The endearing Miz Alice

Spring is bustin’ out all over, we notice, as we head out of New Orleans across to Bay St Louis along the Gulf Coast in order to hunt down the art works of Miz Alice Moseley of Mississippi.

We notice, too, as we drive into Bay St Louis that there is a welcome sign pointing out that this is a Certified Retirement Community. When searching out what this means we discover that many of these southern states have begun to realise that Florida is not the only attractive destination for northern snowbirds needing a great winter break. They, too, have the stuff that makes Florida wealthy. 

So many places along this beautiful coast go through a very lengthy and demanding process of approval in order to meet state government criteria that allows them to become classified as a certified retirement site, such as generous tax arrangements, adult education opportunities, recreational activities, among many others. Down here, they have casinos, as well, for those who find the need.

And everything is sun drenched. Which seems to be a prerequisite. In between hurricanes, that is. Nowhere, though, is brighter or more charming than the folk paintings of Miz Alice Moseley of Mississippi.

After a long and happy career teaching in Batesville, Mississippi, Miz Alice moved down to Bay St Louis. She started painting only when she retired. Fun things she painted. On shingles. And old bits of wood. Folk loved her work, just as they did Clementine Hunter’s in Louisiana. And, like Clementine, Alice found herself drawn to painting. It became a compulsion. Her world, in retirement. And she painted her world. Her memories and her dreams and her wishes.

In Bay St Louis she found a house she could live in in retirement, and called her son to came take a look at it with her. He did. They ended up looking out at the blue blue sea, as everyone does. And there, on the waterfront, they espied a sad old man, the saddest person Alice had ever seen. She turned to Tim, and remarked wryly, that she hoped that was not going to be her in a couple of years given this decision she’d made to move.

It wasn’t. Alice had her new wooden home painted in bright Wedgwood Blue accented with brilliant white. She then painted a picture of it as a memento of that day on the beach. She called it: The House is Blue but the Old Lady Ain't.

Like Clementine, her work reflects her life, and the things she knows and loves and treasures. They often reflect wholesome homilies, too, on how she wished life had been way back. Her piece entitled: If Only The Past Had Been So Bright focusses on a shiny summer day, cotton pickin’ all in a row, kids playing in slave quarters, folk taking time to chat in the fields. Idyllic. Hopeful. If only.

Other pieces of her work focus on daily life activities, including church on Sundays. Much like Clementine’s works. One piece, entitled Memories of Fredonia Church, was a commissioned work. All the tiny details, the cemetery stones, the church cake stalls, the folk arriving for church and talking, are the things that appealed to Alice about church.

Alice needed a title, she said, before she could paint. Clementine, on the other hand, rarely spoke of her work using titles. When she was asked about a piece she would often say: “This one is about…” and she described the subject matter. Alice always hunted down that title. She had a friend who did patchwork. Something different. Alice pondered this--why one person liked one thing, another something else and she came up with her title: Life has so many angles. She then produced a work quite different from her other folk pieces. Geometrical. Stretching herself. 

Alice died a few years ago. Her works are greatly in demand and frequently being found, gifted, bought and displayed in the historic train station in Bay St Louis right opposite her Wedgwood blue home which still stands today.

For rent, as it happens. So folk who stay there need only to walk across the street to the museum where much of Alice’s life fills the walls upstairs. Her desk, her chair, the walls.

It is all so utterly endearing. Like the lady herself.

Poppies springing up

A park bench.  To while away the hours. 

Miz Alice

Her home

The house is blue but the old lady ain't

If only the past had been so bright

Memories of Fredonia church

Life has so many angles

Plantations and poverty

We planned a drive around plantation homes on one of our days in New Orleans. We started on the south side of the Mississippi where most of the plantations were sown with sugar-cane in days of old. The sun was shining, the houses and lands surrounding them were flat, even the stubble seemed to be shining. Some were spectacular, simply begging to be photographed, so it was easy to imagine life was idyllic in days long past. 

If you were not a slave. Tho’ some slaves must have have enjoyed their work, even so. Antoine, at Oak Alley Plantation, for example, was an excellent craftsman. Renowned. He was responsible for grafting a variety of paper shell pecan tree bearing a nut that was able to be cracked by hand. His trees were planted here, and far and wide in plantations elsewhere in Louisiana. He must have been proud. We would stop for a photo, oftentimes, when we came across a pecan plantation throughout Louisiana. They are lovely still. Likely thanks to Antoine's successful pecan. 

Oak Alley Plantation is named for its line of glorious live oaks, a double row of 28 of them. They were planted in the seventeen hundreds and were noticed and recorded by monk travellers soon after that, so stunning were they even then. The architect of the new plantation house built in the 1830s was inspired by the alley of oaks to design the house with 28 tall columns, repeating the pattern. It is one of the most photographed sites in America.

Tucked away under a tree in the back, by contrast, is one of the slave huts. Two families would have sheltered in such huts.  Today  a tree is there shading it.  I hope there was a tree in those days as the corrugated iron roofing would have been no protection after a hard hot day slashing sugar canes. 

We moved on to Laura Plantation, a typical Creole plantation house on stilts, without a hallway, where you enter one room via another. Here on a 12,000 acre sugar cane, pecan, rice and indigo property there were some 69 slave cabins, with 186 working slaves. There was a communal kitchen, water wells and an infirmary. It paid plantation owners handsomely to maintain their slaves health. To that end Laura also had chicken pens and vegetable gardens. And live oaks as shade. 

We stopped for lunch further down the road in a grim little town called Gramercy. The ladies at the local bakery spoiled us with their lunch special of shrimp over rice and a chocolate chip cookie. Their bakery made French bread that we could have taken away by the ton: a first. They were amused by our accents and made us say their names aloud so they might laugh. We happily obliged. They were delightful.

Their downtown was not. Gramercy has some big business in its surrounds — a massive state-of-the-art sugar refinery, for one, but still, one in five folk, in this town, live in poverty. Some of their accommodation is little different today than conditions two hundred years ago.

After lunch we crossed over to the north side of the river and visited some of the properties there. One that stood out was San Francisco for its 'steamboat gothic' architecture. It really is quite eccentric and the colours accentuate that. It, too, is on stilts, to catch the breeze, and it too, opens room to room, Creole style. 

All its plantation landholdings and slave quarters have been gobbled up by massive petroleum gas refineries. We could barely photograph this plantation house without their intrusion. This side of the Mississippi is completely ugly now, a never-ending skyscraper mess of mile upon mile of rust coloured cranes, metal tanks, towers and rigs pocking the shoreline. Scarring it forever. 

Making a fortune, no doubt. Though not much of anything is rubbing off on the surrounds.

 

One of our pecan plantation shots, near Natchez

Oak Alley's arcade of live oaks

Slave quarters with a little shade on a sun-drenched day

Laura

A line of slave cabins all in a row.
A photograph of a photograph to illustrate the closeness.

This looks boarded up, but it is actually the cafe where we had lunch

A home in Gramercy today

San Francisco plantation surrounded by oil refineries

The rising tide

On our first morning we headed down to where New Orleans started, taking a streetcar from directly outside our hotel in St Charles Avenue. The streetcar still had its old brass hand holds. Love that. For the first time on this trip we find ourselves among tourists. It is a shock. Another shock is that the streetcar attendants are tight-lipped, uncommunicative, unsmiling. No one getting on or off could cheer them up. That is not a good look in a tourist city.

Had the tracks gone on to the suburb of Desire I would have changed trams and gone out there. By myself, if needs be. Swooning, "Ah Marlon!" and thanking Tennessee Williams for his phenomenal work. Sometimes tourism has no idea how to make money out of people my age. They should reinstate that Streetcar named Desire that they stopped too many decades ago and let us all aboard. And put a performance on at the terminus.

Today our streetcar drops us at the French Market. Close here, native Indians rowed their graceful birch bark canoes down the big river, which became the Mississippi, portaging their goods and chattels across narrow strips of high ground between the southern lake and the big river in order to trade with strangers who came to their shores on big ships drawn by white sails.

The French wanted furs. In exchange, they had produce and trinkets from all over the world, captivating the locals. Then came the Spanish, who built a public market, here, a butcher’s market. But, after the Louisiana Purchase when the Americans took over, the trading heart was still called the French Market. And while the actual buildings have come and gone with hurricanes and floods over the years, the name survives today, in the heart of New Orleans.

A city grew up around the market. Many nations played a part in its evolution — Africans, Haitians, Italians, German, Irish, and so on. It became a mix of all of them, but, at heart, it was essentially Creole, enhanced by Cajun. Today that early cultural mix is reflected in everything about New Orleans: its cuisine, its music, its style, making it one of the most colourful and distinctive city in all of America.

And it is still changing. Ever changing. Not always for the better. When we were last here we stayed in the heart of the French Quarter, built on ground high enough to escape the worst of the ravages of the frequent flood waters and surges that are forever seeking to engulf much of this low lying land; too much of which has been reclaimed from the sea.

It is so like the Netherlands. Always playing a waiting game with rising water. And too much relies on levees, still. The buildings going up today are so heavy, too. I worry for their future. This whole area is so ecologically fragile. The authorities, trying to keep it all from sinking, will forever have to pump waters back to the sea. Yet one good-sized storm surge could see it all go under.

We retraced old steps. Beautiful St Louis Cathedral still rises up from behind the Place d’Armes, that green park and meeting place at the very heart of the old city, renamed Jackson Square after Andrew Jackson’s war wins down here. Haunted, it is said, by ghosts of brothers past; even a voodoo queen or two wails beyond its walls.

Increasing numbers of sky scrapers are edging ever closer to the beautiful red brick apartments, the Pontalbo buildings, lining two sides of the Place d’Armes, built by a baroness who lived in France. She built them, then seemed to forget about them for so long they fell into ruin, until an offer was made to the family, and they were renovated. Today, they still look beautiful.

We drank coffee and ate beignets in Cafe du Monde as of old. The tradition being that if this is your first visit you must blow the soft powdered sugar loaded over the sticky doughnut squares as you make a wish. Miss Bec did this. I think she wished that the coffee might taste better. The tradition, here though, is to serve the historical brew, Cafe au Lait, made from a mix of coffee grounds and ground endive root —chickory—which the French introduced as a substitute when coffee became scarce during the war. A bitter brew, actually. The place makes an absolute fortune on bad coffee and doughy doughnuts. And still we stop here. Nuts, all of us.

The lanes and arcades behind the waterfront still have an air of France about them, and are still called the French Quarter. The beautiful balconies are bedecked. Streets are lined with characters wanting to be seen and heard. Music groups of all sorts, ages and music styles can be found on major street corners all day long. We heard big band, soft folk, rock and country in the days that we were ambling. There is music everywhere. But very little of it was traditional jazz this time around, tho’ we chose never to stay too long after dark.

Because deep in the heart of the French Quarter, despite things having been tarted up for Mardi Gras with fresh paint, new purple, gold and green bunting aloft and stores bright with tacky t-shirts and tat that goes along with servicing such a tourist hub, there is, in general, an encroaching air of seediness, a subtle air of threat, hanging over the French Quarter—manifested in the many signs warning visitors to get around in groups, to stay together for their own security, to never walk alone after dark, all especially advised nowadays.

I remember when we were here before, perhaps ten or more years ago, restaurants hired security guards with long threatening guns to sit on chairs outside their eating establishments during night service, their eyes peeled. The French Quarter has long had an element of danger hanging over it. It is the place for tourists to hang out. It has always been where things happen. But, worse than ever, now, according to the crime statistics.

It even feels a little different. A little seedier. A whole lot edgier. The hustlers, more aggressive. The beggars more prevalent, more pervasive -- and, scarily, more insistent.

Cyclone Katrina is blamed for destroying many of the city neighbourhoods in the back of the French Quarter. As these fell into the waters and took too long to replace, or never were replaced, the 'control' those neighbourhoods used to provide — unwittingly, and for free — more often than not kept the lid on neighbourhood interactions and eruptions, and did much towards handling and limiting many outbreaks of violence and crime in the city. That ripple effect of pacifying has been diminished with the loss of these neighbourhood interactions. Gone forever, even. So, a constant whiff of danger lurks continuously throughout the French Quarter.

It was not so obvious a few streets away in the Garden District where we stayed, until we gave up walking and used our car to get around the city. You didn’t have to dig deeper than a block or two back to see more. There are scores of panhandlers begging at most busy intersections, holding aloft torn cardboard signs, where “Every little helps” is often the message printed in thick black letters.

You see homeless everywhere from the car. Hoards of them, hundreds of them, an entire community of men live below the pillars holding up the Pontchartrain expressway. These concrete pillars are stacked with piles of dirty quilts, cardboard boxes, and plastic bags of possessions. As we drove up one morning a group of dozens of these homeless men were involved in a massive fisticuffs brawl that had just broken out amongst themselves. Deep in the bowels of their ugly concrete hell hole where the sun never shines.

We drove on up the freeway entrance a'top the violent brawl.  Shocked to the core. It is impossible to know the right thing to do when something like that happens. Sadly, we noticed, just a little way along, a bleak, blocky Penitentiary. Most of these homeless will likely end up there at one time or another. Even today. We feel so helpless. But ache for them. And are angry on their behalf. These people need help. They should not be living under this bridge. They need food. They need shelter. They need a bath. They need warm clothes. And that is just today. They need a future. And that is long term.

I hear these bloated presidential candidates night after night on CNN promising to Make America Great Again. The money they are wasting trying to get themselves elected just to satisfy their backers' needs and desires once they get into office is sinful. No longer acceptable. During this campaign alone--which goes for nearly twelve months, and makes no sense at all and even mystifies most Americans--billions upon billions of dollars are wasted on televising endless debates, renting convention halls, booking out entire hotels for the enormous entourage, bagging endless airline seats from here to there and everywhere while criss-crossing the country, hanging tonnes of red and blue bunting that goes into a skip after a one night stand, and crossing an endless procession of palms with silver -- just this year alone.

Many candidates will each spend over a billion dollars in this campaign. Most of which goes on to make the very rich, much richer. Many candidates promise nothing more than to repeal every single piece of the work, even legislation, that already has cost the American public billions upon billions of dollars from the last time they went through this process and had an election.

How bizarre has politics here become. The waste of money is wrong. How can it go on when America's poor are living like this in so many places. We have never seen anything like it. The desperation is all too apparent. America has never been great for these people living on these streets. Their problems never get better. Never go away. And, clearly, never get solved.

But if America would just take one small step -- a simpler, cheaper, more sensible route to electing a president, for example, that was not so aggrandising and wasteful -- they could, then, divert all those billions of campaign dollars into looking after the destitute in their own communities. That might offer a chance of improving the lives of an entire subgroup of their own American family — folk who have no way of helping themselves. Helping them find a way to have a life. And mayhap help America became a better place in the process.

Building walls to block off the unwanted has never been an effective solution anywhere in the world. And building levees does not solve structural problems when things are built on such flimsy foundations. Structural problems need to be solved. Because the tide always turns. And not always for the better.

One of the famed streetcars

Arches to the French Market

Even the peanuts in their shells are deep fried.
"Eat da whole shell"

St Louis Cathedral behind the Place d'Armes

Atmospheric painting of the French Quarter

Pontalbo building

Beignet et cafe dans Cafe du Monde

Beautiful balconies 

Playing to the beat and the crowd 

Musicians everywhere

  

Child busking.  Should be home after dark.  

Destitute resting in a bus shelter

Some shelter in tents on the streetcar lines

Bizarre politics and politicians

Peace at last, perhaps

A litany of limited choice

We’re now heading to New Orleans, one of our favourite places in the States. Hopefully, we’ll arrive before the hurricane cell hits that is rolling in from the south.  As we are driving the entire sky has turned a dirty grey colour, fuzzy like carded cotton, from horizon to horizon. Closing in. Eerily.

It did this once before as we left Poverty Point, and we discovered later, that we were just 20 minutes west of a hurricane that had quickly formed and completely upended four settlements across to our east. This one looks just as ominous. 

Not long ago we saw a sign which said Hurricane Route, with an arrow pointing in the direction we are headed, but nothing since. And, we have no idea what a traveller does in a hurricane. We haven’t seen any more of those hurricane shelters for hundreds of miles. And stopping in the middle of the road does not seem an option as these things are temperamental enough to do a backflip and twist around you twice before you know it. So, on we go. Stupidly. 

We have been so lucky with the weather to date, and we’re hoping that continues, as even in February, we are in summer clothes, and have been most of the time since we arrived, despite it being winter down here. We have only had a few days of a fading cold front in Atlanta where we needed our jackets, particularly in the evenings, though also for rain, there, one morning. Then, another day, coming out of Chattanooga, the same weather system tried very hard to dump snow, and though soft flakes fell for about ten minutes, it didn’t stick to the ground. It melted beforehand. 

So many folk, we notice, here in southern Louisiana, live in trailers, which are not much protection against tornadoes that roar through these parts seasonally. They must live with worry. We are realising that so many Americans everywhere, now, use trailers as their housing.

We remember seeing many from our trip a few years back, around Vermont and New Hampshire, and being utterly surprised. Down here, though, trailers seem to predominate as housing, particularly in the rural sector.  If you own a block of land you put a trailer on it.  Or you share space with someone who does. Trailers are heavily present on town lots, too. Caravans and fifth wheelers, as well. These are all being used as permanent housing, and not for recreation. 

We read recently that there is a large group of Americans who have lost their homes given their dire economic circumstances since the global financial crises, who now live in trailers, or, even their cars, as they have no other option. Many, the report said, cannot even afford to do the upgrading on these when they need,  like fixing the water pump. Or buying new tyres.

The lack of options that some folk have has been all too visible this trip. One in five, and sometimes one in four, of the folk in the places we have visited recently, live below the poverty line. Pulling themselves out of that circumstance seems impossible. 

Even the character of many of these towns seems to add to their terribly bleak lives. So many downtowns, have so many buildings boarded up, as they no longer function. Trucks and cars moving along the interstate have created a different world in the last few decades. We have seen it in other places, too, but it is well advanced, here in the south. Hotels, motels, inns and the like, have sprung up on the outskirts of towns to provide necessary accommodation for the endless transit traffic that keeps many roads in a constant state of repair, or needing repair. Hotel strips. 

These have mushroomed since the earliest days of transit. We saw this in Turkey not so long ago, with the camel stops, the caravanserai, along the old silk route. Though these structures were built of rock and as solid as perpetuity: made to last. Hundreds of years old, and utterly picturesque, they have become tourist attractions. Rising up out of that vast flat land, like welcoming beacons with their beckoning eastern arches and towers. Beautiful structures then; beautiful even now. 

The same cannot be said for the highway inns of America. Many have seen better days. It seems to us as travellers, using them each night, that when reviews become too terrible and folk simply refuse to use some of them, the management chain, say the Holiday Inn, or the Hampton Suite, seems to on-sell that bit of degraded stock rather than have it revamped. Then, with a paint job and a name change, a new holder from another chain, attempts to eke out a few more years renting the same deathly tired rooms to weary travellers.

Doors may have holes punched in them. Curtains may be disintegrating. Tiles cracked and heavily moulded. Drawers refuse to slide. Power points don’t work. Carpets are often not clean. Occasionally, old mouldy take-out food long forgotten in refrigerators greets the next resident. When we think we have surely seen it all, something new awaits us most nights. 

Breakfast offerings in these inns, too, have been a litany of limited choice. Cereals are mostly sugar-laden: multi-coloured Coco Pops, and the like. Bread slices are always on offer, laid out out exposed to the air in a plastic serving bin. If all the slices arrayed are not eaten today, they appear again tomorrow. The bread is sweet, which is really off-putting at breakfast time. 

Too, ‘biscuits’ are offered. Like heavy doughy scones that appear to be defrosted en masse. Some folk pour a thick white-coloured gravy over them before eating. The gravy looks like the potion we would mix up as school children with flour and water to glue our exercise book covers on, so none of us has been brave enough to taste it. Store-bought waffle batter in a premixed container along with corn syrup, are the main breakfast options, most days. 

But occasionally, there is a tray of poached eggs displayed. Cold. These look like my grand-daugher's silicone eggs from her plastic play kitchen and are a similar rubbery texture. They look identical in every hotel, so we think they must be bought processed, a dozen to a tray, pre-poached. Just peel them out of a box and pour them onto a breakfast platter. The ‘sausage’ rounds are similar. These are flat thin discs of very uniform slices of manufactured fat and cereal mixed, possibly, but not assuredly, with bits of bacon and sausage, or something like that. Whatever it is it is processed beyond recognition and no longer looks like real food. Some brave folk stuff this slice inside a biscuit and top it with gravy. And eat it. Others walk in, grab a coffee -- always from a thermos, and usually cold -- and walk out. That is not even a smart choice. 

We had thought of renting a motorhome initially; staying in caravan parks enroute, but we are now glad we didn’t as that option is even less promising than the hotels, down here. Caravan parks seem to be used mainly for seasonal workers, or for those who may be hoping to find work. All are too grim to even want to enter. 

As the inns accumulate on the edges of most towns, so, too, do the eating places. These, like the inns belong to chains so, again, there is little or no variation between the food in one town and the next. No matter how far you drive. Most travellers, most nights, have the choice of stock items on stock menus and they are, in the main what we are becoming to think of as the four American food groups: fried chicken, burgers, 'BBQ' and, to a lesser extent but occasionally available, a steak house of some sort: but usually a cheaper one, like a chicken fried steak option.

Louisiana has the benefit of the Atchafalaya Basin which adds crawfish as a food option. Millions of pounds of crawfish are pulled from every waterhole in this state every year. This has been a saviour to us at meal times, though there is little or no variation in the serving, presentation, or choice, with that either. Boiled potato and boiled corn, typically, is what is offered as a side option with a crayfish platter. 

Towns all over Mississippi were heavily into BBQ - ribs, brisket, and the like. Though, never hot. Most food that we have been offered in any of the states we have travelled this trip— except for the crawfish which has always been brought to us fresh from the boil — is prepared earlier in the day, or even the day before, or probably even the day before that, depending on when the BBQ pit was loaded and fired. It is then kept warmed in a bain marie. Nearly cold. Always. We worry about the growth of bacteria on much of it, so we frequently resort to asking that our plates be zapped in a microwave where that option is even available. 

Even trying to avoid these roadside eating places and heading downtown does not improve our eating options as most alternatives have long ago closed. As for finding a fine dining option, or a pub, or a dedicated coffee shop serving an espresso enroute — these are now so rarely available, we no longer attempt to hunt them down. 

Plenty of churches, though, we are noticing. This week there were fifty-two in an eight mile radius. With Catholic, now, added to the mix in Louisiana. No doubt a result of the earliest settler settlements in these parts. 

The food of the south has been one of our biggest disappointments, this trip. We had heard about the famous BBQs, and were keen to try these, along with the marinades so frequently touted as being well worth bottling. Or ensuring the recipe was under lock and key. 

We even listed these 'must visit BBQ' places enroute, and went out of our way to visit others that came so highly recommended. We have now tried dozens, but have yet to be served a plate of BBQ that tastes as if it was cooked this morning, even; or where the marinade isn’t just a variation on a bought tomato sauce flavour with a few spices added. Most of the marinades taste just like a thick gluey ketchup, smothering the flavour of meat, which can’t really be discerned through this heavy coating, though the pork often does what it should, and falls off the bone. Which is good. But, we have never once been served hot barbecue. Which is not good. And, most times, the meat is served with a side order of beans, so generic in flavour they might have been poured out of a tin from the nearest supermarket. Then tossed with brown sugar before serving. As is the taste of the only other side offered along with the BBQ meat — the coleslaw. This, too, is offered with sugar added: sweetened cabbage slaw. 

Many sides offered here with entrees, though, are sweetened. Sweet potato, for instance, is frequently served as a casserole mashed with additional tablespoons of sugar. Then, topped with marshmallows. It tastes like dessert. Not enough for some folk, though. We have literally seen customers take their plate of cold barbecued meat, sweetened coleslaw and syrupy beans from the bain marie, head over to their table, pick up a sugar sachet or three, and literally shake granulated sugar over their entire plate of food before even tasting a morsel. The way some people add salt. 

And, for some reason, china plates and silverware have disappeared in eating establishments on our route since leaving Atlanta. Oh, how we miss the food in Atlanta! Even in motels you are offered only disposable plates, mugs, and plastic cutlery. And that is for breakfast, coffee, lunch or dinner. Ai-yay. 

[Enlightened note to self: I toasted a bagel this morning for breakfast. When I placed it on the breakfast plate to top it with cottage cheese it literally melted through the styrofoam plate in seconds. So, that must be why food is served cold. To save floor cleaning when hot food melts plates and drops through it to the floor.]

As this trend develops, as inns and eating establishments mushroom along the interstate exit strips, so, too, do the gas stations, lining up left and right as options along the strip streetscape. Then someone thinks to build a strip mall, including a giant Family Dollar shop where anyone can buy anything for a dollar. Even a cylinder box of a dozen hard, small, processed and pressed frozen burger slices for dinner. Or many dinners. Then a pharmacy might go up. Then a medical centre follows. Then a school further along the road. And, down here, at least since we came to Mississippi and Louisiana, endless casinos are added. Shonkily built, usually behind the gas stations.

We can’t get over the similarity to the border towns of the Czech Republic when we were there a few years back. Where trucks stop, casinos proliferated. Accompanied by a dizzying array of pasted advertising billboards that were sheltering day prostitutes, sitting, standing, waiting, in accessible lay-bys, even on mattresses under trees— though, we have yet to see that so obvious down here. There are lots of churches about, frowning, for one. And for a second, the days of Huey Long as governor, have long gone.

Inevitably, given all this movement, when downtown shops and businesses move out to the cross roads where the traffic action is, means that many of those old downtowns simply die. All that often remains is the town courthouse, with its surrounding bevy of offices of the local Attorney at law, the proliferation of Bail bond shop fronts, and Pawn Brokers. They survive. They often look as through they are the only thing that does in the downtown. 

As business moves to the strip malls along the interstate — life does, too, in some cases. In one very small town with a reasonable population of twelve thousand, we were served a quick 'hot soup' lunch in a Cracker Barrel restaurant by a waitress. Cold. We were chatting, looking to find the historic downtown to see a recommended site, and she was trying to help us. She was all of forty, possibly older. She had lived here all her life, she said, but she ended up apologising for not being able to give us precise directions for how to get downtown. She knew there was one, she told us, but, in her entire life, she had never been to that historic part of the town. Never. She lived her entire life along the strip with Wendy’s, McDonalds, Walgreens, and Walmart, motels and gas stations. She begged us, as we were leaving, not to mention that to any of her work folks. She did not want them to know. We eventually found the site in the obscure downtown that we were looking for, by ourselves. It was one of our favourite stops this trip and it was precisely 1.2 miles from where we had lunch. Yet some folk, that close, had not travelled that far in 40 years. Which seems inconceivable. 

So. These small towns with their historic hearts are dying throughout these southern states. Many with their delightful old solid Art Deco buildings, their movie theatres, their Conoco gas stations, their old bus depots, all boarded up. Buildings strong enough to shelter in if the hurricane gets too close. Which, as it turned out today, it was very close to us. But we only discovered that out hours later. 

We safely found our hotel in the heart of New Orleans, looking very French, with a lovely outdoor courtyard which would be delightful with the sun shining on its pretty umbrellas. All dressed up in its Mardi Gras colours for the season. As a case in point, though: the daily rate for this hotel is around $US145.00 per night for travellers (about $ AUD 200 a night) if you don’t include parking charges for your vehicle which add another $US35 a day, as this is in the heart of the Garden District. Oh, and on top of that, taxes. 

Here, the centre of the city still lives, so we aimed for a hotel in its centre. The hotel is very pleasant. We are happy with it. But, even for that price, it is far from perfect. Both the shower and bath connections hang loosely from the wall. One good touch, or lean, against either and they will fall off, and not work. They must have been replaced at some time, even recently, it appears, but they just don’t fit. And never did. And no one sought ones that did. Some of the lamps work only if you keep holding their bulbs tightly against their sockets. The upholstery on the chair is deeply stained — we keep a towel over it, trusting that even that is clean. And there is a massive wad of dried chewed gum on the frame of the bathroom mirror.

But still, we have shelter, and, now, the weather system is passing, so there is much relief. One small hurricane, we then see on television, made a path directly behind us on our route. Another was just ahead of us. We really were right in the middle of it. Though we missed even a gusty wind, and just had a bit of drenching rain in spells, that obscured our driving. We were lucky. And stupid. We still have no idea what to do in that scenario. 

Two trailer parks, east and west of downtown New Orleans, were hit, though. And a score of fifth wheelers and static caravans were uplifted into the air like feathers, then tossed to the ground crumbled to a pulp of steel and matchsticks. Life doesn’t get any easier for some. They should go find an old abandoned Conoco in the next downtown. No one seems to want them and they look solid enough to withstand the strongest hurricane.

 

A pleasant little eating establishment with an array of Creole dishes that mama taught her to cook.

Downtowns often desolate and barren looking

Casinos, typically, are tucked away behind gas stations

A sign of the times

Courthouses, bail bonds brokers, pawnbrokers, and attorneys all seem to survive in the downtowns

Old art deco Conoco.   Often empty.  

Lovely, but far from perfect 

Tabasco tradition

We have lost count of the times we have eaten crawfish now, in Louisiana, and given that we are here just in time for these little mudbugs to be out in good numbers in the waters of the bayou we should have many more. Luckily, Louisiana harvests some 150 million pounds of crawfish a year, so our few pounds are not going to make much of a dent on the harvest. Hopefully. Though we are doing our best.

Tonight we ate at Crazy 'Bout Crawfish in Breaux Bridge, a colourful little venue with the usual collection of jars and cylinders and bottles of spices, sauce and other chilli condiments that Louisiana diners expect to have on hand to accompany their crawdaddies.

Each crawfish boiler seems to use a different selection of spices to flavour. The chilli level can vary dramatically. We like it hot. Tabasco hot. So, when we came to Avery Island, the home of McIlhenney and Co we crossed over a bridge, passed through the manned checkpoint, and parked,  to explore the history of our favourite Tabasco sauce.

Tabasco sauce started, even before the Civil War, when Edmund McIlheney, a banker from up north, threw a handful of chilli seeds into his father-in-law's vegetable garden at their home on Avery Island.  After the Civil War, with the country decimated, Edmund, without work and prospects bleak, moved to Avery with his wife and children, only to find his chilli plants fruiting profusely.  A foodie, he set about making use of them: harvesting the chillis so as not to waste them, mixing them with this and that, bottling them for the cellar in old cologne bottles he found at hand.

The family loved his chilli sauce.  Friends did, too.  Over time he was urged to make something more of it. Grow more chilli plants. Fill more bottles. Add a label. This he did.  Though Edmund died without ever realising he had created a giant which remains, to this day, one of the world's favourite hot sauces.

Descendants of Edmund's family still run the Tabasco factory on Avery Island.   Always, it has been a family business: with the family virtually building a town close by to house their workers early in the twentieth century.   They even built them a dance hall, where they loved to tango on nights off.   So, the town came to be named Tango.  Many of the worker families have been on the island for generations.  One aged gentleman worker, who died not so long ago, was over 90 and had lived on the island for all but two years of his life.

Nowadays, the sauce factory and the historical museum on Avery island, is a show place, and makes a great tourist attraction. Some of the loveliest things survive from the earliest days. The bottles are still shaped like those old long-necked cologne bottles that Edmund loved and used.  The logo is still a diamond, still distinctive. These days, though, there are many flavours and a selection of heat levels.

While the recipe remains really very simple. Just a mash of garden fresh chilli mixed with salt. Great deposits of salt exist in underground caverns here on Avery Island, and in such a watery world,  there is no end to this salt.

The salted mash is stored in aged wooden bourbon casks topped with salt, and carbon dioxide, released from the chilli mix, bubbles up through the salt fermenting the mixture.   After three years, vinegar is added.  Then, the process only requires taste testing to finalise before it is bottled, ready for sale and distribution. The tradition lives on.

Crazy 'Bout Crawfish

Tabasco hot

Edmund devised Tabasco using his garden chilli

Part of the processing

Distinctive diamond logo 

Salted mash in aged bourbon casks

The beat goes on in the bayou

We have been exploring the bayous in this amazingly watery state. We hardly saw birds in Mississippi.  I think flowering trees must have mostly been cut to grow cotton there.  Here, though, they are in bird heaven. We have been seeing male and female cardinals--such stunning birds; but our favourite, has been the snowy egret. We have seen them raise their delicate and fanciful plumes, particularly in the afternoons as they are grooming, safe in the protective crook of a cyprus tupelo tree, deep in the bayou. But it is hard to get close, so we took a better shot of an image in one of the observation rooms we came across enroute.

Hard to imagine these birds were nearly extinct at the end of the eighteenth century when the women of New York had their milliners decorate their hats with these showy feathers.  Egret hunters were decimating the egret, killing off mamas, skinning them for hat feathers, leaving hundreds of baby egrets to die, untended, in the nest.  Luckily a New York socialite read about the disgraceful practise and solicited her cousin to help her write to every single lady in the New York Blue Book social register begging them to boycott the trade.  Luckily, that single act worked, and today the snowy egret is back in force in the bayou. We found many snapping turtles sunbathing on grass tufts, too, but alligators were lying low today.

Sundays appear to be the day for relaxing on the bayou. Folk, even, have private settlements with their personal houseboats moored on the water. Here for the weekend they go fishing, alligator hunting, a huge pastime,  and partying. We came across three separate parties just along one route.

The first was in an old landing jetty done up as a seasonal seafood joint and bar.  Here a group of musicians were playing the folksy Cajun classics we're getting to know.  So relaxed and homey it was, that one of the band members 4 1/2 year old daughter sang an entire song, in their French dialect. And danced non-stop to her dad's music, much to our delight.  Great to see the young ones learning the old ways, too.

Next, we came across a party on a houseboat where folk, enjoying their free time on the weekend, were playing loud Cajun music as they were moored ashore, uninterrupted by anyone, and interrupting no one, except maybe the alligators.

Finally, we found what I would imagine must be a modern day jook joint, though not playing the blues. It was a large wooden hut, overlooking the bayou, decorated with coloured lights, with graffiti signatures all over as in Ground Zero in Clarksdale, and folk began pouring in, at first in dribs and drabs as we arrived, then in their hundreds, paying a cover charge on entry and buying drinks, chatting and talking. 

Then a band turned up. A Creole band, playing Zydeco music.This was our first experience of Zydeco. We were completely wowed. 

Creoles, at least in Louisiana, appear to have an African-based heritage as part of their makeup. They were born here, but their ancestors may have been freedmen, or slaves,  But, typically, a Creole would have a mixed heritage, potentially including Spanish ancestry, French colonist, German, American Indian, or suchlike.  So, an amazing mix of race and musical influences make up this Creole music style; which, like Creole food, is quite unique. 

Zydeco, like Cajun music, utilises fiddles, guitars and accordions. But, different from Cajun, they use a washboard, which in this band was made of metal, and hung, like a suit of metal chest armour,  from the shoulders of the washboard player. It added a phenomenal steely metallic slash to the musical beat.  Zydeco music is so popular, thanks to the Creoles down in these parts, that it now has its own category in music awards nationwide, and musical venues, playing Zydeco, are all the rage hereabouts.

Hundreds and hundreds of very happy people started dancing as the music began to play.   We were completely wowed. This is what the crowd was here for.  So, finally seeing such crowds on this remote edge of a  bayou made sense to us. Amazingly, the dance crowd was not all that young. Ages ranged from mid twenties to the mid sixties, we estimated.  But they were all rocking; here to spend the next four hours having a blast.

The rhythms were intense. The beats complicated in rhythm, somewhat Caribbean, somewhat African, somewhat rock, somewhat Harry Belafonte blues, and somewhat Cajun, but so upbeat you could not resist dancing, and the dancers were so skilled they could have been on television competing: often doing a jerky version of jive, that looked like a two step.  Amazingly well practised. 

The wooden floorboads rocked. The old building shook. You could feel the beat vibrate deep into to your bones. Even today, their beat goes on. 

Snowy egret

Alligators lying low in the bayou

Snapping turtles trying to sunbathe on a tuft

Private cluster of houseboats accessed by boardwalk

Folksy cajun classics

Houseboat party

Zydeco look joint