Books by Annabelle

Sometimes when Gretal and I went storming, in my fourteen and a half foot Sunfish, the storm would win and sometimes we would come back losers. We’d return with a torn sail, once a bent mast (this was when we crashed into Carrere’s pier and that time it was definitely Gretal’s fault), another time a broken tiller. Once when I had a hard time righting the boat, Gretal decided that she was tired and swam in the middle of the jumbled sail and rested. I had to threaten her to get her to get out so I could right the boat. I have on one occasion lost the rudder. I am not sure how that happened, except it became unshipped and was gone when we got back in the boat.

I lowered the sail, tied the painter around my arm and swam back to shore, towing the Sunfish behind me with Gretal barking needless absurd commands from the cockpit. But as I said, all of this was great fun. Perhaps it was childish and immature, but since we both loved it, that was all that mattered.

There was a time when when I took off with a friend in the Sunfish without Gretal. When I returned sometime later, I found Stella very upset, standing on the beach.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “It’s Gretal,” she said. “She swam after you. Didn’t you see her?”

“No. Where is she now?”

“I don’t know!” she cried. “She went out after you. I couldn’t stop her! She wouldn’t listen to me! You kept going back and forth, and she kept trying to catch up. Then I lost sight of her.”

She had the binoculars with her and I took them and looked out over the water. I didn’t see Gretal. I went back out in the Sunfish to look. Since the current that day was to the east, I went all the way to the Bay looking for her.

I didn’t see her there and came back toward our beach, calling her name and looking. But sitting in a boat doesn’t allow you to look very far and I finally headed in to where Stella was still standing. Gretal was not with her. We stood there for about an hour pacing about, asking people walking on the beach or in cars if they had seen her. We really didn’t know what else to do. In desperation, more of wanting to do something rather than with any hope of success, I went out in the boat and looked around again with no luck. Just as I returned and was pulling the boat up on the sand, I heard Stella shouting. I ran ran to where she stood pointing.

“There’s Gretal!” “Where?” “There! See? Down the beach!”

I looked. Finally, I made out a speck coming down the sandy beach from Bay St. Louis. I quickly got the glasses and looked. It was Gretal! We waited and she came up to us and we hugged her and she licked us and we hugged her some more. She was wet, tired and full of sand and so were we. Stella took her to the house for a hose bath and I stayed to take in the sail.

I was tired and took my time securing the boat to the post and folding up the sail. I sat on the Sunfish for a few minutes looking out at the water. Finally, picking everything up, I carried them up toward the house. When I got there, Gretal, washed and clean, was lying on the warm planks of the porch, letting the sun dry her coat. I sat down beside her and watched her as she dozed. It had been a long day.

Gretal continued to go out with me for many years after that, and we continued to have a lot of fun together. But as she got older, I had to leave her on the beach more and more. It wasn’t as much fun without her and after a while I didn’t go out as much either. When she passed away several years ago, I stopped going out altogether.

A book about us

Paul Estronza La Violette has been a oceanographer for almost 40 years, working with the government, Mississippi State University and -- more recently -- with his own company Heron Laboratories.

La Violette spent years researching aboard aircraft and ships in most of the world’s oceans, spending most of his time in the Arctic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

While he’s no new comer to writing -- he has published oceanographic atlases, books and papers on the circulation of the world’s oceans and seas, “Views from a Front Porch: Living in a Beach House on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” is his first non-scientific publication.

La Violette, still by no means retired, now spends much more of his time at his beach house in Waveland with his wife Stella and weimaraner Jennie.

And now he takes the time to train his researcher’s eye on the people and places around him and to record his “findings.”

But while the book is meticulously detailed, it is far from some boring, scientific treatise.

An easy way of life

“Views from a Front Porch” is a book about Waveland, Bay St. Louis, and Pass Christian.

A book about the way we live and what it is like to be here in a Mississippi coastal community.

There are no murders in this book, no fictional detectives or federal agents looking for terrorists.

Just the everyday, normal, wonderfully unique life we have here on the Mississippi coast. And that is what the book is all about.

And yet just about anyone reading the book should feel gratified in his or her reading and relate to what the author tells us of how he and his wife have lived in Waveland for the last 25 years.

La Violette goes a step further in his book. He is a marine scientist and sees the world of the coastal marsh and Mississippi Sound in a different way than many of us see it.

And in his book, he takes time to describe much of this and how it affects he and his wife’s lives as that of the people of the coast.

It’s an easy book to read. You start anywhere in it and read a chapter or two and put it down and be pleasantly entertained. The style of writing is relaxed, at times lyrically, at times humorous.

“Views from a Front Porch” is definitely a good read.

And, true to the local story teller tradition, La Violette enjoys feedback from his audience, and invites readers to contact him by e-mail at laviolette@datasync.com.

(Note: the email address in the article is outdated. If you want to send Paul La Violette an email, use the address that's at the top of every page: laviolette@hughes.net)

***

Waveland resident Paul Estronza La Violette began writing about life on the Coast for his grandchildren.

“I made 15 or so copies and started handing them out,” he said. “Then, I discovered people were passing them around in town. So I expanded it and it became a book.”

The result is “Views from a Front Porch: Living in a Beach House on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

“I live in a house by the water,” La Violette begins his introduction to the book. “ ... I’ve lived other places, but I’ve lived here the longest. This is my home. The people here are my friends. I’ve found that sitting on the porch of this house and watching the water is different from anyplace I’ve ever lived.”

La Violette moved to the Coast in late 1975 as part of a Navy oceanographic research group that was relocated from Washington DC, to what is now John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County.

He and his new bride, Stella, were unable to find a house on the Coast to their liking. So they bought property on Beach Boulevard and built Heron Home.

La Violette said he had difficulty finding a publisher for his book too.

“They said it’s too regional,” he said.

Well, pooh on the publishers. Coastians will enjoy La Violette’s descriptions of fishing, boating, crabbing, frolicking with his beloved dogs and sharing life with Stella. They will identify with the spontaneous gatherings of neighbors of watch sunsets, talk about the weather or just mellow out.

After reading “Views from a Front Porch,” I want to visit Heron Home, where every room has a view of the Mississippi Sound and a central atrium with a garden.

“I’d never thought too much of pelicans in the years I spent at sea,” La Violette writes.

But, he learns, “They are the most graceful of flyers. I would watch a pelican skimming impossibly low over the water, and except for slight feather corrections, remaining absolutely motionless, falling in a long, drawn out, perfectly controlled manner, floating on a weakening cushion of air, that holds it on and on and lower and lower, until the last moment it would catch itself and, with several quick flaps of it’s wings, rise up to a height of eight to ten feet, then begin the long, beautifully graceful skimming, controlled fall again.”