RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
Hurricane Katrina affected so many cities, so many lives--New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi--we talk about them now every day. There's not so much mention of the storm's effect on smaller coastal towns, rich with their own history and culture. One such town is about 20 minutes west of Gulfport, just off Interstate 10. It's called Pass Christian.
Ms. MARLO KIRKPATRICK (Author, "Mississippi: Off the Beaten Path"): And it is Christian (pronounced Chris-tee-an) and not Christian (pronounced Chris-chen) is how we pronounce that down here.
MONTAGNE: Marlo Kirkpatrick is not among the 6,500 or so people who call Pass Christian home. She's an author who lives outside Jackson, Mississippi. She wrote about Pass Christian for her book, "Mississippi: Off the Beaten Track." We called her recently to tell us about this small coastal city.
Ms. KIRKPATRICK: Beautiful old mansions, beautiful Southern architecture. They would have big open balconies and wide porches, high ceilings. These houses were surrounded by these enormous, ancient, ancient live oak trees and generations-old camellias and azaleas. The water--it's the Mississippi Sound and, you know, that goes out into the Gulf of Mexico, and then you would have the little strip of white sand beach and then these old rustic kind of fishing piers that would stretch out into the water and you could just imagine how beautiful a sunset would be from one of these locations.
MONTAGNE: Tourists mostly don't make it to Pass Christian. It's a community composed mainly of retired people, and they know about hurricanes. In August of 1969, the eye of Hurricane Camille passed directly over Pass Christian. Sixty-five people died and much of the town simply washed away. As Marlo Kirkpatrick researched Camille's impact for her book, she saw one image over and over again.
Ms. KIRKPATRICK: Photographs of this terrible wreckage and this terrible chaos, which is kind of the same thing we're seeing today, and you would see a handwritten sign sticking up from a debris field that would say, `We are coming back' or `We will rise again.'
MONTAGNE: And now Katrina. Once again, the eye of the hurricane hovered over Pass Christian, only this time, the storm lasted nine hours longer. In the eastern part of the city, the water rose up more than 20 feet. Homes that withstood Camille were smashed, the giant oaks ripped from the dirt and slammed to the ground, the antebellum mansions, windows shattered, but some still standing like dark and giant dollhouses. This weekend, the death toll stood around 10. It is mounting, as rescuers search through the rubble. But Marlo Kirkpatrick is certain that the residents of Pass Christian still possessed the resilience that brought the town back after Camille.
Ms. KIRKPATRICK: That same spirit is there now, and I've seen that coming out of people. It's going to take a long time to rebuild, but I'm confident that the coast is going to be better than it ever was before.
MONTAGNE: Marlo Kirkpatrick, author of "Mississippi: Off the Beaten Path," on the devastated coastal city of Pass Christian.
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