The Long Way Home

I’m not sure whether New Orleans is more like heaven or like hell. Quite possibly it’s both combined. From the eastern taxi driver admonishing ‘sin city’ while ripping off its visitors, to the streets which waft like the pores of a man who’s been drinking for days, a feeling of lawlessness ensues.

At times in an eatery I felt I was on a pirate ship – a large number of grubby, pierced and tattooed (and I don’t mean LA ink style) youths rolling kegs and serving large plates of food, the decor possibly came from a shipwreck. Guests staggering around drunk, lots of people looking like they have scurvy, bandannas, and more than one Jolly Roger.

During daylight hours (and by this I mean after midday) one could be entertained by bohemian ragamuffin bands playing on the street, with names like ‘Tuba Skinny’. One was encouraged to imbibe at every opportunity of course which only leads to more pavement dancing.

The sensory combination that is the French Quarter often felt like a Jeunet et Caro film set, and having visited Bourbon St I have now seen the prototype upon which Rhodes’ infamous ‘Bar Street’ (Ορφανίδου) is based.

Move over Los Angeles, you ain’t nearly as cool as this place.

Lots of fun of course and too much tasty food to try everything. Fried (place food item here) was great although I didn’t find okra to put in the parenthesis. Catfish, shrimp, Cajun beans, poboys, oysters you name it, it tasted great and would surely kill you if you stayed.

What better for breakfast then some beignets and cafe au lait to wash away the memories of what one ate last night. The bright white icing sugar over the fried doughnuts, the table, you, and the floor, serving as a kind of ajax scrubbing everything clean (yet sticky).

And the reason our lodging had such a ‘happy feel’, according to the manager, was because it was once a brothel.

‘Tuba Skinny play a set:

Beautiful houses abound, both derelict and restored:

The NOLA streetcars took me back to the days of Melbourne tram conductors:

Overlooking Jackson Square:

Did I mention how good the Abita Resoration Pale Ale was? Dinner at Coops.

Mansion after mansion…

Street scene near our accomodation.

Don’t breathe in as you bite into your Beignet! We saw more than one human dragon coughing clouds of sugar.

We had to return to the garden district -a last resupply of film for a couple of weeks.

An ale at Lafitte’s, accomodating drinkers continuously since around the time Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay.

Suddenly, Martina noticed that someone might need a haircut…

We just saw on the news that 10 people died today in the tornados and severe weather that we heard emergency broadcasts about last night and this morning. (image from google)

An earlier motel we stayed in also had pictures of horrible food on the room keys. I didn’t really notice the first ones, but this evening they jumped out at me. Perhaps it was the choice of either sub or pizza. We decided to get something a little better and headed for Taqueria Sanchez – the roach coach outside the Super8 motel we’re in.

Since arriving at the Jackson Greyhound station in a Carmax shuttle bus this morning, the characters around us are getting more interesting and bizarre by the minute. At present I’m standing on our second bus – out of Baton Rouge – which was overbooked. I can either wait until 4:30am for the next one (“a free night at motel greyhound” I said, but the driver was as humourless as he was indifferent) or call a 1800 number on Monday.

The eccentric lady in her 60′s has not stopped her story-telling, chastising monologue, which becomes directed at another person only as long as they look at her, since Jackson. It crescendoed to a tirade when Greyhound staff at B.R. upset her. This brought the thug next to us onside ,and a common bond developed between him and Martina. With tattoo sleeves and blood over the left side of his face, the story he rebutted a homeless guy who was asking for money with (“Yeah well I was spittin’ blood all night, this sandwich is the only thing I ate in days. And my dog died.”) was more believable than that of the homeless man. The bloodied man, when a young, dolled-up black girl strolled out of the restrooms and out the front door, said “she must be a lady of the night; she din’ come in here looking like THAT”.

To avoid all of this confronting behavior, a young girl from the bus chose to spend the 90 minute wait standing in a corner of the vending machine room. Another hid inside the cafe.

Don Watson’s story is continuing to parallell our own journey. He rode the Amtrak to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina; we are not there yet but there is frequent mention of it amongst other passengers (chiefly the eccentric lady’s rants) and a sense not of pessimism, but of hardship and abandonment. It certainly feels like we are in another world.

A bus pulled up and unloaded its contents. A youth dressed like a bunny at a rave strolled around, and I followed him with my iPhone long enough to ascertain that even if he looked like a character from the film ‘Gummo’ he wasn’t as crazy, and asked him to let me photograph him. As it turned out, Kitaen Silver was in need of friendship – but didn’t ask a thing about me, instead offloading his recent problems. Fortunately it was soon time to board the bus.

Had we travelled this route with Amtrak we would have saved $25 and arrived hours ago; but this kind of experience was worth the extra time and money.

Eccentric lady preaches to the masses in Jackson before boarding:

Then she gives the driver a hard time:

Sussing out rabbit man before approaching him:

Kitaen Silva, fan of Japanese (sub-) culture, couldn’t wear his mask on the bus, for ‘obvious reasons’.

“There is an aesthetic to American rural housing… Every home is a patriotic statement, a miniature White House, America Personified.”

Maybe after a paint job this one might look a little more ‘White House’.

This is Boyd House, c. 1853, in what is now downtown Jackson. It’s ‘Greek Revival’ style.

It was about now that the radio broadcasts we were listening to in the car were interrupted by an emergency response system announcement by the Jackson National Weather Service. It sounded like something one would expect to hear during Armageddon; all blips and squawks, followed by a computerised mechanical voice reading reports on areas likely to experience a tornado. This is when we began to wonder how to form a Tornado Action Plan since the radio had made us beleive we were the only ones in the state without one. Best we could come up with was to take shelter at the bar
at a steakhouse. Seems to have blown over now…

It was a sad drive into Jackson today.. Our Prius has been good to us for the past three years, and particularly since we left LA. 8 days, 2500 miles, and an average of 48MPG. It’s also sad that she’s being sold for an absolute pittance – the Toyota dealer we visited couldn’t offer us more than Carmax – but time constraints make it a good deal, in a non-financial sense.

Approaching Jackson, the weather seemed to sense the impending goodbye and took a turn for the worse. After emptying the car into a motel room, the wind became very strong. We dropped our bulky tent bedding and mats off at the Salvation Army and then drove around Jackson in the pouring rain, admiring beautiful houses and listening to tornado reports on the radio every 5 minutes.

I’ve been trying to read a few pages of Don Watson’s ‘American Journeys’ in the tent before falling asleep at night. Last night, after mentioning the number of baptist Churches we’d seen, Don Watson also visited Jackson: “Jackson is the Rome of the First Baptist Chuch: its buildings stand over two whole city blocks. Several hundred other churches serve the city, whose population is substantially fewer than 200,000…”

(photo unrelated but interesting)

Last night we camped by the Mississippi river on Lake Bruin. We earlier crossed into MS to Natchez for some famous blueberry pie, only to find the strange looking store did so well it only opened 3 hours each day. Then we crossed the river again back to Louisiana to set up camp.

Earlier yesterday as we entered Louisiana the dense forests of east Texas petered off and the landscape opened up to massive corn fields, and occasionally wheat. These became larger and larger as we headed further south; after Natcitoches, the plantations began. Beautiful properties and houses.

The small town of St Joseph just before lake Bruin had some beautiful abandoned buildings.

Our map showed a ‘Political Museum’ in Winnfield, which sounded interesting. Unfortunatey there was not a photo of or reference to a single black person. As it turned out, the museum was based primarily on one figure, Earl Kemp Long, and should have been named ‘Musuem of White Politics’. Here’s Earl campaigning back in the day.

Much more interesting was Odell Woods, local police officer who was supervising inmate workers. The five or so black youths were helping out at the Council for the Aged; earlier today we saw another group pruning trees and ‘weed-whacking’ (using whipper-snippers). All involved wanted to be in photos; with thi iPhone I just got a photo of Martina and officer Woods. He was about 7′ tall and haas great rapport with the inmates. At first I thought they were all friends. He once had a guy escape on him, he said.

We should have been collecting shots of roadkill and putting them on a page of their own. There have been some great splats, mostly identifiable. Here’s the best so far. It’s an armadillo. Marti has been waiting to see an armadillo so we could take a photo of it and send it to her sister Kelli. Lo and behold, we found one. It’s a little worse for wear Kell, but we drove it back to Lee Richards who promised to fix it up real nice and post it straight to you. Make sure you send us a pic when you get it as we gotta get back on the road and leave the master at work!