A Lady Called Camille

NASA satellite image of Camille, August 15, 1969

Fifty years ago this weekend, Hurricane Camille struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast with devastating Category 5 force, an unprecedented calamity.  Your Head Trucker remembers it well - I was staying with relations in Northwest Florida at the time, but mercifully we had no serious damage from the storm, only drenching rain and a lot of wind - and a broken garden trellis that had been covered with lovely purple-blue morning glories.

I remember sitting in a swing on the wide screened porch as the wet winds whipped around the house, struggling to read one of the books on my summer reading list for school - either My Antonia or Giants in the Earth - two of the most utterly boring and completely irrelevant books ever written, especially for a Southern boy living through a disastrous hurricane.  Maybe Midwestern people could relate to them, but I certainly could not, and the memory even now evokes a shiver of disgust.

The people in Biloxi (pronounced Bill-lux-ee) and Gulfport, lying directly on the coast, took a fearsome blow.  There had been plenty of advance warnings on radio and TV, but this was before the era of mass evacuations, so many folks who had lived through other hurricanes did not take the approaching storm seriously until it was too late.

(Nowadays, it seems to me we have gone too far the other way, and set millions of people on the roads needlessly at the first remote possibility of trouble, but what do I know?)

This video produced by the federal government shows the destruction the storm wreaked on that lovely part of the coast, where the highway runs right along the beach for many miles - a beautiful, glorious drive in fair weather.



I love to hear the mellifluous, authentic Southern accents in this film, reminiscent of those of my elders when I was growing up - and so unlike the fake ones you hear all the time in movies and on TV.  Alas, these are already a bit antique, I'm afraid, due to the proliferation of mass media, which tends to make everyone sound alike.  Even the British are losing their distinctive accents nowadays, sounding more and more Yankee American all the time.  Pity.

How anyone had the courage or strength to rebuild after so great a smash-up is more than I can understand. But that is the record of struggling humanity, is it not? All down through the centuries, in all climes and countries, after every fearsome collapse, those who are left and are not utterly broken somehow find a way to begin again and build anew. And despite all the terrors of death, destruction, and dark despair -- by and by the sun rises again, life goes on, and the ant heap of civilization lifts itself from the mud and muck once more, stick by stick and brick by brick.

A hardy race, these small and foolish humans.  If only they knew how to love as well as they know how to endure.