I've been across Alabama, on the diagonal. Not as bad as end to end the long way, but also not as painless as driving east to west. Left from Georgia's West Coast early Tuesday afternoon, to drive to the narrow little bit of land that is the Mississippi coast. Probably not any greater, area-wise, than the spit of land around Mobile bay, that is the Alabama coast, squeezed between Florida panhandle and MS.
I have been told any number of times that it is a five-hour drive, but as you know, stopping for drinks entails stopping to deposit the result of consuming forty-eight ounce Big Gulps, causing even a short jaunt to drag on for interminable hours. What is it about driving/traveling, the boredom of back-seat riding that makes for a major case of the munchies? Which of course, requires liquid refreshment, which requires another pit stop. So leaving shortly after noon, put us there just in time to eat - without factoring in crossing into a different time zone. We did not notify our stomachs or appetites of time change, so were ready for food despite doing nothing but sitting for five hours.... Yet all the cell phones somehow mysteriously, freakishly knew that we had crossed over, and changed to account for 'traveling through time and space'....
Things look pretty much the same as they did a year ago in Biloxi. Some places have bounced back remarkably from Hurricane Katrina's wrath, and some never will. It is always somehow sort of surprising, making you look again, blink, consider to see the blocks and blocks of cleared land, old hundred-year-old oak trees, still standing, grass neatly mowed. An occasional paved driveway, a random set of steps leading to: nothing. The neatly mounted mailbox, with no home for an actual address for the USPS to make a delivery. The few homeowners who have returned to the neighborhood mostly have long rectangular boxes mounted on tall pilings, made of concrete blocks/poured concrete, or utility poles, about twenty feet above the earth where their families once lived.
A few families must have had the resources, or just maybe the gumption, determination to Not be Run Off. So devoted themselves to renovating, gutting structures, rebuilding, certain they were willing to invest what was required to return to a former life-style in the same house and neighborhood where they had been. But mostly the area between the beach and the back bay is cleared, lot after lot, block after block, acre after acre of open space, with the big sturdy moss-draped oaks still standing, patiently waiting for the next storm.
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