WAVELAND - Since Aug. 29, I have been to the Mississippi Gulf Coast eight times in nine months. Some of those trips have been in the guise of a journalist and some trying to play a miniscule part in relief efforts.
Sunday morning, I made my latest trek. With a companion who had not seen the destruction firsthand, I drove Hwy. 90 from Bay St. Louis east to Point Cadet in Biloxi - from collapsed bridge to collapsed bridge - and watched the expression of stunned awe develop on my friend's face as we passed through miles and miles of once-familiar locales that are now the landscapes of no less than apocalyptic devastation.
In the nine months that have ensued since Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore, I've flown over the length of the Coast from Pearlington to D'Iberville in fixed wing aircraft and in helicopters.
On the ground, I've seen the destruction from military vehicles and private four-wheel trucks, and I've covered a lot of the battered ground on foot.
Only a few of the old landmarks remain. I find myself searching for remnants of old waterfront restaurants where I took my late wife in happier times or where I drank wine and ate Oysters Bienville years ago with friends now forever absent.
From Gulfport west to Bay St. Louis, the surge line penetrates deeper toward I-10 and entire neighborhoods - significant parts of entire cities - were simply washed, churned and blown into piles of unrecognizable debris.
Each time I visit, I marvel at the resilience of our fellow Mississippians who are living through this ongoing nightmare of suffering, deprivation, isolation and uncertainty with such dignity and grace.
It is so easy for those of us north of Wiggins or Picayune to begin to forget the awesome calamity that has befallen our fellow Mississippians on the Gulf Coast unless some of them are our own kin or friends.
The 24/7 cable TV news coverage has ceased. Katrina has crept slowly off the front pages of the newspapers. It's easier now to focus on broad questions of which government agency was too slow or too unresponsive after the storm.
But for far too many on the Gulf Coast, life is still like a haunting scene from Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." Yet instead of the hard fiction of migrant workers in the dust bowl of the Great Depression headed for California, it's the harder reality of incredibly decent, hard-working people living in FEMA trailer encampments - cooking and eating outdoors, living hand-to-mouth on insufficient supplies that are unpredictable and hard to come by.
Churches and charities continue to battle poverty, hunger, despair and fear on a daily basis as victims continue to seek a hot meal or a blanket or safe shelter. Too many otherwise solid citizens have fallen between the cracks of government bureaucracies, insurance adjusters and the realities of unemployment.
Bitter truth: Too many had too little to fall back on prior to Katrina to make "recovery" more to them than a foreign eight-letter word.
On this Sunday, locals stood three-deep in line to buy convenience store chicken, corn dogs and red hots as if the chefs at Gulfport's venerable old Vrazel's were serving the very finest French haute cuisine.
Hot food is hot food - and there are miles upon miles along the beachfront in which a public restroom, a store of any kind or the simple availability of even a cold drink is a dream not yet realized.
It's hard to overestimate the progress made on the Gulf Coast by these valiant Katrina survivors. But the greater danger lies in underestimating the crying needs there that remain as yet unfulfilled. Mississippi must not forget these victims.
