An Unpolished Pearl in the Gulf of Mexico
Fortunately, there is no bridge to get out there, no water, no roads and no accommodations. You might see a deer. Or not.
Bear with me a minute.
We live on a ball-shaped jewel. This ball flies at 67,000 miles an hour around a star in the empty blackness of space which doesn’t seem to be intuitively evident. Common sense indicates that the ball is flat and that the star is continually rising and falling in a sky which is inexplicably the color blue before disappearing every night.
The ball is blue because of the molecules which make up its thin atmosphere of various gasses. These gas molecules scatter the light of the star so that the blue end of the spectrum is the first to ignite just after the star’s beams pass through the invisible ultra-violet part of the spectrum. This makes the sky blue.
You probably already knew that but I bring it up in case.
Horn Island is a strip of sand and pine trees just off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. It is one of the intuitively evident reasons that Earth truly is a jewel.
Years ago, before personal computers, before cell phones, before the widespread invasion of tacos, margaritas and tattoos, before even the moon landing occurred, a bunch of us would go out to Horn Island for four days of camping and fishing and not caring about anything else. It was like time apart from Time, living in a jewel made of white sand, clear water, salt air and moonlight in the pines.
So you’d get up in the blackness at 3:00 in the morning, throw duffle bags and fishing gear into the trunk of Baringer’s car along with boxes of groceries, a nautical chart of the Gulf Islands, a set of binoculars and a styrofoam “lo-boy” loaded with ice and a bunch of steaks. Then head south.
Before daybreak all this stuff would be loaded onto the boat at the marina, then you’d head downriver to the Gulf of Mexico. Right out there ahead of you were the choppy waters of Mississippi Sound. From there it was eleven bumpy miles in sea spray across to Horn Island. By then the sky would be pink. The trip was on.
Horn Island was first mapped by an associate of Christopher Columbus in 1500. It was named some 200 years later, in 1699, by the French founder of New Orleans, Sieur Bienville. One of the five explorers in his command lost his gun powder horn in the sandy brambles out there and never found it. The island stretches about 10 narrow miles from east to west and is less than a mile across at its widest, all such configurations being subject to the whims of hurricanes, one of which no doubt ran off with that powder horn.
Bob Baringer, my good friend of many years, introduced me to Horn Island long years ago. We’d meet every Wednesday night and plan those trips over glasses of cheap brandy, complete with navigational charts and exhaustive lists of items we couldn’t do without such as coffee and Coleman lanterns and stoves and bags of ice and hatchets and beer and matches and toilet paper. Such weekly entertainments were held for about three months prior to activating the plans.
He named these island adventures “the rites of spring” since we planned each one to happen during May. My job was determining when the moon was going to be full for that month so we could stumble around outside the tents without a flashlight.
Even though many years have passed, those days still sparkle in my mind like gemstones in the morning sun.
Walter Anderson was an artist on that same Gulf Coast with the exceptional talent to see the jewel-like structure of nature itself. He deeply loved Horn Island and studied it for many years, revealing its beauty with pencil and brush. He was a solitary man whose way of perceiving was almost like that of a diamond cutter. He rowed eleven miles out by himself in a small oarboat to the Island where he would camp and sleep under his boat for days at a time. There he drew and painted what he saw as the uniqueness of the island and its plants and wildlife.
Walter Anderson spent most of his life exploring the wonders of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, absorbed in the haunting ambiance of the water, marshes, and woods. His "oneness with nature" and his expression of that unity have made Anderson a legendary figure on the Gulf Coast
Today, the Walter Anderson Museum is located in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Here is a link:
https://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/
Anderson was born in New Orleans in 1903 and died in 1965 at Ocean Springs.
As for the aforementioned Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, he not only was the governor of the French colony of Louisiana and founder of New Orleans but gave his name, unbeknownst to himself, to one of its most famous culinary delights; Oysters Bienville.
This amazingly tasty dish is credited to Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans but it probably originated in the one named Antoine’s. I won’t pick sides there but I will bang the drum for those oysters.
Being an aristocrat, old Bienville probably wouldn’t have cared much for camping and fishing on Horn Island nor hanging out with a crew of grungy, dirty fishermen, cooking beans and weenies on a camp stove and passing the bottle around a campfire and slapping mosquitos all night. More’s the pity, I say.
But I’ll bet you he’d’a dug in with gusto to a plate of smothered and baked oysters named after his esteemed self. Bet you will, too.
Oysters Bienville
You Can Do This:
Open a dozen good-sized oysters and leave them in the half-shell. Keep cold. (Don’t use a screwdriver! You can buy an oyster knife at a good hardware store or maybe at a serious seafood market.)
Chop very finely: 1/2 cup onion, 4 green onions, 2 cloves garlic, 2 cups raw shrimp, 2 tablespoons parsley and 1/2 cup mushrooms. (Very finely!)
Melt 6 tablespoons unsalted butter in a large skillet on medium and add the chopped ingredients. Add 6 tablespoons flour and stir well to incorporate.
Add 1/4 cup white wine and 1/2 cup heavy cream and cook for 2 minutes.
Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 teaspoon Tabasco and cayenne to taste.
Stir in 6 beaten egg yolks (quickly to avoid curdling). You can save the egg whites for scrambled eggs if you want to.
Top each oyster with about 2 tablespoons of this sauce.
Bake these for about 10 minutes on a bed of rock salt then turn on the broiler to brown the tops for a minute or so. They’re done when the edges of the oysters start to curl.
To me living on this jewel we call Earth is a treasure beyond measure and little facets of it such as Horn Island and Oysters Bienville simply add to its value and appeal. A lot.
“Bien Vivre”!
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