Day 6: The Big Eating

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Driving Cross Country - August 29th to September 6th
From: Dallas, TX
To: New Orleans, LA

Two States Traveled:
Texas
Louisiana

Total mileage: 555 miles
Total mileage to date: 2,533 miles

Groan. It's hard to get up this morning and get on the road. Checking out of the hotel, we restock on water and roll out of town to the east. A few miles down, we pull over at the Waffle House for a classic cholesterol-fest breakfast. The fast order cook is flying around doing god knows what with various skillets and frozen meats. Nothing is written down but he doesn't slip up one bit. It's a pretty impressive display of total concentration. There's signs on the walls notifying the customer that there are over 1.2 million ways to prepare hash browns. Okay, maybe if you do the math with the various additional toppings, but you know what? It all still tastes like greasy potatoes. The only disappointment is that the waitress didn't' have any missing teeth. But maybe we'll encounter that in Louisiana or Mississippi. One can only hope.

Back on the highway now, we're polishing off the last few miles of East Texas, which is much greener than West Texas. If you look at a map, Texas is this microcosm of the U.S. as a whole where Dallas is New York, Houston is Miami, and Ciudad Juarez is L.A., and San Antonio is um... San Antonio. Looking out the window now, it looks no different than the area around Richmond, VA. Except for the occasional camel farm that is. What's the story with that? You can also buy a lot of propane and propane accessories from some guy named Hank.

Time for one of those 10 minute narcoleptic naps that simultaneously refresh and fatigue the highway traveler... I'm going to my happy place. Happy...

Snort. Whuh? I'm back. What day is it? Where am I and who are these two guys in the front seat. Oh my god, I've been kidnapped by some rogue Al Queda software engineers. They'll make me write down numbers and turn me into a random number generator for encryption keys. How did they know how random I am? Somebody talked. When I found out who it was, they'll rue the day.

Just outside of Shreveport, Louisiana, bogland and muddy creeks start flashing by our windows and the humidity starts climbing rapidly. A little while later, we encounter the first patch of rain we've felt in six days. Refreshing. It's a free car wash to clean off the Texas bug smears --- a 70 mile per hour pressure washer.

Heading past Alexandria, the humidity starts to become sweltering. I said it once and I'll say it again. Thank the deity or deities of your choice for the invention of the air conditioning compressor pump.

As we approach Lafayette, the local news radio announces that two tractor trailers have jackknifed and spilled petroleum all over the roadway on Route 10. Hmm. Oil. Texas tea. Black gold. Homer Simpson would rush there to scoop up the gloppy mess for future re-sale to his neighbors. But we're not cartoons, so we decide to take Route 90 further south to get closer to the Gulf of Mexico and see something besides super-slab highways.

South of Alexandria, you can smell the bayou mud in the air. Ah. the tang of fetid decay hints at the presence of a lively coastal marine ecosystem. The road is lined with fields, and small lakes and swamps dot the countryside.

When we go through Morgan City, we'll cross the Atchafalaya River. I read about this river back in a geology course in college. John McPhee, an amazing nature writer, goes into detail about this river, which diverges from the Mississippi about 100 miles north as the crow flies, near Simmesport. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains control locks and dams on the right bank of the ole Miss, which get battered every year by the floods. The Mississippi is supposed to jump it's banks every 100 years as silt deposits at the bottom of the river build up. The Army Corps of Engineers has been fighting this through dredging and by building the massive levees that line much of the river banks. But the higher the levees grow, the faster the river flows and the more likely flooding becomes. An unwinnable cycle.

Within our lifetime or that of our descendants, the Mississippi will no longer flow through Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Without cheap bulk riverine transport, the industrial and chemical manufacturing area (the "American Ruhr Valley") between the two cities will have to relocate at a cost of billions. The area would devolve into the swamps and lakes that currently dot the Atchafalaya River and surrounding bayou.

Nobody wants this to happen. Especially, the current residents of the Atchafalaya River basin. Many residents cling to their family traditions and tend to be a bit xenophobic. They're in for a big change in the future when the mangrove swamps where they fish and trap crayfish start disappearing. Same thing goes for the shrimpers who base their boats out of Gulf ports all along this portion of the coast.

But to return to more immediate matters, the highway around Houma, our southernmost point during this trip, is completely elevated off the ground by ten to twenty feet. On both sides, swamps and green marsh wait for the next flood. Some areas have been cleared and set off with levees for commercial farming (sorghum or sugar cane?). Every power line in this area, and there are lots of them, has to be aboveground. Every once in a while on a railroad siding, you see three or four open-topped freight train cars filled with big stacks of timber. I think these are pre-positioned replacements for downed utility poles in the event of storm or flood. Also, the concrete supports under on-ramps are sometimes blackened and sinking into the swamp, while the sides of overpasses are blackened and covered with creepers. It's about 7 PM now, as we pass through this area, but it must be amazing after dark when the night denizens emerge.

The sunset behind us is spectacular as usual. I saw a glimpse of something moving in the mangroves off to the right. Blue-greyish up top and dark-colored on the sides and bottom. Anteater? Swamp bear? Big tangle of moss waving in the breeze? Dick Cheney in his undisclosed location?

Near Houma, LJ sees something move in this truck-towed trailer just ahead. It's a white horse wearing a blindfold being transported in an open trailer. What's unusual is that this horse trailer is not enclosed by anything but a five foot high barrier of rusting horizontal metal bars. The horse is shuffling from side to side to keep it's balance as the trailer bumps over the paving joints. It doesn't seem too happy, but hey, it may be excited that it's moving sixty-five miles per hour without breaking a sweat.

Pulling into New Orleans, we get a little twisted around and wander around the warehouse district when we take the direct, non-highway route. But this doesn't last long and we pull into the Sheraton New Orleans on Canal Street at about 8:30 PM.

After checking in and tossing our bags upstairs, we notice that our hotel room on the 27th floor has an amazing view of Canal Street and the northern vista of the French Quarter. There's a floor to ceiling window behind slatted doors. The view is great but I can just see somebody make a head-first dive out the window, which isn't really all that thick. If you're scared of heights, don't stay in this hotel. So we pull out the cameras and snap away. Bug is taking 10 second exposures and lying down to stabilize the camera while LJ is standing up and clicking away. The Bay Area sniper team strikes again.

As we get ready to go out for dinner, I notice and comment on the fact that with every passing day on this trip, there's less and less need to verbally communicate plans and intentions. Amusing situations and people produce eyebrow quirks (Bug), slow head turns (LJ), and forehead crinkling (me) that are readily understood. A few looks and head jerks are enough for all of us to stand up, wheel as one, and walk in a specific direction. This is quite amusing. But then again, the days of driving are starting to blur together. Where were we two days ago? Being confined to a seat (large and roomy as they are) for eight hours a day will do that, I guess.

But to return to the narration, we leave the hotel and stroll down Chartres Street just looking around for place to eat. We pass a few places, including the W Hotel, but pull up at K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen. The menu looks good, so we walk in, sit down and have a fantastic meal. While we're perusing the wine list, we notice that there's multiple caricatures of a guy who looks like Dom DeLuise in an old-fashioned forties driving cap adorning every wall. They look a lot like the head chef in the kitchen, which is visible from the dining area. The face looks suspiciously familiar. So Bug walks outside to take a closer look at the restaurant facade, walks back in, and announces that this is Paul Prudhomme's restaurant. Ahah!

My philosophy when dining out is to order things which I can't or don't cook or eat at home. For the past few years as the everyman of bachelorhood, this covers pretty much everything. I don't even use my microwave, much less the stove. My poor lonely toaster sits on the counter, weeping chromium tears of neglect. So at K-Paul's, I ordered turtle soup and pan-fried rabbit. Hee hee. I was thinking of the old Brer Rabbit stories. Bug and LJ had pork, which was absolutely god-like. When the wait staff came by, Bug told them that this was absolutely the best food that he'd had in 48 states of driving. After closing with a good glass of Graham '85 port, we walked slowly back towards our hotel, feeling absolutely stuffed. The turtle and rabbit were fighting in my stomach. Some rivalries never die.

On the way back, we stop by a little corner bar named Jimanji where wait staff from neighboring restaurants are congregating before going home. The bartenders are playing the movie "Old School" on the TV and seem to know every line. They rewind periodically on really funny bits and shout out the lines. They've seen it about a thousand times. And they're proud of it. It's actually a pretty funny movie, but not good enough to create a philosophy around it. Ayn Rand's Objectivism is bad enough, but Will Farell-ism would be enough to wake the dead and bring down Ragnarok around our ears. "Blue, you're my boy!" The subtitling was even funnier. Especially when the cinderblock tied to a rope around the fraternity pledges' privates drop off the balcony and one of the blocks goes through a manhole cover. A large black pledge gets yanked off the balcony, falls onto the manhole face down... and the closed captioning says "[Girlish screaming]". I almost lost bladder control 'cause I was laughing so hard. I guess you had to be there. Silly rabbit, trix are for kids.

When we get back to the hotel, we're not really tired yet, and decide to try taking multiple exposures to create ghost images. It's an impromptu digital photography class. With the lights out and using 8 second exposures, with a flashlight for spotlighting, we take a few really amusing photos with ghost images of us fighting, giving the birdie, and looking out the window. Some of them turn out like Norman Rockwell images. They're on Bug's laptop right now so I can't post them yet but they're a riot. Then we turn on the idiot box and watch the last hour or so of a Joe Pesci movie before fading out.

 

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