An untamed island offers nature, peace
AS I stood on the splintered boat dock with John Anderson looking south across Mississippi Sound to Horn Island, his lion’s mane of hair blew straight back, as if we were already bumping across the water, underway for the island. But the Gulf of Mexico was especially choppy, and the boat I hired was heeding small-craft warnings. Horn lay 13 kilometres offshore, a hyphen on the horizon’s hazy line. Still, it felt within our grasp. “The fact that I can’t always go makes me value the island even more,” he said.
John became an expert on the island by way of his father, artist Walter Anderson, who made more trips to Horn than probably anyone else. He called spring “battle of the equinox”, when Boreas, Greek god of the north wind, and Notus, of the south, fought for supremacy and kept the sea in constant turmoil. I’d seen the battle many times over the years while I was researching a book about the Gulf.
I’ve been fascinated with Horn since I first visited the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, years ago. From the end of World War II until his death in 1965, Anderson completed thousands of drawings and paintings on Horn. Rowing and sailing out in a leaky skiff, he spent weeks at a time among Horn’s many living things, turning his boat over for shelter when need be, surrendering to the island’s way. He became, as he said, “fortune’s favourite child”.
I was eager to see the island, where he so often sought creative and spiritual wholeness, a place without scenic canyon, waterfall or mountain, yet one that moved him, in his word, to “realise” his relationship to nature.
Horn has its own splendors. Sixteen kilometres long and three-quarters of a mile wide, it rises to a 6-metre peak in a spine of white dunes Anderson venerated as the “back of Moby Dick”. In late March, migrating birds drop in by the thousands for rest and replenishment. Autumn brightens with blooming goldenrod, sea pinks and arrowhead, inviting bees and butterflies, including migrating monarchs. In all seasons, the sun rises from the Gulf and sets into the same, sometimes quietly from beneath “vermilion streamers of cloud”, other times with “wild explosions of colour”, but always, as Anderson said, “arranged with taste”. During this “magic hour”, a time for feeding, gannets, gulls, pelicans and terns plunge-dive into the fishy sea, as plovers and sandpipers glean tidal flats. Ghost crabs stay hidden in their sand burrows.
Wilderness seemed out of reach to John and me until, after weeks of waiting, we caught the sparring wind gods between rounds and set out for Horn. A trip that took Anderson several hours to sail and row took us just one. R elying on the noisy haste of a motorboat, John says, is not the same as approaching Horn under sail, when you cross meditatively into a “natural reality.”
Still, the machine completed our passage, and the island became our focal point, our new world. We could look back to the old one, visible as a faint realm of architecture, but our perspective had fully shifted. Time was no longer on our wrists or smartphones; it was in migrating light and shadows and habits of wildlife. A great blue heron’s forked footprints encounter those of a crab, but only the heron’s continue. Lines made through the sand from the trailing alligator tails mark a thoroughfare between a pond and the beach, giving warning to pitch your tent elsewhere.
Real-time events arrive on the wind, itself an agent in the natural reality. A constant, it buffets not so much as it wraps you, making you a part of the island by heightening your senses. You touch, taste, smell and listen to the island – the massaging sand under your feet, the sweetness of artesian ponds, and the shushing needles and resinous scent of pines. Nothing is glaring or loud, yet everything is amplified. “The butterfly here stamps its feet,” wrote Anderson. Even a clutch of common nighthawk eggs, camouflaged in the sand, catches your eye. Will they survive the resident raccoons? The island does that to you, starts you thinking about connections.
Horn makes you aware that “forces larger than yourself shape your existence”, John said. I found myself periodically stopping to take them in as we followed trails maintained by the National Park Service, winding from the Sound to the Gulf through scrub and beside wetland, passing into a white valley of dunes. We are “walking through Daddy’s footsteps”, John said, “and looking through his eyes”.