After almost a week in hotels and motels, I celebrated the
weekend by getting back to a campground. Lake Fausse Pointe
State Park is just off Levee Road, maybe 20 miles outside
of St. Martinville (the third-oldest town in Louisiana).
Once part of the great Atchafalaya Basin, the 6,000-acre
site was cut off from that vast, fertile maze of swamps
and waterways in the 20th century by manmade protection
levees, but it’s still a watery wonderland.
When I called from Breaux Bridge at around 4 PM on
Saturday, only two of the park’s 50 sites were
still up for grabs, and they were first-come, first-served;
Ranger Keith Broussard gave me excellent directions.
(Although the turns are well marked once you get off
of LA 31 in St. Martinville, no sign marks that first
turn. Go figure.) I prayed hard and drove fast, and
was rewarded with my pick of the two. It was an easy
choice: Both were nicely wooded, but one lay right on
Bayou Benoit, with its own little dock.
Of course I spent some time on the dock (it should
go without saying that I had first slathered myself
with hard-core mosquito repellent, the kind that contains
DEET). Although the moon was nearly full, it hadn’t
risen far enough into the sky to light the bayou, and
cloud cover obscured all but a few stars. Still, the
opposite tree line was dark against a lighter sky and
the water rippled with muted silver. A young mangrove
tree anchored perhaps 10 feet out from the dock cast
elegant shadows; frogs and insects kept up a steady
racket, upstaged every now and then by an owl calling
to flush its prey. Somewhere far down the bayou, a quartet
of hounds howled—at the moon, or at a wild animal,
or just for the sheer hell of it.
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“Plugging-in” In a Tent
Then I came back to the tent and started writing. (All
of the campsites are equipped with electric and water,
so it was another night of plugging-in in the tent.)
Although this was where I really wanted to be, I had
forsaken the equally appealing opportunity to groove
to some live chank-a-chank (Cajun music) on a Saturday
night, so I fired up a CD recorded by Beausoleil—one
of my favorite Cajun bands—while I wrote. It was
a very good night.
Despite the fact that I had spent the first few days
of the week holed up in a motel room fighting off a
sinus infection, I had a lot of good material to work
with. Cajuns love a good story and a good laugh, so
when Keith started telling Boudreaux and Thibodeaux
stories—very roughly analogous to Polack jokes,
but much cleverer and better developed—I knew
I was in for some real entertainment. It doesn’t
get much better than the tale of the volunteer-fire-department
boys who decided to declare war on Saddam Hussein.
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A Modern Cajun Tall Tale
It seems that the boys were getting awfully tired
of hearing about Saddam, who had had the nerve to continue
to annoy us ever since the Gulf War. So they decided
to put him in his place, and Alcee Menard called him
up to tell him that they were declaring war. You boys
are crazy, said Saddam; I have 5,000 tanks and 2,000
Scud missiles just waiting for you. Alcee said he didn’t
think that was a problem but he’d call him back
tomorrow. When he called the next day and said they
weren’t afraid of Saddam’s tanks and missiles,
Saddam said, Well I have two million brave men ready
to die for me right now; can you handle that? Alcee
said, I’ll call you back tomorrow. So the next
day, after meeting with the boys at the volunteer fire
department, he called him back. He said, Saddam Hussein,
this is Alcee Menard again; look, I’m just calling
to tell you we’re gonna cancel the war. Saddam
said, Well, I’m glad you all gotten to your senses.
He said, Oh yeah, me and the boys talked it over and
there’s absolutely no way we can afford to feed
two million prisoners.
As good as it is, it’s that much better when
Keith tells it.
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Keeping Everything Tidy
Once again, I had found a wonderful state park. The
bathhouse actually has two washers and dryers, so I
finally got around to doing the laundry that had been
piling up in the trunk. (The balance of power, so to
speak, between clean and dirty had shifted, and the
trunk was beginning to smell a tad stale. Not to mention
that I was about to run out of clean underwear.)
Not only was Fausse Pointe the first state park I’d
encountered that had laundry facilities, but it was
also the first in which I noticed the rangers wearing
side arms, so I asked Ranger Danny Carpenter
about that (despite the English name, he’s part
“French,” as Cajuns still characterize themselves).
He said that although he’s never had to fire,
he has pulled his weapon a few times. The park in which
he was last posted had a pool, and in the summer—on
weekends especially—it would sometimes get dangerously
rowdy; in order to keep the peace he had to fall back
on the threat of violence. That’s one of the reasons
why he transferred.
It’s clear that Louisiana’s state parks
are serious about keeping everything right and proper:
Not only do the rangers carry guns, but they also patrol
the campground more often than do many other states’
rangers. And when I showed Danny some photos, he sighed
and said he wished he and his colleagues could wear
what Florida Ranger Judy Favaloro was wearing: shorts.
(I had wondered about his fatigues and combat boots.)
Incredulous, I asked, “In this heat you’re
not allowed to wear shorts?!” “It wasn’t
that long ago,” he replied, “that we had
to wear ties, too.”
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Fun and Games In Birmingham
But enough about Fausse Pointe, fabulous as it is.
Before I got here, I also had managed to have a grand
old time in Birmingham, Alabama, where I met some delightful
people and had a truly first-class dinner. I landed
in Five Points South, a cozy, mostly upscale neighborhood
near the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and when
I asked about the best place to eat, a local informant
directed me to one of those understated-and-expensive
restaurants. I figured it was worth it. (“You’ve
got to be sure to sit at the bar—you can eat there,
too—because it’s ‘cheat-on-your-wife’
night, and I think you’ll find the scene amusing,”
said my highly entertaining source.)
I saw what my informant meant: It was a well-dressed,
well-heeled professional crowd, and more than a few
middle-aged men chattered with (or at) pretty young
things. Being happily well past the pretty-young-thing
stage myself, I was spared invitations to aid and abet
anyone in cheating on his wife. Fortunately, I found
thoughtful, interesting companions right beside me,
and made a new friend in sculptor Elizabeth MacQueen.
She treated me to dinner, and someone else gave me directions
to a died-and-gone-to-heaven-good, beat-up-old barbecue
joint outside of Tuscaloosa, called Dreamland (I patronized
it the next evening).
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I Just Don’t Get It
Before I headed off to Dreamland, though, I managed
to squeeze in a visit to the north side of Birmingham:
the flatlands where the poor—mostly black—live.
In deference to some Southern friends who think that
I Just Don’t Get It (being a benighted Northerner),
I’ll spare you my musings on the symbolism of
topography and social conventions; anyway, socioeconomic
segregation is obviously not limited to the American
South. (For whatever it’s worth, though, the sculptor,
a white native Alabaman, Just Doesn’t Get It either,
if Getting It means that one accepts de facto segregation
as all Southerners’ preferred way of life. One
of the many reasons she likes Five Points South is that
it is, she tells me, one of the few fairly integrated
neighborhoods in Birmingham.) Birmingham’s northside
may not have safe streets or jobs, but it does have
the restored 16th Street Baptist Church, where four
little girls died in a civil-rights-era bombing, and
a vast, gleaming Civil Rights Institute.
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The Romance of Ralph
I was glad I went to Selma, Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa,
but after that I needed a blue-highways fix and U.S.
11 did the trick. Just off that road, in the tiny hamlet
of Ralph, I pulled off to admire an abandoned old schoolhouse.
A truck pulled into the adjacent rutted lane and I called
to the driver to ask about the school. Lawrence
Fair works for the Fosters-Ralph Water Authority,
and it turned out he was not only a native of Ralph
(a Ralphian?) but also had attended the school. I could
see memories washing over him as he told me about how
his teacher had once moved him away from the window
because he paid more attention to the men in the fields
than he did to the schoolwork in front of him. He had
a warm, open face and I liked him immediately; we had
a very nice conversation, and he promised to send me
some more information about the school when he could
lay his hands on it.
I liked Lawrence even more when he told me that a beautiful
old antebellum plantation house had stood back the lane,
and early on he and his wife had bought the property
with the dream of restoring the house—but it burned
down before they could afford to get to work on it.
(What an awful indignity; to survive the Civil War only
to burn ingloriously over a century later.) He knew
it would have been a money pit, but I could see the
regret that he felt, still, as he told me about it.
It may be better to have loved and lost than never to
have loved at all, but the loss is always hard to bear
nonetheless.
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Love and Loss in Vicksburg
Like Heat Moon, I crossed the mighty Mississippi at
Vicksburg. But before I crossed, I spent a few hours
in the Soldiers Rest C.S.A. Cemetery. Again I’ll
spare you my thoughts about the extensive stretches
of gleaming white stones honoring the young men who
gave their lives in the battle of Vicksburg—but
I will share a few thoughts that I suspect don’t
occur to most men reading old gravestones.
When I see the significant number of young wives mourned
in granite by devoted husbands, I wonder how many of
them died in childbirth or miscarriage. (Pregnancy and
delivery was truly a game of Russian roulette for U.S.
women until well into the 20th century; it remains so
for women in many parts of the world to this very day.)
When I saw the stone erected by an apparently unrelated
man to honor his “affianced,” and then realized
that his intended died at the tender age of 13, I marveled
at the crapshoot that marriage was, and still is, whether
one of choice or arrangement. And when I saw the six
small memorials lined up in front of their parents’
stones—six children who died before the age of
six, most as toddlers—I wondered how people ever
had the heart to survive those kinds of losses and try
again. I see all of these matters of the heart etched
in stone, and I rejoice at the triumphant optimism of
the human spirit.
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And so, like the Cajuns who have suffered more than
their fair share of losses, I revel in good food, good
music, and good company; I just keep rolling along,
enjoying this life while I’ve got it.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . . .
