water of the inlet into the lagoon itself. Bordered by bulrushes and tall grass on all sides, the lagoons are secluded little worlds unto themselves. As schools of small fish flit around them, blue crab bunker down in the shallows, waiting for the receding tide to bring a meal floating by. Out in the deeper waters of the pond, larger fish jump; and we occasionally catch a glimpse of a redfish’s dorsal fin making its lazy swirl in the eddies. Surrounding all of this are a myriad of birds: red-winged blackbirds cavort in the grass and mangrove while overhead, pelicans make their stately cruise on the breeze.
The beach and open water provided Anderson with numerous striking images to record, but the lagoons were where he came to do his most detailed work. The ponds teem with life, and Anderson’s logs describe many occasions where he would wade up to his neck with only his head and sketchbook above water to get the desired perspective.
Leaving Big Lagoon we take a late afternoon meander back towards the east side of the island. Arriving back at our first pick of camping spots, boats are anchored within seventy-five yards on either side of us; but as we line up our approach, they both clear out and suddenly, we have the island to ourselves as far as the eye can see. This, I think, is what Walter Anderson’s Horn Island is supposed to feel like.
"Frigate Birds" by Walter Anderson; courtesy of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
We’ve left ourselves less than two hours to make camp before sunset; but the island doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to give up the day and we fall into its rhythm, gathering driftwood for the fire and exploring the dunes behind as the sunlight slowly fades. The sunset is admittedly lackluster, hidden mostly behind hazy clouds; but just after the sun has dipped below the horizon, and with the same suddenness that the day-trippers left us to ourselves, the sky and water both suddenly alight with the last pink-purple dying embers of the day, subtle and fading. As dinner preparations commence, we make our introduction with what are to be our boon companions for the evening: two raccoons who, over the course of the night, will make numerous ransacking forays into our camp for food. They are likely of the same tribe as Walter Anderson’s beloved Inky, a young raccoon rescue of his that he attempted to nurse to health with sardines, only to find his efforts wanting.
We awake with the first hint of morning light, just before the sun rises. The wind has shifted and the previous evening’s breeze from the southwest now blows from the northwest, putting a bit more chop on the Sound’s water, which is just now starting to appear with dawn. Our last exploration for this trip is to walk to the Gulf side of the island. Our campsite, chosen by happenstance, has put us at one of the narrowest parts of the island. We can see the Gulf of Mexico standing atop the dune behind the campsite, and it’s only a third of a mile walk to the other side to reach it.
Our walk to the Gulf is short but provides a quick tour of the varied terrains that can be found on Horn Island. We leave our campsite, weaving between dunes, which bring us to a low, small plain dotted with mangrove. To our right is the same inland pond that waters the old oak under which we camped and our raccoon friends used as a staging point for their raids. As we pass the lagoon, we discover what would usually be a large tidal pool from the overflow of the Gulf when the tide is higher; but with the tide low, it is a long, sandy bottom strewn with innumerable seashells.
We cross between more dunes and the path opens up onto the beach on the Gulf side of the island; the view is stunning. The beach is well over one hundred yards wide between the water and the dunes. You can see for miles in both directions, and it easily confirms that we have had at least half of this fifteen-mile-long island to ourselves since we saw the last day-trippers yesterday afternoon. This beach is not something you see on the commerce-sculpted Gulf of Mexico beaches on the mainland, save for the few state parks that have been carved out of the otherwise condo-infested beachfront. Here the sea and the land have been allowed to call their own shots, to give and take from one another as they see fit. Horn Island has given us many gifts of beauty observed, but this is the image that I will never forget.
Our boat pointing towards the mainland, we take our last looks back at Horn Island, receding into the waters of the Sound. In thirty minutes we’ll be back in civilization, and it’s hard to believe that the switch can be flipped that quickly, that we can go from this simple, subtle place of beauty back to the land of asphalt, concrete and cars. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Anderson chose to row/sail to and from the island. His trip out was his penance, how he earned his place as a human in a place humans were not considered natural. His slow journey back to the mainland left him time to acclimate to modernity, where he largely felt, I believe, out of place.
Having spent a night on Horn Island, I come away thinking that the place itself has changed very little since Walter Anderson’s time there; but the world around it certainly has, and that makes the existence of places like it even that much more important. Sixty-five years ago Walter Anderson recognized a world more intent on controlling nature than observing and communing with it. Rather than outright rejecting that notion, he sought to correct it: going to nature, “realizing” it with his art, and bringing it back to eventually share with the public so that we might pause to consider the elemental world around us.
Details. Details. Details. Gulf Islands National Seashore nps.gov/guis/index.htm Walter Anderson Museum of Art 510 Washington Avenue Ocean Springs, Miss. (228) 872-3164 • walterandersonmuseum.org