Smoking Section

The place I grew up in...

I keep hearing “it’s never going to be the same. It isn’t the place where you grew up. It has changed forever.” And I believe the contrary. The coast while I was growing up was small. The roads were more than enough for the people to get around on. There were more vacant lots than houses and the beach was unobstructed by large purple monstrosities. I played in the vacant lots and I could get from Long Beach to Biloxi in fifteen minutes. Then the casinos came and suddenly it took thirty to forty-five minutes to get to Biloxi from Long Beach, the infrastructure wasn’t enough to hold the population growth and the vacant lots I used to play in were being cleared and cemented over for fast, affordable housing. My small town grew close to thirty thousand and by the time I graduated high school, my class was over three hundred students strong. That’s when things changed and it ceased to be the place I grew up in. Businesses boomed, more moved in and more and more people relocated to the Gulf Coast. Some people were happy about the sudden economic boom. Others shook their heads and asked what was to happen when a hurricane comes. The “Big One” they called it. The people who remember the last “Big One” began to grow few and far between. About seventy percent of the population had probably never seen a hurricane, let alone lived through one. Camille was the name. Camille was the mark, a Category five that hit in 1969 and destroyed the towns of Long Beach and Pass Christian and heavily damaged Gulfport. There was a ship that had washed up north of Highway 90 in Gulfport that, instead of being towed back out to the gulf, was turned into a souvenir shop. For the last thirty-five years people watched the gulf cautiously waiting for the next “One”. It was bound to happen. I admit I was one of the people that shook my head every time I passed the casinos on the beach and thought, “wonder where they will end up when it happens.”
I found out. Katrina, the one to knock Camille out of the running, showed us just what would happen with all those casinos. Most of them ended up in the middle of the highway. Some sank, some crashed into hotels and homes. Bridges were washed away or moved several feet. Businesses were washed away, people are deciding to move or just to not come back. Going down the beach now, it looks like it did when I was twelve. The fast and affordable houses have given way to vacant lots and so many people have been displaced the roads are nearly empty most of the time.
This is the place I grew up in. No casinos, empty beaches, smooth roads and vacant lots.