Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 July 2004 19:57:12
Can't halt time, I guess.
When I moved back down to Louisiana in 1995, I was fortunate. My father allowed me to move into his little unused house trailer, set up on family land across the street from my grandmother.
All around me were cousins of one degree or another, elderly ones or their grown children, on cleared land surrounded by miles of woods and swamps. In some directions there were clearings for natural gas pipelines; in others there were fields originally cleared of cypress and swamp maple only perhaps 150 years ago, to grow sugar cane usually. The trees and the swamp water are patient, always willing to take over again if the tractors and the pumps should cease their work.
On the very lawn where I lived, between the little shotgun house "Nonc Mireaux" used to live in, and the relatively new blue-sided home of an elderly cousin and his second wife, my grandmother as a teen had worked a flooded rice field.
I don't know about all y'all in "older" parts of the world, but to be able to step outside and sink my bare toes into mud my great-grandparents had cultivated 100 years ago, man, THAT's a sense of history.
It meant a lot to me to be able to live there. I suppose we were there about two years.
We'd been in the Midwest for eight years before the move home. I loved Sioux City, I really did -- it had all the amenities of city life and few of the drawbacks. But always in the back of my mind was the alien feel of it.
I literally would think, sometimes, that if I ever lost everything I owned and had to feed my children off the land, I couldn't do it "up north". I didn't know what was edible. I didn't know the habits of the things to hunt for, the edible creatures.
For a long time, for years, after moving back "down home", I could be in the midst of the rottenest day imaginable, with everything going wrong and my plans crumbling about my ears... but I could still honestly breathe an easy grateful sigh and whisper, like a mantra, "I'm here. At least I'm home."
That's about worn off now. Perhaps I am becoming ungrateful.
The country roads heading back there to the clearings and swampland are all wonderful now, blacktopped and graded and swooping smoothly around curves originally laid out along borders of family lands and to accomodate the search for oil under the cypress swamps.
I remember when they were still gravel, though. Or, more accurately, shell, back then. White white glowing blazing pristine white in the sunlight, those clamshell roads. Raised up a ghostly grey-white dust when the weather was dry.
Then came the blacktop, the tar-and-gravel composite stuff, so much more sensible than sections of concrete on land not much more stable than jelly.
So what I grew up with was blinding white shoulders alongside smooth black road, gleaming white or yellow stripes, aggressively growing greenstuff always plotting to take over the roadbed again. Much of that long curving road was built up of earth dredged from either side to build up a high ground through the swampland.
So, a canal of dark water deep enough to swallow a car would run on either side of those swamp or marsh roads. Swamp and forest or reclaimed fields of sugar cane ran on either side beyond the canals. I was always passing through green tunnels in those summer memories. Hundreds of different shades of green, most of the year, much of it green even in winter.
I went to a meeting with my son the other night, in the little old town "up front" from the country area of my family's land. Afterward we had a root beer in a little old fast food joint on Bayou Lafourche, one continuously in business since before I was born. As far as I know it's the only place for many miles with REAL root beer.
Then the shortcut home I told him to take, avoiding downtown, not that it's a huge metropolis, hah, but it was late and quicker to take the shortcut.
As he drove I reminded him of landmarks we'd pass if we took this route or that, places he remembered well because he had to pass them when we drove to town all those years ago. He was 10 years old when we moved back here.
It was so odd, that drive. My adult son, driving me home, over these roads we'd traveled when I was behind the wheel and he was 10, 11, 12 years old.
I pointed out Talbot Drive, the one that crossed from the town past the high school, through the fields, past the auction barn where the relatives' fattened heifers were sold sometimes.
That's where that dogleg lies, just past the auction barn.
Other places on the roads took quirky turns too-- sometimes due to where high land was, sometimes to accomodate property lines of ownership. That dogleg, though, was just plain weird.
Why in the world wouldn't the landowners give up a few yards so the stupid thing could be made straight? It was-- is-- literally several yards of roadway in a deep kink, like the profile line of a dog's back leg.
Did it perhaps run that way to avoid a useful ancient live oak, 100 years back? A big tree left to shade the field hands, as is sometimes still done, though the days are gone of hundreds of people planting cane fields by hand...
No one knows, no one I ever asked. Mamman may have known -- my grandmother-- but she's gone now, two years this month. Perhaps the folks who run the auction house know... But I somehow never ever have the time to ask, to stop by there. They are probably cousins too, though they live farther "up front" than my known family. But, these busy days, I almost never go by there.
Except the odd trip, in the pitch dark of a moonless night, with my son driving, eager to get home to his sweet wife and the grandchild she's building for me. Putting him together from scratch, she is.
So I still don't know why that dogleg's there.
It's bad, though. Strangers don't see it coming, even though the cane is kept far back. Even with plots of land being sold off and stripped clear for houses along that stretch of road, somehow you can't tell the dogleg's coming.
I guess familiarity breeds contempt for the folks who know it, as well. Not everyone who wrecks there is some hapless innocent from Peoria.
We were driving home once, from town, back to the trailer, on an overcast day after a rainstorm. The Spouse and I. We were among the first couple of vehicles on scene after a wreck.
A full-size truck had crossed the center and bashed a sporty little car.
It appeared the truck's driver had been drinking, unless perhaps he was slurry and staggering due to hitting his head. He stayed close to his truck. The lady with him didn't, though-- she was totally disoriented, wandering, staggering. We had no way to know how badly she was injured -- Spouse gave her his best bass bellow, "Lie DOWN!", after I fetched some rugs for her. I had to put her down right there in the road, there being nothing but deep ditches and muddy fields right there at that dogleg.
Then I moved to the little car. The girl driving had bashed her head into the windshield -- there was a spiderweb crackle in it, and a matching one cut into her forehead. Blood streamed down her face. The pale ice-blue eyes sported by so many of us Cajuns gazed, dazed, out of a bloody mask.
Couldn't get her door open -- the window was down. She complained of wanting to get out -- she was feeling squashed in there -- yes, the steering wheel was pressing against her -- so I took a chance and lowered the back of her seat a bit.
No way could she get out of there before the paramedics arrived. Suppose she'd broken her neck, her back? I tried to make her understand that. There was spilled fuel, there was heat and steam but please God no sparks from the displaced engine...
She tried to move her legs, but couldn't -- the right was trapped at the ankle I thought, though not so badly they'd have to cut her out. As for the left -- unless the child had an amputation and a prosthesis up to mid-thigh to cause her jeans to move like that, I could see she'd a broken femur. Completely clean break, no blood on the denim that I could see, thank God. Didn't look like it had punched through her thigh. But, still, I knew she'd do something horrid to the muscles if she tried to scramble out of there with a femur broken in half.
So I held her hand, and brushed her hair from her eyes. The pupils were huge, but even and responsive. Heh. I guess if I'd gone through all that my pupils would be huge too.
The Spouse kept the other lady still, and bullied the truck keys away from the seriously impaired driver, who wanted to drive away! The rat. I have no proof but I KNOW that idiot was high or drunk or both. Fortunately, the Spouse can be a pretty intimidating sight, and had no trouble getting the keys.
By that time, residents in houses down the road had called for help, and arriving cars disgorged nurses and paramedics who happened by, arriving before the emergency vehicles.
One man, a nurse, managed to get the passenger door of the little lady's car open. He crawled in with her and consoled her, taking her hand and checking her pulse. The car seemed to settle, to stop steaming so much, and the gasoline wasn't actually streaming out anymore. It diluted itself on the road and down into the ditch, mingling with the rainwater still draining from the morning's shower.
The professionals were arriving, things were in hand, so we left. My rugs were still there in the side of the road when I next drove the dogleg, so I got them back.
Mamman told me later that the girl had been my youngest first cousin's fiancee. Last I heard, she did well with her therapy and is OK.
Small, small world, especially among the Cajuns. "Everybody knows your name" at Cheers, but in Cajun country everybody HAS your name.