Gulf Islands National Seashore, Mississippi

The RV life for families, senior citizen travelers and retired folks encompasses camping, fishing, wild life observations, meeting interesting fellow travelers, photographing nature at her best, enjoying walks through pristine forests and along sandy beaches, swimming in lakes and oceans. The following account tells of just such an encounter with nature and humans.

Bright morning sun light streams through stands of tall slash pines and loblollies casting a fretwork of light and shadow across the campground.

The sky shows itself pale blue with grayish white cloud puffs slowly drifting. A perfect day, it seems, is in the making.

RVs of many sizes and types, uncanny creatures in this forest’s natural venue, sit on asphalt pads laid down among the trees. It is early morning and no one is stirring. But at least in one RV the people are watching the morning news on television.

This much I know, because they are in the next site to us. It is a very large vehicle with sections that extend out from the sides causing the thing to look more like a house than a traveling van. Presumably, the people inside are having their breakfast as well.

But not us. We ate several hours ago. Margot is out in the forest taking photos. As for myself, a solid hour has been spent on the Internet, checking emails and looking into various web sites that I customarily visit – political, scientific and general networks.

We are in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, part of the U.S. National Park Service, situated on the edge of the quaint old town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. It is January 14, 2004.

While a deep freeze holds the northern parts of this nation in its grip, here at the edge of the gulf, we can walk around in our shirts, even at this hour of the morning.

To be able to say we are grateful for this boon, traveling in our van through the warm southern states away from the piercing cold, is in itself a blessing worth mentioning.

It is time for me to get moving. A wash and a shave is the present agenda. This morning, we will do a nature walk. A quarter mile distant, the designated walk begins. Yesterday, we went to the Visitor Center, a one-mile walk from the campground. We watched two short videos in an amphitheater designed to hold about a hundred individuals. Much fewer visitors this time, only two other couples besides us were in attendance.

One video focused on the natural history of the place. In the immediate off shore area are four barrier islands that protect the main land from the ferocity of sea and wind. They are sacrificial strips of sand and sea grass offered to placate the elemental gods, constantly undergoing transformation. Shaped like worms, they get chopped in half from time to time by the cutting knife of hurricanes; and then they regroup themselves through the force of attraction, their grassy surfaces grasping the millions upon millions of sand granules thrown at them by the roiling seas. Back and forth, a never-ending lively game of tug-of-war between sea, sky and sand.

While on the mainland, humans quietly go about their business, making breakfast, getting children off to school, opening their shops and offices, answering phones, making transactions, moving goods and services – another form of coming and going actually – the people seemingly totally unaware of nature’s drama happening just a few miles distant, perhaps even unaware that these islands forfeit themselves for the sake of the milder weather the people enjoy so much.

The second video details the history of Fort Massachusetts that lies off shore about fourteen miles on the barrier strip called Ship Island, so named because of its harbor’s deep water.

British troops had used this island as a staging ground in the War of 1812. When that war ended, the U.S. government decided upon building a series of forts wherever necessary to guard the young nation from any more invasions.

This, despite the efforts of the equally young naval department whose admirals attempted to persuade the administration that the country would be better protected by fleets of roving war ships. And thus, it would seem, a precedence of faulty administration decision-making was established, which persists to this very day.

Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island became one of these forts. Many years later, in 1866 the fort was completed, only partially in time for the Civil War.

Southern troops had seized the unfinished fort for a period. Then Union troops recaptured the place. Just as the islands themselves are constantly shifting and changing, so too is the ownership.

Originally, the French held these islands. Then the British took control at the conclusion of the French and Indian Wars. Then for a while, the Spanish grabbed it. And finally the U.S. When it negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with the French, the young republic took over the barrier islands with no resistance from the Spanish.

There was little point in owning the place, since it no longer served as port. Ship Island had been the port for the old French capital originally located at Ocean Springs. But not long afterward, the capital had been moved to New Orleans.

Since the end of the Civil War, these island forts have never been subjected to foreign invasion, their original purpose never realized. Instead, their only real function has been to serve the tourist industry. Such was the wisdom of the government. There may come a time when tourists may be going to Iraq.

Except for the winter months, tour boats take tourists to the fort on a daily basis. Those who own private boats are able to visit most of the islands the year round. Camping is allowed on the uninhabited, narrow strips of sandy beaches only a few miles long. Campers need to bring everything necessary to sustain life – water, food and fuel to return on. And lots of sun block and mosquito spray.

We stayed at the National Park facility for two and a half days. Cost: $8.00 per day including water and electricity, half price because we are senior citizens having applied for the “Golden Pass.”

One is allowed to stay at these sites for as long as fourteen days per year. However, at this time of the year, a few very sharp citizens manage to stay a full month, arriving two weeks before the end of one year and staying two weeks into the new year.

We met one of these “seasoned” campers, a man living alone and traveling in his 22 foot RV, towing a small pickup that has a special rack over the cargo bed, which holds a small kayak.

I had a long and interesting conversation with this man, Jim Keller from Kansas. Jim said he travels almost constantly, taking a month to visit each state. He owns a 35 acre piece of land in Kansas that has a 30 by 60 foot structure on it. When he stays at home, he continues to live inside his RV, which he parks inside the building.

But Jim doesn’t confine his travels to the U.S. alone. He ranges far and wide to places where he cannot take his RV. In 1996, he went to Russia to a small village near the Volga that has two names. The German name, Dreispitze – Three Points in English, is the name he was familiar with, so called because of the confluence of three rivers that son join the Volga nearby.

This is his ancestral home. The people in this area had been imported from Germany by Catherine the Great because they were good farmers and the land was perfect for grain growing. Some of these Germans eventually migrated all the way to Kansas, bringing with them their propensity for growing grain.

There are Kellers in Dreispitze to this day. Jim discovered the existence of Dreispitze when he met a Russian woman with the name Keller, a librarian who was living in Kansas near his home. It was she who gave him the inspiration to visit the place where his people came from.

Jim stayed for six weeks in the home of one family of Kellers. All the while the two Kellers, Jim and his hostess, strained their memories attempting to locate a common ancestor. But to no avail.

Nevertheless, he was definitely glad he made the journey to Russia. He said the village life hasn’t changed since time knows when. The streets are unpaved. Each homestead is like a tiny farm. All the families have one or two cows that are herded together in the common pasture. A herdsman takes care of them each day collecting them each day and herding them out to pasture, in the evening bringing them back. Each cow knows where it belongs. They make their own way home.

Only two households have TV, he said. The people have very little contact with the outside world. During World War II, the Russian government removed these Germans from their villages and confined them somewhere in the Urals, dealing with them much the same way the U.S. government handled their Japanese-American citizens. After the war, most of the displaced German-Russians returned to their villages. Today, the younger members of the village speak only Russian. A few remaining elders still speak German.

So, there we stood in the middle of this very quiet, peaceful campground in the middle of a forest maintained by the National Park Service, only two miles away from congested civilization, our conversation ranging halfway around the world, while dozens of small squirrels – the real and permanent residents of this place – scampered around endlessly grasping and munching the innumerable acorns lying on the ground, gifts of the tall, stately, wisdom-seeming live oaks that live side by side with the slash and loblolly pines, the three main arboreal inhabitants of this region of the world.