Travels for the truth

Travels for the Truth will be a future YouTube channel documenting my road trips through the Deep South. These road trips are also made with the purpose of writing a book. Though this project is still in its beginning stages, raw material for future videos is being collected, and the book is being written at a quick enough pace. The Travels for the Truth YouTube channel will be officially released when more of the book is complete.

Paradise Route 90

The first draft of a completed chapter for the future book.

Lafayette

The city of Lafayette, acknowledged by many to be the happiest city in America, might be a city living in the mythical golden age, something akin to Arcadia disguised in modern trappings. It is almost too coincidental that Lafayette is also described as the hub city of Cajun Country, Acadiana. But for the want of one letter ‘r’, we could all find ourselves drinking Ambrosia with the gods. It is easy to see why Lafayette might be the happiest city in America; the food is to die for and the music is good for the soul. If you find yourself wanting, you could dine on death shrimp decadence and not give a damn, knowing that the music is an effective balm and safeguard to your maintaining your address in heaven.

The real estate here is beautiful, and at the center of it all is St. John the Evangelist Cathedral. When I close my eyes and envision a cathedral, I see an old world monument to the sublime expression of God, bedecked in stone grotesques, stained dark by centuries of foul rain and human history. But St. John’s in Lafayette isn’t like that. St. John’s in Lafayette is beautiful. If Lafayette is the hub of Acadiana, then St. John’s is the hub of Lafayette, and from this hub, it seems, beauty radiates in many unexpected ways.

Beside St. John’s is a 500 year old live oak tree, erupting out of the ground like an upside down octopus. The long heavy branches grow more out than up, their thick weight propped up by metal poles. Despite its age, it doesn’t seem burdened by history. It feels timeless, basking in golden light. There is something communal about it. The trunk is such that it must take at least five people, arms locked together, to circle it. In other circumstances, this tree could appear as a lonely, catawampus beast, but here, in Lafayette, it is beautiful and loved.

The people here are beautiful as well. Did you forget your sunscreen? Across from St. John’s and the live oak is a well-kept house where you can find Sister Abeni. With an earthy laugh she’ll say she doesn’t have sunscreen; that she doesn’t need it because she is from Nigeria. But she will give you a cold glass of water while she calls Sister Wilma from Wisconsin. She’ll have sunscreen. I ask Sister Abeni of her opinion of The Flying Nun. She says she heard of the show, but never saw it. To be fair, neither have I.

Lafayette is a beautiful city, but eventually you’ll have to leave. All good things must come to an end. I have a trip to take, a descent down U.S. 90, and it promises to be an adventure leading me to all sorts of interesting places. The night before, I had a dream; I was told to keep on driving until you see the clock with no arms, and then drive some more, on to timeless places known for their corrupted beauty.

Past blindfolded mindless justice.

Past spinning loaves of Evangeline Bread.

Past the crawfish behind bars bail bond sign.

Water, Water Everywhere, and Everything’s on Fire

If you’d like to get to know the local lay of the land when traveling, take a turn off the interstate and drive the back roads. I-10 be damned; I’ll take U.S. 90 through Acadiana instead. From Lafayette U.S. 90 dips east south-east to Houma, before rising north-east to New Orleans. This is the dark underbelly of the dirty south. The defining feature of southern Louisiana is water. Water is everywhere. Four of the five longest bridges in the U.S. are found in Louisiana: Lake Ponchartrain Causeway at 24 miles, Manchac Swamp Bridge at 23 miles, the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge at 18 miles, and the I-10 Bonnet Carré Spillway Bridge at eleven miles. Bridges are wonderful things. They are an amalgamation of land, air, and water, transporting you from one world to another. They are the perfect place to get lost in the dream.

Am I dreaming? There are no people here. The whole of U.S. 90 must be one long bridge, a liminal space carrying me from one place to another. A timeless place.

All that water below, endless. The mighty Mississippi, Ol' Man River, blue water canals crisscrossed with drawbridges, brown water creeks laden with crawfish, and black water bayou with hard knee’d cypress bearded with Spanish moss. Water is in the air as well, in the form of humidity. You can open your mouth and take a drink; but breathe in too deep, and you can drown. And bring a change of clothing. By noontime in July you can wring out your shirt and fill a gallon or two. Sweat and blood is the price you have to pay to escape, to do penance in this journey through Humid-Hell Paradise. Not that long ago, cotton was king. But count me in for linen instead. It is more breathable when you find yourself simultaneously drowning and on fire, a perverse kind of torture that only God could create.

I don’t see anyone outside on my U.S. 90 drive. If there is anyone living here, they must be hiding inside due to the heat. These are just some of the things that you think about while driving past timeless places, timeless places dripping with mid-day perspired beauty.

Past a truck-stop slash casino.

Past a gas station named Hit n’ Run.

Past the Farmer’s Market with a sign for Gator-on-a-Stick.

Sugarcane, Salt, and Tabasco Sauce

U.S. 90 starts as a pleasant drive, hemmed in by the green walls of miles and miles of sugarcane fields with razor sharp leaves, boxed in by the heavy cobalt blue sky above and the sun faded asphalt below. This wondrous and substantially humid paradise is occasionally punctuated by signs subtly warning you that it is a prison area, and not to pick up hitchhikers. No beauty without danger. The prisoners of Angola harvest sugarcane to make syrup the old fashion way, over a wood fire. You can buy the syrup in the prison gift shop. The hitchhiker warning signs are easy to laugh off, but best heed the advice lest you become a cautionary tale statistic. Keep on driving…

Salt in the wounds of martyrs. After water and sugarcane, salt might be the next thing of overabundance. Only it is hard to see the salt. It’s found in the soil beneath you. One mile north of Delcambre you’ll find Lake Peigneur. At 200 feet, it is the deepest lake in Louisiana. It used to be only a ten feet deep pond. In 1980 Texaco was doing some exploratory drilling on the pond. The drill penetrated the ceiling of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company salt mine beneath the pond. The result was a vortex of doom, the largest manmade maelstrom in history. The whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, a tugboat, and countless trees along with 65 acres of the surrounding landscape.

First up is Avery Island. Avery Island is home to Tabasco Sauce. Edmund McIlhenny, a New Orleans banker, invented the stuff in 1868. Avery Island is essentially one large salt deposit, and Mcllhenny operated salt mines here prior to the war. When New Orleans was captured by the Union is 1862, it didn’t take long before they found their way to Avery Island. Salt was an essential material in the Civil War, so the Union took over salt production. After the war, when Mcllhenny returned, he found everything in a ruined state, his business destroyed. About the only thing that survived was a stockpile of dried red peppers that Mcllhenny acquired while fighting in the Mexican-American War. Mcllhenny planted the seeds and soon found that the peppers not only grew, but thrived in the salty soil. Soon after, Tabasco Sauce was born. And everyone lived happily ever after. Almost. The Cargill salt mine beneath Avery Island closed after it collapsed this past December, killing two.

But it’s not the end. Not yet. I continue to cruise with the windows down, letting the wind blow in the fresh clean smell of sunshine freedom, and occasionally, the smell of fresh cut grass and decay. With the AC dead, driving with the windows down is a necessity. It is better this way, to become part of the landscape and not locked into the sterile auto-pod-mobile, a spectator rather than participant. And the wind whisks the sweat away. Keep moving. Stay in this moment. If it were not for the limitation of time and my gas tank, I think I could drive to Forever. If only I had more time in this timeless place, this timeless place ripe with salt-fruit beauty.

Past the riding lawnmower on stilts.

Past the true gospel robot Jesus.

Past fried catfish with the head still attached.

Hard to Pronounce Places

On this trip you will inevitably find yourself driving past hard to pronounce places. It isn’t so much out of ignorance or disrespect, but when you’re driving past signs with multisyllabic French and Choctow names at any speed quicker than a half-jog pace, the letters get mixed up. Sometimes hilarity ensures. Atchafalaya is one case in point. With the letters scrambled, I start pronouncing it as Atacha-falafel. Later, with a little more creativity, it became Mustache-falafel.

I make no pretenses to my pronouncing anything correctly; when stumped I ask locals for help. It turns out Atchafalaya is pronounced properly as Ah-chaff-al-eye-yah. I’ve been mispronouncing praline as well. Until recently, I’ve been going about Southern Louisiana barbarously pronouncing it as pray-lean. Nope. Properly speaking, in these locales, it is pronounced as prawl-line. One evening I was enjoying a local beer called Catahoula. The Catahoula leopard dog is the state dog of Louisiana. It is a strange looking dog, stranger than that regionally ubiquitous wide-eyed Blue Dog on the jazz posters. The Catahoula leopard dog looks like a blue Dalmatian with larger, Holstein cow patches of black and rusty orange.  Catahoula isn’t pronounced as differently as it’s written, being Cah-tah-hoo-lah, but in bar side conversation, I insisted that we pronounce it like a hound-dog would pronounce it – Cata-Howl-la, with emphasis on the howl part, like one might howl at the yellow midnight moon.

That wide-eyed Blue Dog on all the Jazz Festival posters is the creation of folk artist George Rodrigue. It is also featured on an Absolut Vodka label, among many other places. We might as well say everywhere. I’m not entirely sure what to think about it. You’ll find it on a calendar, for the month of June. The Blue Dog’s unblinking yellow eyes stare at you, and its piercing gaze goes through you, like it is forever accusing you of some misdeed. You secretly wish it were July, so you can turn the page, only it’s on July’s page, too, and the humid-heat is even worse. Out of luck.

Back on the road, I can’t help but think of the many different shades of blue: the heavy cobalt blue skies above the sun faded asphalt below, the unblinking wide-eyed Blue Dog from the jazz posters, staring you down in judgment, the Catahoula leopard dog, the blue Dalmatian with the Holstein cow patches of black and rusty orange, and the indigo blue roofed porches with the empty rocking chair rocking in the afternoon breeze. In the South we like to talk about the past as if it’s present. We don’t hide our ghosts in the dark of night, but keep them in rocking chairs on our front porch at noon. Indigo is a tragic color. Indigo was one of the main cash crops harvested by slaves prior to the invention of the cotton gin. Painting the front porch a light indigo blue is an imported African tradition, meant to keep the haints at bay. But tradition doesn’t seem to work anymore in a place where we insist upon our wounds. Keep on driving past these timeless places filled with ghosts – all of this haunted beauty.

Past the six wooden crosses clustered together, leading me to wonder what tragedy befell here.

Past the dead black snake on the side of the road, Saint Michael protect us.

Past the dingy white plaster Medieval Castle sinking in the woods.

Gods and Monsters

Southern Louisiana, like much of the South, is full myths and monsters, legends and ghosts. When the fog settles over the surface of the swamp at night, and you can’t see a thing, familiar sounds take on a more sinister meaning. Is that the barred owl’s call –“who-cooks-for-you?”, or is that the siren song of a hungry ghost? Is that the soft splash of an alligator sliding down the mud bank into the water, or could that be the footstep of the monster of Honey Island stalking down prey? Is that the howl from the near extinct red wolf, which once had a home in these swamps, or is that – the Rougarou?

The Rougarou is the Acadian version of a werewolf, the name derived from the traditional French “loup-garou” – it’s Cajunized to roll off the tongue easier. According to legend, one of the ways you could transform into a Rougarou is to miss observing Lent seven years in a row. Little children, take note. The Rougarou haunts the swamps and hunts down Catholics who don’t observe Lent, and children who don’t behave. To protect yourself from the Rougarou, keep thirteen pennies outside your front doorstep. The Rougarou can only count to twelve, and so becomes vexed and perplexed until it retreats back into the swamp with the rising sun.

I tried my best without success to find the Rougarou, looking behind every hard knee’d cypress bearded with Spanish moss. But it’s the wrong time of year. The surefire best way to find the Rougarou is to peel off U.S. 90 and go to Houma in October, where you can find the Rougarou Fest. And there are other monsters there as well. There is the annual nutria pardoning. The nutria is a giant semi-aquatic rodent native to South America. Early Catholics to the region categorized it as a fish so they could eat it on Fridays during Lent. Coming in at 10 to 20 pounds and 12 to 18 inches long, they are considered an invasive species. Nutria can be particularly destructive, their burrowing and feeding habits causing permanent damage to wetlands and coastal marshes. The state now offers a bounty on nutria tails in order to control the population.

But no monsters today. The closest I came to finding a monster was getting uncomfortably close to a five foot alligator. He was laying in the sun, mouth open teeth exposed. I swear it was a smile, my alligator friend happy to have my company. A happy gator, perhaps from Lafayette.

Time to press on. Keep on driving. Don’t let the sun set on your back with your feet on the ground, and keep driving lest the Rougarou find and gut you like a fish. With the AC out, my windows stay down; you can listen to the landscape and the wind whisks the sweat away. I can hear the insects scream as if in pain. It’s hard. I drive through a storm of dragonflies, a plague, each of them doing their best to avoid the windshield. Sometimes the windshield wins, and their mortal remains become lodged in the windshield wipers. When they hit, it sounds like hail hitting the hood of the car. The endless waves of dragonflies, relentless, and with the windows open, I find myself fortunate that none have found their way inside.

Dragonflies are not the only creatures to meet their fate on this road. Legions of doomed lubbers attempt to crawl from one side of the road to the other. Lubbers are giant grasshoppers the size and thickness of your thumb. They are hard to miss because of their color, black and yellow, with the occasional red band on their hind legs. It is impossible to dodge them while driving down the road. Ahead you can see flattened lubbers crushed by cars long past. Yet this killing field doesn’t deter their compatriots from continued attempts to cross the road. What is it that is so alluring for them on the other side of the road, that they risk crossing this killing field? Salvation? What insect saint must they venerate, that they must make this pilgrimage gladly?

Keep on driving past the bodies. Let these monsters mourn their dead. Death is an illusion here in this timeless place, this Humid-Hell Paradise incensed with the smell of fresh-cut grass and decay. We are gods with automobiles, crushing all that run before us in this timeless place vested with sacrilegious beauty.

Past a gas station named Smoke ‘n Go.

Past the replica steamboat fueled by sweat and gasoline.

Past oil refinery smoke stacks, belching out orange flames speaking in tongues.

A Railroad Bridge Contemplates Death

I’m not entirely sure why it seems to me that there are more railroads in the South than in the North. Railroads were instrumental to the Union victory in the Civil War, being able to move troops and supplies with more efficiency than the more agrarian rural South. Maybe it is because I grew up in Atlanta, a major railroad hub even back then. Just north of Atlanta you can still find an example of a Sherman necktie, where Union troops would render a railway unusable by heating up the rails over a fire to make them malleable, and then twist them around a tree.

Maybe it is all the early blues and country songs mentioning railroads, songs by Muddy Waters and Johnny Cash. Songs about trains as a metaphor for passing. Songs about chain-gangs working on the railroad. Songs about famous train wrecks. Songs about trains taking your lover away. There are a lot of songs. Most of them taking place in the South.

Maybe it is because I’ve spent my time living on the edge of small dusty towns, where you can hear the train horn blow hauntingly, and miles away distant across the open fields at night. Of course every one of these towns has that ghost story where that floating yellow orb that you sometimes see on the side of the tracks is supposed to be the lantern of the conductor looking for his lost head.

I think about these things as I drive down U.S. 90, passing over the railyard with ten empty lanes of traffic, past the long abandoned rusting rail bridge, its rough textured red contrasting against the green leaves of vines slowly strangling it to death. It’s kudzu, and it is swallowing up the South. In high summer it can grow a foot a day. The hairy vines can grow up to 100 feet in length, the stems 1 to 4 inches in diameter, and the woody tuber growing 16 feet deep. I’ve seen it cross highways by clawing its way across overhead power lines. When the human race is done with itself, kudzu will suck on our bones. 

U.S. 90 killed this railroad bridge, just as I-10 is killing U.S. 90. There are no other cars on the highway. It is lonely. The red-rusted rail bridge crosses over the black bayou waters. It looks down into the dark waters and contemplates death. Don’t look too deep. Wake up! It doesn’t look safe. Stay out of that water; who the hell knows what’s swimming down there. Keep on driving, past these timeless empty places, timeless empty places filled with savage beauty.

Past the Honey Island monster.

Past the tree with the tree swing, minus the swing.

Past the cartoon pig advertising how good it tastes at such-and-such barbecue place.

Live Seafood

At some point on your travel down U.S. 90, you will pass by Delcambre, where you can buy shrimp right off the boat. Sure, those little bastards are delicious, but watch yourself; shrimp have these things called rostrum and telsom, a sharp little spike growing out of their head and tail. The annual Delcambre Shrimp Festival is held in August. Like so many other events over the past year, it is canceled by Covid. Normally, the five day festival would be the epitome of the Cajun-Creole joie de vivre. There are carnival rides, music, and fais-do-do (dance parties). Fais-do-do is a phrase translating as “go to sleep”, which is what Cajun parents would tell their children before heading off to the party. But the next crowning of the Shrimp Festival Queen and King Crustacean will have to wait until, hopefully, next year.

Beginning in the ‘70s, a new wave of immigrants found their way to Acadiana. Vietnamese immigrants found similarities between the Mekong delta and the Mississippi delta, and shrimping is a big part of both cultures. It was inevitable that the two cuisines should meet. It’s Viet-Cajun, and the fusion makes sense; it isn’t forced together clumsily like a Frankenstein creation, but blends together seamlessly. Now it is found in just about every city in the U.S., and it has even made its way back to Vietnam. But it hasn’t found its way to the French Quarter in New Orleans. Not here.

New Orleans, like many places in the South, is in love with its traditions. It is generally acknowledged that steaming crawfish is better than boiling them, but that would go against tradition. Cajun-Creole cuisine is delicious, absolutely – and a seafood andouille gumbo with jasmine rice can’t be beat - but non-traditional chefs might call it static. A more polite way of saying it would be to call it timeless. Here the kitchens have clocks with no hands. Impotent to change. I can’t help but to think of a photo I saw of a Delcambre shrimp boat mast jutting out of the water, gunnel listing to port, submerged and sinking.

Keep driving on. Nothing to see here in this timeless place. Occasionally I might see a hand-painted sign for live seafood. I prefer my seafood dead. If I did eat raw oysters, I wouldn’t eat them, not anymore. A friend of mine survived Necrotizing Fasciitis, vibrio flesh eating bacteria that entered a small cut while swimming in the Gulf. The warm waters of the Gulf make the bacteria a more frequent hazard. Raw Gulf oysters are a gamble. All it takes is a grain of sand with the bacteria on it, swallowed, and that’s it. Keep driving on. Not your time yet. Stay in this moment and pull the scales off your eyes. Remain here in timeless places, learn to appreciate grotesque beauty.

Past the Abita Mystery House Horsigator.

Past Mr. Binky’s Adult Superstore.

Past a purple gorilla wearing a coconut bra.

Shark Island

I decide to take a detour on to Darnall Road, faded yellow lines burned on red asphalt. Soon the road narrows, and I find myself missing my turn onto a road that I confused with a driveway. Rerouting myself, I drive some distance on a gravel road, until I find myself parked on Poverty Row, on the far end of Shark Island. This is supposed to be a small town, but there is nobody here. The shrimp boats sit unused. This area is called Cypremort Point. Cypremort is French for Dead Cypress. It projects into Vermillion Bay, and it feels like being on the edge of everything.

I move on to Cypremort Point State Park. There are more dragonflies than people here, thousands of them buzzing about, mutating clouds of them. I am on a manmade beach, complete with planted palm trees and seagulls. A bulldozer pushes sand from one place to another place; the engine grumbles with black exhaust alongside. Underneath this, the beeping sound of a dump truck backing up. Is this how it all ends? On the distant horizon I see a half dozen oil rigs chugging away. The lighthouse must illuminate them at night. Chugging endlessly, there is no rest in this timeless place.

You could be tempted to go swimming off Shark Island, despite its name sake, if there were not a green-diamond shaped sign warning you not to, that the bacteria levels are currently too high. I still see quite a few people swimming, adults, adults with their dogs, adults with their kids. I question their judgement. The water here looks like a stagnant soup. It doesn’t move. There is no breeze, none but that may be created by the wings of swarming dragonflies. But at least it isn’t humid here. There is no Humid-Hell Paradise, only Paradise, or that which may suffice for Paradise, for the time being. But this is not how it all ends. We must keep driving. We haven’t seen the light yet. Keep driving in this timeless place, full of mutant beauty.

Past hungry sharks who would settle for a toe.

Past haunted dreams looking for a human host.

Past the shipwreck stuck on a hill.

The Future

The speed limit on LA-319, the narrow two lane road I took to get here, is set at 55 mph. This surprised me. Until I found the speed limit sign, I was cruising around 35. The road is residential. The houses are lined up on one side. There is a marsh on the other. I kept expecting a kid to rush out in front of me, chasing a ball. But there was nobody out. Not for miles. And the speed limit is set high, perhaps, not so much to get here, but rather to help with a speedy egress out.

Why would you want to leave these cloudless alligator skies? Did I not give you enough light? U.S. 90 calls you back, promises you it will be different next time. But it doesn’t need to change. U.S. 90 is perfect the way it is.

Des Allemandes sneaks up on you. A traffic light and a strip mall. You suddenly wake up, rubbing your eyes, wondering if it was all a dream. Maybe. One last stop for gasoline. This could be the end - but not really. Things only change on the other side of the bridge. All that water below, it’s endless. The mighty Mississippi, Ol' Man River. Bridges are wonderful things. They are an amalgamation of land, air, and water, transporting you from one world to another. They are the perfect place to get lost in the dream.

So I keep driving, past New Orleans and past Lake Ponchartrain, and back onto the I-10 void with its endless stream of billboards for ambulance chasing lawyers and real-estate agents, back into the world of Applebee’s and Hooters, Dillard’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Past concrete Madonnas still holy.

Past diamonds on the highway reflecting.

Past the past and timeless places.

Propelled into the uncertain future.