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I had stopped to camp at mile 34 on my odometer; it ended up being three miles in the dark to get to downtown Port Sulphur, where I was told there was one store open in the evenings that would have food – a gas station.  I had a headlight for the bike, but its attachment decided to break as soon as I actually started using it, and so I held it in my hand as I rode.  I then finalized my earlier determination not to do much night riding.

The gas station ended up being quite a bit livelier than I could possibly have expected – though I really should not be surprised anymore by the vitality of Louisiana.  The gas station had a larger-than-normal grocery section, and a small pizza parlor attached, where frozen pizzas were thrown into a little oven. With the assistance of a ravenous hunger I managed to finish half of one, swearing to the Lord above that in the future, with all due respect to his Provident Mercies, I would rather starve.   The pizzas are made by a company called Hunt Brothers; and if they ever start selling pizzas in New York City, we know the Apocalypse is near, for the Abomination of Desolation will be in the sanctuary.

But they did a brisk little business in Port Sulphur, did this pizza company which sponsors NASCAR drivers, and the place was a hub of activity.  Strange, lonely-looking men with baseball caps and red eyes and moustaches stood around, waiting for their pizzas and ogling the attractive young woman who threw them in the oven; others sat at their tables, looking off into the distance, finishing, in a room full of men, another meal alone.  Groups of Hondurans came through getting groceries.  A black man yelled at his little son who had started crying: “I TOLD you it was hot.  I TOLD you not to eat it! Now don’t come cryin’ to ME!”  A black woman who worked the counter barked at everyone around her: “Now that’s the LAST PIZZA I’ve had enough we’re closin’ down NOW!”  “Where’s the mop?  Where’s the god-damned mop?  I don’t CARE if the place is full, it’s time to mop!”

She looked up at me.

“You’re closing?”

“Damn right we’re closing what does it look like?”

It looked like the place was not closing.  “Can I get a pizza?”

“Didn’t I just say we were closing?”

“What about one to go?”

The other woman behind the counter, a young blonde, said, “I’ll make you a pizza.  What do you want?”  I placed my order and the black woman turned around and started muttering.  An older, poorly shaven man who was standing very nearly behind the counter and had the general air of a derelict and a drunk, smiled.  The black woman reached into a refrigerator, opened a beer, and gave it to him.  I slunk away from the counter.

“Don’t SIT there I just CLEANED that table,” the black woman said to me.  I sat at a different table, but I will say, the place showed no sign of closing whatsoever.  In fact, it was just about full.

A young black woman came in.  “Gimme a root beer.”  The black woman behind the counter reached for a cup to fill the order.  “No, a BIG ONE.  Hey, fill the ice to the top!  Gotta be ALL the way to the top!”  When there was a pause, she barked, “I don’t wanna cup of ice I wanna ROOT BEER.  Hey, all the way to the top, Bee!  Yeah.  No, wait til there’s no more foam.  Fill it up.  Hey – don’t put that lid on yet!  Fill that up!”  When the cup was full – and the black woman behind the counter, I will add, complained the entire time about these proceedings: “You’ll get what I say you get!  I know when it’s full!  God-damn, bitch!”  – as I say, when the cup was full and capped the customer said, “Now gimme two straws.”  And when she got the two straws, she just burst out laughing, saying, “Ha, she gave me two straws!” turning around to everyone else in the pizza parlor in triumph, showing her two straws.

Then I knew I was getting closer to New Orleans.

When my pizza came out, I asked the blonde woman, “Are you closing?  Do I have to take this to go?”

“Naw we’re open for another half-hour.”

“I got the impression you were closing.”

“Naw don’t listen to her she’s just having fun.”

“Is it always this lively here?”

“This?  This is slow.  Usually it’s a lot brisker than this.”

“You all seem pretty saucy.”

“Yeah, well, we have to be!”

“Are you from around here?  You certainly seem at home here.”

“I was born here, but I live in Texas.”

“Why are you here now?”

“This is my vacation.  My Dad lives here, I come back for two weeks.  I work here because it’s fun.  I’m hoping to move back here, I love it around here.”

“You don’t like Texas?”

“No it’s just that I love it here.  But you know, my mom is in Texas, we’ll see.  Excuse me one sec.”  Some young man she knew had showed up, and it seemed he was trying to arrange some kind of date with her.  She went to the other end of the counter.  After a few moments she came back, smiling.

“You seem like you get plenty of attention,” I said.

“I won’t lie, I like to have a good time.  I don’t like to stay at home much.”  Another young man came in, and she started talking to him – he was another man she knew.

I ate half my pizza, hopped on my bike, said my goodbyes, and headed back to my tent.  It was certainly the most interesting meal I had had in a gas station.

The old Barrois Drug Store.

Buras did indeed have a little downtown, but the shops were all boarded up or abandoned; it did have a library, however, built on stilts. Local government has apparently made the determination that future floods are to be expected. I visited at a Vietnamese coffee shop just to see it, and got a soda in its cheerless environs; I then cycled through some quiet ground, springing up in dense thickets of trees and shrubs and vines. I saw the fish-oil factory Roland had mentioned, run by a company called Daybrook, and so I knew I had arrived at Empire; I crossed a canal on a drawbridge, landing at a fine old church called St. Ann’s, a white clapboard structure which, except for its denominational affiliation (Roman Catholic) and a noticeable emphasis on the cross as a decorative element, might be at home in New England.

Saint Ann of Empire.

Here beside the church a pair of older men were working on a malfunctioning sedan. They were as unlikely and picturesque a pair as could be imagined, the one looking like a respectable retired manager of a stationery business, the other a big fat slow man in baseball cap, overalls, and a footlong ZZ Top beard. I do not have to say which man had come to fix whose engine. They had apparently gone to school together. Overalls had a pickup truck which for grime, rust, and picturesqueness could not be excelled; its odometer read over five hundred thousand miles. “That don’t tell you nothin’ ‘cept how old the odometer is,” he said. “I think I’ve changed out every other part in the whole thing.”

“Probably more than once,” Professional said.

“Probably more than once,” Overalls agreed.

I wanted to take a picture of them but was too shy to do so.

Unloading oysters.

The light was very fine, and the sun was setting; so I decided to leave my bike and walk over to the highway, which crossed the canal on a large, tall bridge which commanded a fine view: it had been the highlight of the drive from New Orleans to Venice. It did not disappoint. I watched the boats down below; I had been wondering about some of the canopied flat-bottomed boats I had seen, wondering what their various purposes were; and I found out. These were oyster boats. I could see men unloading the boats, one burlap sack at a time. This was one industry which had hardly changed at all, apparently: these oyster sacks had been the standard mode of gathering oysters for many decades.

Roland had told me that the oyster harvest was smaller than it had been before Hurricane Katrina, but he did not think it was because the oysters were fished out or unhealthy: he said that there were simply fewer oyster fishermen. They had all gotten big payouts from the insurance companies after Katrina; and many, who were nearing retirement age anyway, had taken the payouts and retired on them.

I could see large piles of white stuff near the oyster boats, and my eyes are not what they used to be, so I called down to the men:
“Hey! Are those oyster shells there all piled up?” Because if they were, I had never seen so many oyster shells in one place.

“It’s gravel,” a man yelled back at me.

“What do you do with the gravel?” I called back.

“We dump it in the water. The oysters attach themselves to it.” They were building oyster reefs.

Otters!

I kept on walking, up to the top of the bridge, and there – mirabile dictu – I saw some dark shapes moving in the canal below. Again I was struck with wonder and joy – “Oh my God,” I said, “SEA OTTERS!!!” I have since read that sea otters live only in the Pacific, so these must have been river otters, but my joy in them was the same. They were swimming around in the open water of the canal. I watched as they swam, in a pack, to an abandoned boat, which they boarded, using it as a gangplank to get onto land, where they frisked about a bit on the tall grass, and then, in a pack, all decided to go back into the water and swim under the bridge, playing and gamboling all the while. It was amazing. Again, I was struck by how alive this place was – how beautifully alive.  I could watch the human beings living off it just as much as the other animals.

The Rooster of Empire.

I went back to my bike and set out once more. I had heard that the pastor of the Catholic Church in Port Sulphur let people camp out behind the church, so I figured I would head there; but the sun was setting, so I pulled off the road where I saw a little pathway go over the levee to an old river-landing. Here I found an old rooster and his hen living happy little independent lives in the old dock; and I pitched my tent not far from them, just a few feet from the bank, and watched the sun go down on my first day on the Missisippi River.

I had found, during the latter half of the day, neither supermarket nor restaurant of any sort; and so I set up my tent and struck off in the dark for Port Sulphur. This was not an ideal situation – I don’t like biking in the dark – but I was hungry, and I felt I had to try to get something.

The inner ruins of Fort Jackson.

After Boothville there was some waste ground, which was coming up in forest; here there appears to be ground enough to grow trees. Cycling along the levee I came to the ruins of an old fort, Fort Jackson, which had been built in 1830 to complement a similar Spanish fort on the other side of the river, Fort St. James. These structures – large pentagons of stone (or here, since there is no available stone, brick) with holes for cannon – are found in several of the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean, and around New York Harbor as well. The fort was refurbished with concrete around the time of the Spanish-American War. I took my picnic lunch there, and then seeing the clouds beginning to look threatening – after what had been a glorious, sunny morning – I tried on for the first time my rain gear. But when I resumed riding I found it was too warm and humid to ride wearing rain gear – I preferred rain to sweat.

The "wetlands" west of Buras. Just a few feet of grass and then open water.

From the fort for greater speed I returned the main highway, which runs on the opposite side of the narrow peninsula. It too is next to a levee: the so-called “citrus levee,” which protects the area from the wetlands – now more and more the Gulf – to the west. Jutting out into the Gulf, this is one of the most frost-protected regions in all America, and it supported a modest but profitable number of citrus orchards. The levee’s specific purpose was to keep out the salt water, which would have killed the trees; but during Katrina the levee was overtopped, and sure enough, the trees are now all gone. Climbing the levee I found that what once was salt marsh was now open water. Though the water is shallow, a levee is not sufficient protection against it, and the town of Buras, though twenty miles “inland” from Venice, is dangerously exposed to the Gulf.

Before I made it to the highway I passed some men putting up some very large tents – over a hundred feet to a side – as if for a school graduation or reunion.  They swung the sledgehammers, pounding in the tent poles in a most impressive way.  Again, they looked different from any New Yorkers I had met, and speaking to them I found they were from Honduras.

Pretty easy to tell what this was.

The highway was fast and loud, and its shoulder littered with gravel and broken glass; not an ideal route for a bicycle. What is more, the shoulder served as a kind of hot morgue for local wildlife, and if Louisiana had any need for a public roadkill inspector, I’m sure I could have passed the qualifying examination after just a few miles along that road. I hoped by the end of my trip to be able to tell the animals apart merely by smell, but I found that we all smell about the same when dead.  I passed a mock-up of Jesus’s tomb, where I stopped and said a prayer for my trip.  There was also nearby a cement casting of the Ten Commandments in English, which had broken in half.  Cheap workmanship.

I soon found myself in Buras, which I could tell had some kind of downtown to my right, off the highway, so I took a right turn and found what was probably the old road, going along the river. I passed a sign for a Catholic Church, but the church was gone – presumably destroyed by Katrina. I got off my bike to take a further look.

Big Muddy at Fort Jackson.

"Downtown" Venice.

I left a bit late my first morning on the road – some of it was that I was not planning on cycling that much that day – it is best to start slowly, if you intend to keep going for a long time – but there was a little bit of fear, that gave weight to natural inertia. From the marina the previous evening I had taken a slight detour over to the southernmost point on the road, to mark the beginning of the cycling portion of the trip: it was five miles from there to my hotel. So now I was five miles into the trip, and something like 2,395 miles of river road were north of me. It was such a large prospect that it was almost better not to step into it.

When I walked people would tell me things like, “You’re not looking so good – you all right?” I had thrown my back out two weeks earlier, and it was still a problem. I could cycle, but dismounting was painful, and I simply dreaded having to stand up after being seated. I was doing stretches to fix the problem, and I could feel it was getting better, but it was by no means ideal.

Atop the levee, looking at the river.

But I rode out that April morning all the same, and pointed my bike north. I started on the main highway, which was ugly, then took a side road past some small houses and trailers for awhile, and then, not feeling close enough to the river, I got up on the levee and rode there. The top of the levee was gravel, a bit looser than I wanted for my bike, but I could ride on it. What I could not do, however, was go more than eight or nine miles an hour on gravel. If I wanted speed I needed a better surface. But it was nice riding on top of the levee – the river was my companion. It was mostly empty – occasionally very large boats came by, but not much else. I saw no one walking or riding their bikes, in the neighborhoods or on the levee.

Venice bleeds seamlessly into Boothville, with buildings scattered at more or less equal distances all along the road. There is no point at which you might say, “This is downtown Venice,” or “This is downtown Boothville” – it was sprawl without definition, along the one through road.

From time to time there were large parking lots, entirely out of scale with the small town around them, several acres’ worth of blacktop.  They were completely filled with vehicles – mostly pickup trucks, and a plurality of white Chevy Silverados. From living in the country I have become very familiar with this truck and the men who drive them, and I will say that I never see one without wincing a little: the men I have known who have owned them, underneath the bravado, have mostly radiated powerlessness and fear. The rural districts of this country, where such trucks are the norm, are also some of the poorest and, in terms of power and influence, least important places in the country. The men who live there live mostly to serve other men more powerful than they, who live in cities: they build extensions onto their summer homes, or mow their lawns, or plow their driveways. Here they were pumping their gas – or more accurately, they were pumping gas for everyone, and pumping money for the few rich who owned the oil companies. They park their Silverados in these lots and take boats or helicopters out to the oil platforms, where they typically work for two weeks straight and then are brought back to land. They typically, I am told, do not live in Venice, but drive back to their homes in upper Louisiana or Texas or Mississippi or Alabama when their two-week shifts are done. Since they are not actually living in Venice – not even during their shifts – they don’t have much of an effect on the local economy. There were almost no stores to serve them – all those thousands of cars resulted in only one grocery, and two bars, which probably served the fishing community more than the oil workers anyway.

Contraband photo of a Venice heliport.

From atop the levee I could almost get a good picture of one of these lots which was next to a heliport, when a man who was pulling up to the lot’s barbed wire fence got out of his truck and started walking up the levee. The way he had his head down inclined me to believe he meant nothing friendly.

I have a standard way of approaching situations like this now – I have been in many such, as curiosity and corporate America never seem to get along: “Uh-oh,” I said. “Am I in trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that?”

“You better watch out! Look I just work here, I’m trying to help you out. But they’ve been picking people up who take pictures around here, they take ‘em down to the police station and check them out.”

“There’s nothing illegal about taking pictures, is there?”

“Listen I don’t know the law, but I know they’ve picked people up before. Trust me, all these places along the river, they all have security guards. So I wouldn’t take any pictures if I were you.”

“Okay, good to know. It’s just so impressive – so many cars here. All those cars are people who are out on the Gulf?”

“Oh yeah. There’s actually another lot which is attached to this heliport, it’s about a mile down the road, that one’s full too. This is a brand-new facility they built to handle all the people going out to the oil platforms. The old one wasn’t big enough.”

“Impressive. I saw the lots were full even on Easter.”

“No holidays in the oil business, I’ll say that. Speaking of which, I’m headed to work, but I’m telling you, watch out!”

I took note of his advice but did not follow it, of course.

Venice, jutting out into the Gulf as it does, was almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The houses there now are all new because the old ones are almost all gone. But most of the lots do have houses, and the houses all look trim, even though they are mostly trailers of some sort. A friend of mine who lives in Louisiana told me, “I knew Venice would come back after the storm. Maybe other places down in Plaquemines Parish not so much, but Venice is important for the oil industry. It’s the furthest you can get into the Gulf by road. That’s valuable. Even if everything else is just ocean all around, they’ll try to hold on to Venice – it’ll be a bridge to an island, like Key West, if it has to be.”

Coming back into Venice I asked Roland about the Vietnamese fishermen who I heard had moved into Southern Louisiana. Did they have any special communities or towns of their own?

“No, dey heah,” he said. “In fact dat dock ovuh deah is owned by a Vietnamese, dose ah dey boats right deah.” Their shrimp boats looked more or less the same as everyone else’s: just a bit more battered. They looked like the used boats other fishermen had cast off. I would see a few Vietnamese fish stores/restaurants as I rode up toward New Orleans. There were a number of immigrants but they clearly had not taken over entire areas of the swamp, as I had heard. Their stores were terribly unprepossessing: none of the Louisiana color and flavor inhabited the stores, which would be fluorescent lighting and bare walls and cheap mass-produced tables and chairs.

“Dey good people,” he said. “My only concehn is dey ought to speak English. Sometimes when you talk to a bunch of ‘em, dey staht to speak dey own language, which I dink is rude. Dat’s my only concehn.”

“Are they crawfish fishermen? I had heard it was crawfish they were fishing for.”

“No, no, dey shrimpuhs. All kinds of fish, I suppose, but mainly dey shrimpuhs.”

If his only concern was language, I wasn’t too concerned. Their kids would speak English and speak it well.  And they didn’t seem likely to stay in the swamp very long. Every time I walked into one of their stores, if a young person was at the counter they looked up at me from a thick textbook.  I don’t think they were training themselves to be the next generation of shrimp fishermen (but you never know).

When we arrived back at the dock, Roland again refused any compensation for his fabulous services, despite the fact that I had taken up hours of his day and a fair amount of gasoline too. I tried to just pay him for the gas but that failed as well.  I was deeply impressed by his humanity and generosity – and his concern for his son, his father, everything. He took joy in my joy, too, and understood it.

I had now come up to Venice from the Gulf. There was more river down there – we had taken the shortest and smallest of the river’s mouths to reach the sea. Down below there were isolated spots of higher ground, I heard, some of which was privately owned. You could see this on the official Louisiana state maps, which shaded the mouth of the river green to indicate public land, except for isolated strips and blocks. People had hunting and fishing cabins out there – I spoke with someone who had just come up from a two-week stint out there. He offered to take me out there next time he went, but it would be the fall before he went back out. There was always more to see, of course. But I had been to the Gulf, and entered the river from the sea, and now could head upstream. I wanted to find the Source.