Zydeco to Big Guns

As the Astros were out of town, we merely did a drive-by.

 As luck would have it, it took us past the G.W. Bush memorial trash can.

We headed South from Lake Charles tuned to the repo man song on KBON (http://kbon.com/ ) Along one of the canals in the wildlife refuge we met up with a woman and her four daughters, busy crabbin’. They’d been at it since 5AM and still seemed pretty happy about it in the early rainy afternoon. Here is how it’s done: You lay a net on a stick into shallow water. Then you toss out a piece of bait (the nastier , the better) on a string and when you feel the bug tuggin’ at it, you slowly coax it in and over the net. Then you yank that net up and toss the mudspider into the cooler. They’d caught a good two hundred already. The lady warned us not to get too close to the reeds on the canal’s margin, ‘cause that’s were them gators like to hang out.

When we reached one of only two beaches ( Holly Beach Louisiana has on the Gulf, it was blowin’ hard from the South and there were a lot of hard rain squalls.

 There are traces of the big storms, but no evidence of the “bubbler”, as the locals put it. The shore was deep in rotting seaweed and thick with shells and other protein fare for the seabirds.

The brown churning water was not exactly inviting. We made the impromptu move to follow the county roads along the coast and passed through the low rent shore of Arcadia. Here the mobile homes are on stilts, but the pickup trucks are usually worth more than the house. Every gas station also sells bait.

As we moved East, the coast becomes industrial; a familiar industry to me. The Louisiana DOT operates a ferry across one of the canals and there we were in the heart of the oil patch.

 Cameron still builds BOP’s and BP’s office flies the corporate flag proudly. I felt right at home, seeing all those liftboats, supply tenders and service company yards. I spoke with a hotshot driver crossing on the ferry with us, and as I suspected from the sustained good oil price; it’s real busy out there in the black gold world, or “balls to the wall”, as we would have said. No one sleeps; you hardly eat, but you’re makin’ money hand over fist.

The oilfield has left a permanent imprint on me. It made me more rude than I should be, harder to please and expecting a lot from others. That’s how that world is and it gets the job of creating wealth from black goo hidden miles underground done.

In Lafayette (seems like a nice town) we splurged on some real good Cajun food. (http://www.prejeans.com/ ) The place features live Zydeco

 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zydeco ) Well, the snap beans were pretty good. You could’ve seen us on webcam eatin’ shrimp (ordinary), gator (not bad) and gumbo (excellent). From there we made the good move to head South yet again and met up with “Cajun Jack” (http://www.cajunjack.com/ ) for a swamp tour. The guy is a genuine bon vivant;  played ball for LSU on a championship team ( Ferdinand was in awe ), did his time in the oil patch ( Iliked him then ) and now brags and entertains tourists. He’s got a pretty good thing going. He has a nice house/office by the water,

accepts  cash only and that goes into his pocket ( for tax-purposes, dog )

It’s a good trip

and we saw a bunch of real fine bayou

 and swamp.

We cruised past the homes of some old time swamp residents but saw neither them nor any gators/

.

We thought we could make it to the Zephyrs (http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t588 ) game after the tour, but Cajuns have a vague sense of time and the boat got back late. It was raining pretty hard on the way to New Orleans anyway  and it turns out the game was cancelled.

We stayed in Gulfport, Mississippi ( 34,650 distinguishable permutations of that state name)

and then made haste to Mobile, Alabama (only state where a song made it onto the license plate) Sweet !

At Mobile Bay we visited the USS Alabama

 and  a bunch of other associated killing machinery. Now we have an idea of how wide the Panama canal locks are.

Interesting to note that the dreadnaught was planned in the late 1930’s and her keel laid in 1940. Now, we had a whole bunch of this heavy armament in the pipeline by December 7 1941, so let’s not pretend it was all such a big surprise. There is also a WWII sub you can crawl through

 and a plaque commemorating the 2000+ sailors drowned in the submarine service during the  conflict. ( The Germans lost 20,000 men, or almost 70% of the service )

Down the street from the battleship is a lovely place called Felix’s FishCcamp

( http://www.felixsfishcamp.com/ ) I had the whitefish with some really good collard greens. The service was also interesting. They take the trouble to have an individual waiter/waitress for every person on the table when the food is served and take care to set all the plates down on cue.