The sign as we entered Texas at the Sabine River: "El Paso, 875 miles." Yikes!! Daunting!! That's a long waltz across Texas. It's about four states wide.
We stayed an extra day in the New Orleans area to visit across the river in Algiers with our friends Curt Feldman and Megumi Ishiyama. Our trip's fourth and last crossing of the Mississippi was on
the Algiers ferry (at left) -- a wonderful ride, right on the water, over before it starts, ending at picturesque Algiers Point. Curt and Meg, who moved to Algiers from the Bay Area, are blogging about the transition: www.megandcurtinneworleans.blogspot.com/ Check out the papayas.My sister Marion and 11-year-old nephew Shafir came over, and we laughed when we realized that all the adults in the room were bloggers. Check out Marion's blog, too, at: www.ateardropintime.blogspot.com/
Meg, working as a nurse in a cardiac intensive care ward, saw up-close and in deadly detail the results of the Southern diet -- high in saturated fats, sugar, salt and alcohol. Even some of her co-workers live this life. It sounds like some sort of denial mechanism: Let's go out for a smoke after reviving (or failing to revive) a heart attack patient. Because of Lynn's history of heart trouble, we had only two real New Orleans-style meals, delicious and dripping with fat: (1) A po'boy with deep-fried shrimp for Lynn, a po'boy with hot-link sausage for me, and (2) fried catfish for both of us. It was a full-employment guarantee for the cardiac repair folks. (It's not just Louisiana. In north Arkansas, we stopped for coffee and "homemade" pie, and it turned out the "pies" were deep-fried turnovers! And delicious.)
Curt works for an internet business that deals in virtual worlds, like Second Life. So we had this odd conversation about avatars and virtual experiences. It was sort of like a virtual conversation, using words that I sort of understand, talking about virtual purchases and virtual experiences. It almost made sense, but not quite. Lynn, the former science fiction fan, says the conversation seemed to come out of a 1960 Philip K. Dick novel about the future – and the future is now. (That's Curt, Megume and their mellow dog, Anton, in front of their home in Algiers.)While in New Orleans, we struggled with a parenting decision. Our daughter Kenny, the freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio, got her nose broken in an intramural basketball game. She's going to need surgery to set it, which will happen Wednesday. And it's possible that I should go up there to be the mom at the bedside. That would leave Lynn alone in the vastness of Texas for four days. (He wouldn't really be alone. He could find refuge in Austin, I'm sure. My cousin lives there, as do our friends Ingrid Weigand and her husband George Dolis, who offered to take Lynn in if we decided that I should fly to Cleveland.)
Lots of factors came in -- but the swing factor is the weather report showing two waves of winter
storms set to hit the whole midsection of the country. That would surely not be the time to fly in and out of Chicago and Cleveland. Our friends Maryann and Clyde Hohn in Oberlin have promised to take care of Kenny as if she were (Maryann's words) "our own little princess." But this is the first time we've left Kenny on her own in this sort of situation, and it's hard.Leaving New Orleans, we headed out into Cajun country to the Acadian Cultural Center in Lafayette. We left the freeway and drove down two-lane Highway 182 under live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. We cruised past plantation mansions fronted with massive white columns. The signs outside called them "antebellum homes."
We shouldn't have been surprised – but we were – to see endless fields of sugar cane interspersed among the horse pastures and rice fields. We stopped to look at great clouds of
white smoke billowing out of a sugar refinery. Huge trucks pulled into and out of the muddy loading area with towering loads of cane, even on a Sunday, even as the New Orleans Saints (11-0 at the beginning of the game) were on TV. The smell of burning sugar reminded me of the acrid odor of the old sugar-beet processing plant when I was in high school in Manteca. The conveyor belts at their crazy angles look like the abandoned and rusted sugar refineries we've seen in Kaua'i.The Saints pulled out out an amazing come-from-behind victory on the radio as we drove past pirogues drifting on the cocoa-colored bayous, where white pelicans glided above the waterways and egrets fished, elegantly.
The Acadian Cultural Center, operated by the National Park Service, showed us how, in 1755, the British overlords in Canada expelled the French farmers and fishermen whose families had
settled in Nova Scotia even before the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Shipped to Louisiana's swamps and prairies, the survivors blended with other groups and became the gumbo-cooking, accordion-playing and French-speaking folks who evolved from Acadians to Cajuns. Their journey from Nova Scotia was horrific, and many thousands died of disease and starvation. Their history in Canada was one of cooperation with Native people. They carried that on in Louisiana, mixing with Native Americans, free blacks from the Caribbean, escaped slaves, Canary Islanders, and numerous other groups. Our souvenir (French word!) is a CD of Cajun music, which is carrying us along as we head for Austin, Texas.Notable: We stopped for coffee at a roadside store and gas station between Beaumont and Austin. The notices outside told us that we're really in Texas now. One: No weapons in here. That's a felony. And two: You can't drink liquor on the premises, but that's only a misdemeanor. About three feet inside the door was an open cooler of ice where you could buy beer one can at a time, ready to go. But I guess you have to get it all the way to your car before you start drinking. (I've since noticed that lots of the roadside stores have the same signs. I'm in favor of both those restrictions, and I suppose it never hurts to be explicit about behavior expectations, but still....)
Mileage from New Orleans to Austin, Texas: 543 miles
Mileage so far: 10,045
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