“The Choo-Choo Train House” (1911-2005)

The Choo-choo Train House 1980s

Box fans, window fan, ceiling fan, tuna-fish sandwiches, train horns, sand, donuts in the morning, the beach, seining, hot summer days, cold-water showers, afternoon naps, no TV, no telephone, sand, stacks of Reader’s Digest books, dart board, cards, sand, late-evening thunderstorms, crabbing, fishing, and oh, I almost forgot to mention…sand.   These wonderful memories all seem to bunch up together in my mind when the long days of summer come. They make me long for “The Coast,” “the camp” — or more endearingly dubbed by the kids as the “Choo-Choo Train House.”

My mom (L) with friends at the camp in the 1950s

Newly purchased camp 1948

The Choo-Choo Train House was located in Clermont Harbor, Mississippi and was originally a school house that sat five blocks inland from the beach, and a few houses from the railroad.  It had been a school from 1911, when it was built, until the 40’s when the town built a new school.  At that time it was put up for sale and my grandmother and my step-grandfather (Pa-pa) bought it when my mother was about thirteen years old.  They spent the entire summer every year down at the coast, while Pa-pa went go back to Baton Rouge on the weekdays to work in his store.  He would head back to the coast on Friday evenings to be with his family again.  When I was a child, we’d go down at least a few times each summer.

The old camp had one big room that was divided into three parts, with half-walls surrounding the kitchen area which was located in the middle. Across the middle hall were two bathrooms — one half-bath and one with only a tub. There were large windows on every wall. These allowed a nice cross-breeze to flow through the building when the weather was hot.  The old ceiling fan in the front room was a large heavy-duty, two-blade, “they don’t make them like that anymore” type of ceiling fan.  It made a slow, loud, repetitive grinding noise as it started spinning, but when it got going, could blow a part in your hair.  There were beds  in the front room and beds in the back room.  But there was one special twin bed right by the front screen door where my Pa-pa took a nap every afternoon.  It was difficult to keep a bunch of kids quiet for two hours and to keep the screen door from slamming while he slept!

A typical day for me started at 4 AM when I would get up to go fishing with my dad.  It would still be dark as I tried to get dressed quietly.

My dad would turn on a small lamp at the kitchen table and make French bread toast in the old Munsey toaster.  After scraping the blackened toast into the sink with a knife (quietly) because we usually left it too long in the toaster while we got other things ready for our fishing trip, we would finish eating and head to Bordage’s (pronounced Bo-dash’s) fishing marina. It was located inland on Bayou (Bye) Caddy.

After getting there, still dark outside, I put on my orange life-preserver and got into our skiff.  Daddy would load our rods and reels, bait, and gas tank and then start the outboard motor. It always seemed so much louder in the early morning!  We slowly pulled away from the dock and then made our way down the bayou toward the Gulf. I can still smell the salt water, mud and marsh grass. I remmember occasionally seeing, shining in the water as the boat glided through, the phosphorescent organisms that glowed briefly in the darkness. After what seemed to be half an hour of winding through the watery passages, we would finally reach the mouth of the bayou just as it was getting light.  We’d fish for an hour or more and then head back to Bordage’s.  We  always ended our trip with a Barq’s rootbeer and a pack of peanut butter crackers.  I still love that food combination.

Me (L), my sister Karen and my cousin Steve

My children at the beach

We’d get back to the house just in time to put our bathing suits on and go to the beach with my brothers and sister –and whichever cousins happened to visiting at the same time.  If the tide was in, we played in the shallow surf. If the tide was out we played on the sandbars running and splashing through the tide pools. Around lunch when we were on the verge of getting sunburned and when it got too hot to stay out there, we’d head back to the camp..  Each of us got a turn at the hose out back to rinse the sand off of ourselves and then we’d do the complete job in the cold shower inside. It seemed extra cold when you were extra hot. And no matter how much you rinsed off, you still found sand somewhere on your body when you got out!

Cousins

Lunch usually consisted of tuna sandwiches or other cold lunch meat sandwich, then the sleepy people would find a bed and flop on top of it for a nap under the strong breeze of the ceiling fan.  Those of us who never napped, read comic books or played a quiet board game, or card game.  I must have played a thousand games of rummy! Sometimes Mom would give us each a dime to walk down to Garcia’s (Gar-sha’s), the local general store to get an ice cream.  I believe she did that mostly to get us out of the camp during her nap time.

My dad helping grandkids push the seine

My mom and grandkids

Finally when the nappers awoke, we’d get our damp swimsuits back on and head back to the beach and play until the sun went down.  If the tide was out, we’d seine between the sandbars in the tide pools and see what little fish, shrimp or crabs we could catch.  The youngest children always enjoyed the flipping minnows jumping on the net as we pulled the seine up onto a sandbar.

When the sun went down we’d head back to the camp for a meal of hot dogs or boiled crabs if we had been crabbing at the train trestle that day. Of course we didn’t eat until we went through the “de-sanding” ritual again of the hose and cold shower.  By the way, one of the best feelings in the world is to be clean, and cool, and in fresh pajamas after being hot all day and in a damp,d sandy bathing suit.

After supper it was time to get on — not in — our beds until the house cooled off.  At 9:00 PM we always had our radio tuned to the AM station, WWL out of New Orleans, to hear CBS Mystery Theater.  We listened intently as the opening trademark  “creaking door” opened and E. G. Marshall introduced that evening’s suspenseful tale.

Melinda – 1962

Before we went to sleep, we dusted any sand out of the bed — and there always was some — and Pa-pa would tell us to cover our heads with our sheet while he sprayed the inside of the camp with the flit gun to kill the mosquitoes.  Going to sleep hot, but waking up cool in the morning, with the birds chirping in the trees outside the open windows, is one of my fondest memories of being at the Coast.

The Coast is where my parents met and courted.  It is where all of us put our feet in the water of the Gulf for the first time. It’s where we went each summer to relax.  It’s where we had family reunions every year around my parents’ anniversary.

Our last family reunion at the Coast in June of 2005

Yes, it was hot.  Yes, it was sandy.  But it was a nice place to go to relax, to be with family, to bring friends, to enjoy the beach, and to eat and sleep as much as you wanted.

The Coast is where we used to enjoy all of these things, — but those days are gone now. Only memories remain.  Along with many other people’s precious possessions, the Choo-Choo Train House and Clermont Harbor were destroyed in August of 2005 by the unprecedented power of Hurricane Katrina. This stretch of the Mississippi Coast was one of the hardest hit areas of the hurricane.  The sadness I felt from the loss of our camp and Clermont Harbor was the same as if I had lost a member of my family. I mourned for many years — and I still do.

Dad and Mom surveying the damage after Hurricane Katrina. The roof of our camp is on the ground in the distance. The picnic table is all that survived.

Nothing can replace the old camp, or Garcia’s, or Bordages, but one story demonstrates the resiliency of the place and its people.

One hot day a few weeks after the storm while we were cleaning up debris on our property, my mom proceeded to pull out a checkered table cloth, spread it on the surviving picnic table and began to set out cold lunch meat and sandwich fixings. We all sat and enjoyed our lunch under the sparse shade of one of the remaining, bedraggled trees.  It was at that moment that I knew not everything had been destroyed.  The heart of the Coast was still there.