Everywhere you look is evidence that this is Walter’s town - the annual “Peter Anderson Festival” each November, named for his potter/sculptor brother, and Mardi Gras and St. What life cycles are sustained in their canopies, what stories memorialized in their twisted trunks?Īnderson himself likely pondered these same mysteries, and his paintings reveal the passion he had for natural life and the obsession he felt about portraying it. But having seen so much natural destruction on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a result of hurricanes in my lifetime alone, it now seems to me that we call them live oaks because they are still alive, long after they shouldn’t be. Unlike most hardwoods, they do not lose their leaves in the winter. I used to believe the easy explanation that “live oaks” are so named because they are evergreen. Live oaks line the main downtown north/south thoroughfare of Washington Avenue, ruling sentries in a town that doesn’t take kindly to rules. These live oaks have seen their share of hurricanes Photo provided by Wonderlust We’ve been back more than once to watch Tom hypnotize chickens, in character. Alongside it is a large-format photograph of Ocean Springs inner harbor, canvas wrapped, bearing the name Bob Walters. Hustling back to my table, I whispered to my wife that they were all telling the truth.Ī print of a Ching original, an osprey nesting on a navigation buoy, now hangs in my office. I went to the men’s room to collect my thoughts, and on the wall hung a beautifully finished print of a painting of a shorebird. So, he reached behind me onto the window sill, where resided a framed photograph of a man who appeared to be himself, dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh, with what could only have been a dead or comatose chicken on the table in front of him. Seated at the bar was Tom, the chicken hypnotist. They had sailed some several thousand miles together and decided to make Ocean Springs home, their story went. Then, she called over an enormous man whom she introduced as her husband Bob Walters, a retired fighter pilot, retired commercial airline pilot and current nature photographer. She introduced herself as “Ching,” an artist she said, which I wasn’t buying, except, of course, to the extent that everyone you meet in a bar in a coastal town is an artist or a musician. We sat down at a table and within minutes a small lady with long grey hair said, “You’re not from here, are you?” The first time we visited Kwitzky’s Dugout, we went because I had never seen a bar with a “No Smoking” sign out front, and I could tell the owner was a big baseball fan, besides (ergo, the name). And in Ocean Springs, everyplace is Cheers. So a little asking around is likely to result in landing at a spot on almost any night where someone is holding forth. But Ocean Springs weekends never start later than Thursdays, and often on Wednesdays. Lots of towns boast live music a few nights a week. Ready for adventure Photo provided by Wonderlust And the small inner harbor is idyllic, featuring fishing, leisure and shrimp boats that look for all the world as though they were miniatures placed there by hand, just for purposes of arranging the perfect post card setting. Fact is, there appears to be no other town bearing the name “Ocean Springs” in the entire country.įront Beach is small, and protected, so there’s no surf, and a visit to the waterfront feels more like strolling through a park than a day at the beach. Ocean Springs or its environs has been named one of the state’s most redneck cities and one of the snobbiest by the same publication in back to back years. Not many places in the world have mutually exclusive personalities.īut not many places in the world are Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Walter’s boat, which hangs in the Walter Anderson Museum Photo provided by Wonderlust Walter’s records include musings of the many times he rowed the fifteen miles from his family’s art compound at Shearwater Pottery across the Mississippi Sound out to Horn Island, now a part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. If Ernest Hemingway had not written about the outdoor wonders of the world – human, fish, fauna – from a Key West cottage, he might have been in Ocean Springs.Īnd if Walter Anderson hadn’t been a painter, watercoloring the world as he saw it from Ocean Springs, he might have written about it instead.Īnd indeed he did write, though he thought only for himself, keeping logs of his adventures and fantasies. “Nature does not like to be anticipated… but loves to surprise in fact seems to justify itself to man in that way, restoring his youth to him each time - the true fountain of youth.”
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