90 Miles Down 90

The Mad Lifestyle Journalist of the Marigny meanders over to Mississippi.

by

One of the best aspects of writing occasional travel pieces is that sometimes you have to go on vacation. After a January spent in a DayQuil haze and punctuated by The Game That Will Not Be Mentioned, I needed a weekend away. Fortunately, I was slated for a mini-adventure on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, an area I had visited but never truly explored.

I left the city on Highway 90, both to start my adventure in alternate-route earnest and to avoid the gleeful suicidality all drivers on I-10 east out of New Orleans seem to share. Roadside glitter included gloriously decaying mid-century motels and miles of whimsically named beach houses and fishing camps. You never reach an area that feels truly rural, but as the density of the city gave way to more spacious settlement I felt the familiar feeling, both relaxing and thrilling: I’m getting out of town.

[Read this: Riding the Coast Road—Between New Orleans and Mobile, travelers can find anything from the outrageous to the sublime.]

My first stop was the Infinity Science Center, the public face of the John C. Stennis Space Center and a hands-on museum of earth and space science. The trick to a good science museum is to simplify weighty concepts without quite dumbing them down, a task at which the center succeeds admirably. Exhibits on carnivorous plants, water dynamics, and the electromagnetic spectrum will intrigue kids up to the age of at least 34, and the massive carcass of a space-shuttle engine reminds visitors: hey yeah, our species went to space. (Take that, raccoons.) Bus tours of the station’s outlying science offerings and other interactive lagniappe are available, but I was on a schedule and anxious to shake a leg.

On to Gulfport. A side effect of perennially worrying about being late is constantly being early, so as I killed time before my lunch reservation I checked out Fishbone Alley, a narrow passage downtown given over to public art. Public art is often bland, since “affordable and inoffensive” are good attributes for a new sofa but bad signs for expressions of the human heart, but Fishbone Alley knocked my socks off. Colorful and playful, the art merited another couple of passes, during which I noted that the place even attracted a better class of vandal; the after-market additions were amusingly nihilist or waggishly crass as opposed to merely obscene. Bars and restaurants lucky enough to abut the alley have set up attractive back patios so patrons can please multiple senses at once.

Lunch at 27th Avenue Bistro, a new downtown spot by Chef David Dickensauge, formerly of Baton Rouge’s Bin 77, was delightfully overwhelming, as I juggled two fascinating conversations and a marvelous meal. Belgium-born Anna Roy, public/media relations manager for the Mississippi Gulf Coast CVB (who helped to organize my trip), spoke of her love for the South and its big characters with the gossipy verve of someone whose life had taken an unexpectedly fun turn. “You know, some guy a few years ago pulled in Al Capone’s wallet on a fishing line. And there’s a lady in town who dated Elvis when she was young.” Between kitchen tasks, chef David came by to talk the pros and cons of the Mississippi Gulf Coast food scene (pro: fresh and excellent farm produce and seafood; con: too few chef-driven restaurants willing to meet diners partway in expanding their palates). Between it all I managed to clean my plate of the vanilla-juniper pork chop with braised cabbage and wild mushrooms, an earthily jubilant dish, and also put away a spicy-sweet lava cake, recommended with enthusiasm by the waiter.

Swollen like a tick but regretting nothing, I drove east. I had dawdled a bit over lunch, and I would have to budget my time a bit and visit attractions in a specific order to see them before they closed. First was Biloxi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, a striking Frank Gehry-designed collection of buildings that houses, among other holdings, the work of George E. Ohr, the “Mad Potter of Biloxi.” (“The Mad Lifestyle Journalist of the Marigny” doesn’t have the same ring, so I may have to move, change careers, or as a last resort not go mad.) A docent gave me the tip to shine the provided LED flashlights on the ceramics, and when I did the pretty-but-subdued colors bloomed into richer, fuller life. An added treat at the Ohr-O’Keefe is a reconstructed cabin holding an exhibit on Back of Town, the African American neighborhood of Biloxi, once a thriving center of black life but drained by integration and battered by Katrina.

After [Walter Anderson's] death from lung cancer in 1965, his widow opened it to find dense murals covering the wall [...] displaying the passage of a day, with morning to the left of the door, evening to its right, and a haunting sylph dominating the exposed chimney. It took the wind right out of me.

Onward. After a brief detour to try every single door of a glorious mid-century church (the roof is shaped like a seashell!), I reached the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum. Tall, straight-backed, and glass-fronted, the museum’s architecture almost steals the show from its exhibits, which include such landlubber-fascinators as a Fresnel lens from a lighthouse and multiple prize-winning boats, one displayed in full sail with the sea visible behind it. A section on the seafood industry features a ‘70s-era automatic shrimp peeler-deveiner, which looks like something heretics would have been put onto in premodern Spain, and a fascinatingly kitschy ‘50s-era filmstrip with a bit on cuisine in New Orleans, which in its desaturated color and Eisenhower-years cautions against overseasoning manages to make shrimp amandine sound more like a chore than a treat. (If you’re too heavy-handed with the parsley, the Communists will be marching down Canal Street before you can say “dark roux.”)

I was enjoying myself, but I was also still full of pork chop, so I wanted to knock out the Walter Anderson Museum of Art quickly so I could go take a nap before dinner. This was, of course, a fantastically stupid plan, because WAMA is breathtaking, probably the best single-artist museum I’ve ever seen. Rotating exhibits of photography of Anderson’s insular muse, Horn Island, and pottery from Shearwater, a clay studio run by several generations of Anderson’s family, filled central galleries and made for great ambling, but the real showstopping gut punch was Anderson’s Little Room. As the artist’s mental illness took greater hold, he designated a room of his studio a sanctuary, forbidden to anyone else. After his death from lung cancer in 1965, his widow opened it to find dense murals covering the wall, with the flowers, foxes, and other teeming life of Horn Island wrapping around the walls and displaying the passage of a day, with morning to the left of the door, evening to its right, and a haunting sylph dominating the exposed chimney. It took the wind right out of me.

In my long sea creature-eating career, I’ve almost never had any so perfectly cooked.

The museum’s receptionist had been eager to point me down the road toward Shearwater, and I was so taken with the pottery I happily let her. A short drive from the museum (it would be a nice walk if the roads had shoulders), Shearwater is tucked into a wooded area miraculously close to the coast; Katrina did ferocious damage to Shearwater, the Walter Anderson Museum, and the personal homes of several Andersons, but miraculously (or perversely, depending on your mood), the town has retained an enviable population of oaks, which give it a cozy inland feel. Clean and attractive in form and with luminously colored glazes, the Shearwater pottery is miraculously affordable. The cashier-cum-docent explained some of the less obvious pieces—an old-fashioned bean pot and a face-powder container from the days before plastic compacts—and rung up my choice, which was apparently a cereal bowl. “Can you believe some people put their keys in those?” said another customer in horror—I can believe it, because I was going to, but now I can’t make myself.

Pleased with my bowl but now really tottering, I made my way to The Roost, a boutique hotel nestled in the middle of town. Gorgeous and cozy, the room was modern without sacrificing comfort—and as an added treat, the shower offered two shower heads at contrasting angles, so I became clean in ways I had never before thought possible. The bed was so comfortable I overslept my dinner reservation, which if you know how I feel about dinner is a testament to thread count. 

Fortunately, the staff at Vestige held my table, even after I pronounced it “ves-tidge” instead of the apparently correct French “ves-teezhe.” Anyone who says man cannot live by bread alone hasn’t had the sweet potato loaf here; I usually love traveling solo, but now I wished I had someone carrying a purse with me so we could load up. I started with the charcoal grilled octopus tentacle—an admittedly startling word to see on a menu but tempting nonetheless—with earthy Asian spices and a beet kimchi. In my long sea creature-eating career, I’ve almost never had any so perfectly cooked; none of the rubberiness you can accidentally get with calamari, and the subtle flavor was elevated, not dwarfed, by the seasonings. I followed this with a hanger steak—perfectly rare, with the added mineral tinge you get from eating unconventional parts of the animal. I could honestly tell the waitress I had no room for dessert; even an after-dinner drink at The Wilbur, the Capone-themed speakeasy attached to The Roost, proved difficult, though I soldiered on to try a satsuma-based old fashioned. (And, uh, a tall strawberry-based cocktail with a spicy rim.) 

[Read this: Come to Pass Christian—A Mississippi Gulf weekend with Hotel Whiskey, Sazerac Square, and other coastal charms]

After a further eight (all right, ten) hours of temporary oblivion courtesy of The Roost, I headed to the Greenhouse on Porter to fuel up for my drive home. This cozy spot—much of it is, in fact, a greenhouse—offers one of the best breakfast concepts I’ve ever encountered: a sweet/savory option play of rotating Biscuits of the Day. A king cake themed biscuit complete with colored sugar and its tomato-broccoli-cheese companion, along with a fresh and crisp fruit salad, set me up for the drive home. 

Twenty-four hours isn’t enough time to do the coast justice—I missed artsy Bay St. Louis and and friendly Pass Christian completely this time around, and it was too blustery to do the outdoor exploration I’d hoped to fit in—but there are far worse fates than owing the Mississippi Gulf Coast another visit.  

Visit gulfcoast.org/things-to-do/attraction-pass for a $35 pass offering admission to the science center and museums Chris Turner-Neal visited, along with other coastal attractions.

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