Seagulls flock around a shrimp boat off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Seafood is one of the area’s prime industries, and visitors can take tours on some of the boats, and visit a museum devoted to seafood, ships and other maritime pursuits. Photo by Andrew B. Hall

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Situated on the Mississippi Sound along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the Biloxi lighthouse rises over the city’s welcome center, a replica of a pre-Civil War mansion that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Built in 1847, the lighthouse has become a symbol of the city’s resilience, withstanding Katrina and other major hurricanes. Photo by Rob Hainer

Exploring Mississippi’s 26-mile Gulf Coast is a sojourn to small, laid-back towns, sugar-white beaches, artsy enclaves, “aromatic” fishing villages, and even a whiff of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Life moves at a slow southern pace, and friendly locals greet out-of-towners with a hearty, “Hi ya’ll!”

Mississippi Gulf people are proudly resilient. Hurricane Camille smashed into the state in 1969 with 200 mph winds, cracked levees, felled power lines, wreaked havoc and left many bad memories. A 20- to 30-foot tidal surge flooded homes, stores, roads and graveyards.

Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina roared in, a monster that left massive destruction behind. Called the worst storm in 300 years of recorded history, Katrina severed casino barges from their moorings, heaving them onto buildings and highways.

A 30-foot storm surge slammed white caps into homes, carried roofs away and splintered buildings. Pelicans rode 25- to 30-foot waves over the elevated interstate highway. People still talk about watching their cars float away.

Then came BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest marine spill in the petroleum industry’s history. It poisoned marine life, blackened seaside wetlands, oiled birds, and dumped tar balls on the beach for several years.

Disasters like these change you, one local said, adding, “We may never get over it.” Changed maybe, but when life gave them “lemons,” they “made lemonade” and they are still making it.

Mississippians have rebuilt and repaired. Some stately antebellum mansions survived, and many iconic live oaks, hundreds of years old, still stand, nature’s symbols of resilience.

America’s Riviera

Once called “the American Riviera,” the Gulf Coast — the largest manmade beach in the world — is 26 miles long (62 if you count all the inlets and tributaries).

A string of 12 high-rise, beachfront casino resorts sprout all along the coastline. Restaurant menus feature shrimp and grits, catfish, crawfish, oysters and fried green tomatoes, exuding hints of New Orleans cuisine.

“You come across the bridge from Louisiana and your blood pressure goes down,” said Nikki Moon, owner of the Bay Town Inn, about her hometown, Bay St. Louis.

With a population of 10,000, it has an “an ole timey feel,” and is “the gentle way to go about life,” where people walk to restaurants, and chug around in golf carts to see the latest local pottery, jewelry, sculpture and paintings.

Chainsaw sculptor Dayle K. Lewis transformed once-living live oaks into “angel trees” — sculptures that honor hurricane survivors. One served as a raft for three Katrina survivors and their dog.

Biloxi, population 44,000, is a centrally-located base for branching out to coastal points. Across from the Lighthouse, which survived Katrina, the restored visitor center is a replica of the Katrina-smashed Robinson-Dantzler antebellum mansion.

Here you’ll learn about the area’s Gilded Age, when the affluent had an active social scene in waterfront mansions, many coming on excursion trains from New Orleans. Woodrow Wilson vacationed at Pass Christian at Beaulieu, the Dixie White House.

Go fish

Coastal Mississippi is all about water, good and bad. Biloxi claims it was the seafood capital of the world in the 1800s.

“Seafood built Biloxi,” trumpets one exhibit in the town’s Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum, where the narrative starts with Biloxi’s 1699 founding, when settlers looking for gold found oysters instead. Video interviews with old timers recall grueling seafood factory work from the 1890s to 1920s.

The museum features boat building, net making, shrimping with sails and trawls, and fishing equipment, such as oyster dredgers, engines, shrimp peelers and marine blacksmithing. Fishing is a hard life, weathered seamen explain, but they work hard, play hard, bounce back and survive life’s curveballs.

Captain Mike Moore’s shrimping excursion on the Sailfish is a spirited lesson in marine mysteries, from jellyfish to bottlenose dolphins to pelicans. The self-described “Ambassador of the Gulf Coast” opens by saying that passengers may need a translator to decipher his Cajun accent.

Using a 16-by-35-foot net, he drags the bottom and calls out the critters he brings up. On shrimp, he gabs, “Everything wants to eat them.” Another factoid: “White and brown shrimp grow one inch every seven to 10 days.” Or shrimp anatomy: “Their antennas are for smelling. They hide in the mud and smell what goes by. It’s their radar.”

At Quality Poultry and Seafood, visitors ogle mounds of today’s catch. In operation since the mid-1940s, it also hawks pickled quail eggs, and seasonings for gumbo, crab and shrimp boil, étoufée and crawfish pie.

One historic Katrina survivor in Biloxi is Beauvoir, built in 1852 and the last home of the only president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, also known as a “memorial to the Lost Cause.” Hoop-skirted docents reverently describe the Davises’ genteel life in Beauvoir from 1877 to 1889, and explain that Jefferson Davis’s 1889 funeral was the largest ever in New Orleans, when 50,000 mourners walked 18 miles to the Metairie Cemetery.

The adjacent museum memorializes Confederate soldiers with displays of wagons, uniforms, guns and battle scenes. Prominently displayed are Davis’s catafalque, and the “capture coat” that he wore when Union forces caught up with him in Georgia. In a rush, he had grabbed his wife’s coat.

Art along the Gulf

For a more modern twist, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum is a four-gallery complex designed by Frank O. Gehry of signature Gehry rounded pods and gray steel. The museum is known for the work of quirky, one-of-a-kind artist, George Ohr, “the mad potter” — an eccentric father of 10, who potted from 1857 to 1918. “I want every pot to be itself,” he said, “no two alike.”

Made of local Tchoubouffa River clay, his thin “mud babies” have crumpled edges, loops and curves. Some, seen as offbeat in Ohr’s day, have sold for as much as $100,000.

The museum also recounts another resilience story, local African Americans who created their own self-contained town within the town of Biloxi during the segregation era — a community with its own barbers, banks and baseball team, the Dodgers.

Civil rights hero Medgar Evers went to Biloxi for the 1960 “wade-in” to desegregate the beaches. Unfortunately, this civil rights action became known as “Bloody Sunday” because a mob attacked the demonstrators as the Biloxi police silently stood by. A court decision finally desegregated Biloxi’s beaches in 1968.

Ocean Springs is a contrast of artsy refinement and juicy, downhome eating, coastal Mississippi style.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art spotlights the work of a man some called a genius, others a schizophrenic. He was prolific, constantly drawing as a child, and later painting four or five watercolors a day on typewriter paper.

To better understand hurricanes, he rowed 16 miles to Horn Island and tied himself to a tree during a storm where he felt free. Anderson rode his bike all over the country, traveled the world, and studied snakes, birds, raccoons, butterflies and crabs.

One of his series features cats’ sinuosity and kinesiology. The museum houses “the Little Room,” his totally private space where he painted murals on all the walls and created his own world.

Tucked in the woods nearby is Shearwater Pottery, a family compound founded in 1928 by Peter Anderson, Walter’s brother, and still home to family potters. Katrina destroyed the showroom, but the Andersons rebounded and rebuilt. They make glazed figurines, decorative tiles, thrown ware and cast ware.

Bozo’s Seafood and Market in Ocean Springs is aptly named. It’s a noisy madhouse of long, communal tables, where locals in bib overalls and t-shirts chat with outsiders, as everyone crams down bulging po’boys and mountainous fish sandwiches, all washed down with Dr. Peppers.

The Pascagoula River Audubon Center at Moss Point offers a different water experience, a winding ride through the swamps and bayous of the Pascagoula River — the largest free-flowing river in the U.S., and named “the singing river” by French explorers.

Guide Bennie McCoy of McCoy’s River and Marsh Tours explained that the area was once part of the Republic of West Florida, as he pointed out Yaupon hollies, bald cypresses, alligators, egrets, bald eagles, ospreys and turtles sunning on logs.

The French named the gray, stringy epiphyte dangling from trees “Spanish moss” because the Spanish had beards, McCoy explained.

Non-stop gaming

Gamblers have a wide range of choices, with 12 multi-roomed casinos hosting 24-hour gaming and Vegas-type entertainment, such as the Temptations, Four Tops, Louanne Rimes and Michael Bolton. Every casino has a spa and pool, and each has a special allure.

Biloxi’s Beau Rivage has stunning inside gardens. Hollywood in Bay St. Louis has a “lazy river” for tubers that winds around sun decks and to a “swim-up” bar. The Scarlet Pearl in D’Iberville touts an indoor, 18-hole, miniature golf course with an “erupting volcano.” The Casino Hopper Trolley takes patrons to Biloxi’s seven casinos day and night, every 25 minutes.

While the BP spill tainted the beaches, and Katrina unleashed its devastating fury, many Yaupon hollies, palms, azaleas and live oaks persisted. “Hurricanes are part of life,” one local philosophized. “Your possessions are not life.” Deal with it and move on, they say.

A case in point: The Tatonut Shop in Ocean Springs miraculously dodged Katrina, but the supply line from New Orleans was interrupted and owners had FedEx bring flour from Birmingham.

Uncertain when the next batch would arrive and wasting nothing, they threw leftover dough into the fryer and created odd-shaped morsels, dubbing them Katrina pieces, which eager customers still snarf up today.

Maybe it’s their hurricane prayer that’s made them so resilient: “Lord bless and save the Gulf Coast, Lord help us survive this oil spill, help us save our golden Gulf Coast; let the hurt and pain be over, Lord, bless and save our Gulf Coast.”

And then they say, “Amen,” and “Y’all come back, ya heah?”

If you go

The most convenient airport is Gulfport-Biloxi, http://www.flygpt.com. The least expensive fares for mid-June require flying with one airline there and another on the return. For example, a combination of United and Delta flights is $328 from BWI or Dulles in mid-June. Going roundtrip on American Airlines is $418 from Dulles.

Visitor information including lodging, events, attractions and tours, can be found at http://www.gulfcoast.org.