PIRATE AVE

There’s a place about 120 miles from here, maybe more, where a gentle curve in the highway pushes the sand out towards the tip of a pine tree covered island, 9 miles due south. There’s a northbound street here that reaches a large oval “neighborhood” of sorts, with a street exiting the northbound side. If viewed from the air it looks like a double Q, or maybe just a Q with a tail on each side. This is Pitcher Point. 

It was named after the local legend or the pirate, John Pitcher. A man so hated by his crew that they burned him alive in a tree house with his Indian female companion. It’s said he buried great treasure in this area and that while being burned alive, the Indian woman placed a curse on the area. Seems like a legit backstory to base a family neighborhood on.  

In 1978 when we moved to Mississippi my family moved into a split level house at 103 Pirate Ave. and this was my stopping point between 21450 Meridian, in Grosse Isle, Michigan and the 15 places I have lived in Baton Rouge and one in Austin, TX. It will always be the place I think of as “where I grew up.”  

My folks moved away from it in 1995 and it was subsequently wiped from the face of the planet in 2005 when Katrina hit. Like the house in Michigan, I’d make trips by it anytime I was near. I’d want to go knock on the door and see if they’d let me walk around, an exercise sure to be terrible, but one I wanted nonetheless. 

When Katrina hit the Coast and 60,000 homes and tens of thousands of other structures were literally wiped away. The hand and forearm of God setting down in Biloxi and wiping westward for 30 miles, annihilating everything in its path. The opportunity of that never to likely happen home tour went with it, as did the history of my youth. 

Melodramatic?  Maybe. But this is how it feels. For the past 15 years I make it a point to “take the long way home.”  To drive from wherever I am on the Coast, down Highway 90. I try and place structures long since replaced or not and I try to connect. Connect with my youth I guess. Connect to the memory of a simple time. Of Boston, KISS, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, STYX, ELO, to the bus stop, the pet raccoons my neighbor would feed and pay me to feed when he went out of town. Of bonfires, Hobie Cats, and heat and pine tress and well, anything I can remember. One tree from our yard remains there, an oak of some sort, I think. The tree I had 3 planks nailed in and a tire hung from. I park next to it when I go there to run. 

I think about that house on Pirate Ave. the pool in the backyard that I spent hours swimming in and I wish I could knock on the door, the new owners surprised or perplexed by the guy at the front door saying, “Hey, good morning, I used to live here. I know this sounds weird, but do you think I could take a quick look around.” 

I can, as I sit here this morning, almost feel the flood of forgotten memories pour forth, spurned on by the wallpaper, the rooms and maybe a lingering smell. I can feel it with every part of me and it feels empty and sad, knowing that it will never happen. That even if the house were still there. It never would. 

#hugsandhi5s