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how to buy neurontin online So began one of the great rides of my life, with Roland, my pilot for this expedition. He absolutely refused any kind of monetary compensation; but I did get his address, and will send him some maple syrup. He was a man about fifty, with an intelligent look in his eyes.  His accent sometimes sounded like a Southern black man’s to me, but he was white.  Many Louisiana accents are shared across the races.

Kuantan Pulling out of Venice.

His boat was a small (perhaps twenty feet) flat-bottomed boat with a little sunroof. When I complimented him on its speed he smiled. “This heah can go thihty-five miles an awuh.” And I think we used all its speed, zipping along. He pointed out everything along the way and was a great guide: it was clear he enjoyed doing this, and enjoyed my curiosity too.

“That’s a refinery?” I asked.

“Yeah that’s Chevron,” he said. Big boats came from the other direction, creating large wakes, which we slowed down to take. When they arrived they struck the boat like solid logs.

“I’ve seen big parking lots full of cars around here,” I said. “What are they?”

“All those men are out theah wukking in the Guff,” he said.

“So many!” I said. “And working on Easter Sunday too, I saw.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “It doesn’t stop. Now we goin’ heah by Red Pass. This take us right out to the Guff.”

Where the River ends.

We were past the levees; on either side there were marsh-reeds, the beautiful forms of wading birds at the fringes of the grasses. The water was brown: clearly river-water. The river, which had been channeled so long, finally, out here, was allowed to distribute itself into the marshes, dropping its silt and building up the marsh. And out in the distance I could see the opening: where the reeds came to an end and we hit the shallow sea.

“Theah’s the Guff,” he said. “Theah it is.”

I could hardly believe it. This was it, the city-gates of an entire continent, the end, or the beginning, of the Mississippi River. We passed right through the gates and before us was nothing but gray: the gray of the water bleeding right up into the gray of the sky. Roland cut the motor and we drifted. I filled my lungs with the brackish air; I came to the front of the boat; I was ecstatic; it was strange, it was mystical, gray above, gray below, I peered up and down at the soft air and soft water, I took the water into my hands. I took out my camera and took two or three photos; then all of a sudden I saw large shapes in the water; the water swelled above them; then they came up and broke the surface.

“Oh my god DOLPHINS!” I could barely tear my eyes off them to look back at Roland. “Dolphins!!”

“Dey pawpawsis,” he corrected. But feeling bad, I suppose, he added, “But dey lahk dolphins.”

This was as good a shot as I got of the porpoises. They're the dark spots on the water. They got a lot closer too.

On every side of our boat they were coming to the surface, bringing their backs to the sky, just feet away from my hands. I tried to take a picture but my camera beeped at me – out of battery. It was great timing – and I mean that without irony. I was profaning the moment by taking pictures of it. I put the camera away and heard the slap of the water against our hull, the breathing of the porpoises as they came up, the gulls in the air around us.

“Dey feedin’ on pogiefish,” Roland said. “We in a school of pogiefish.” I didn’t know how he could tell that, but I believed him. “See ovuh theah,” he said, pointing to the horizon, “dose boats? They fishin’ fuh pogiefish – I tink you call ‘em menhaden. De pogiefish dey got a plant fo ‘em. You know you kem ovuh a big bridge? It’s up by Empie-uh deah [the town of Empire]. Dey mekkin’ medicines out o ‘em. Fish oll.” And later, sure enough, I would bike past the fish-oil factory he spoke of. “But heah it’s too shallow fuh dey boats. Dis boat it can go anywheah, see it’s got a flat bottom.”

We had drifted into a circling flock of pelicans, which would fly around us and then appear to be struck dead, diving directly down in the water and emerging less than a second later. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe any of it. I find myself always throwing myself on my knees before anything that is alive, and this was alive.

“See dose ayuhplanes up deah, dey telling the boats wheah the pogiefish ah.” Looking out at the horizon I could see the planes, and the big pogiefish boats. They were massive, but despite the difference of scale it was clear that they were analogous to the porpoises and pelicans. It was like a vast plain, with all the animals grazing on it, and man just one of the animals. It was the blood of the Mississippi, poured out into the Gulf to make new life.

I knew that the lower Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico was one of the most abused places on the planet. The river dumped so much sediment and fertilizer into the sea that during the summer a vast “dead zone” formed – more accurately a hypoxic zone, where there was so much simple life – bacteria – that it used up all the oxygen, and made complex life impossible. We had abused and unbalanced the life here; destroyed the bayous, starved the marshes, cut down the cypress swamps, polluted the waterways with our sewage and chemicals and pharmaceuticals and trash and everything else. Just a few years ago we covered this entire sea with a slick of oil in the largest oil spill in history.

And yet it was alive. I am not saying we had not wounded it, or that we couldn’t kill it if we continued to try – maybe we could. But it was alive. It was alive and beautiful. And worth our love, and worth trying to save.

There was a shrimp boat on the horizon. “Do you wanna go visit dat deah shrimp boat?” Roland asked.

“I’m very happy going back now if you have to go back,” I said. “But if you have more time, I’ll stay out here forever.”

“I want to go see what dey doing ovuh theah.”

So we zipped over to the larger boat, a tall shrimp boat with two large trawling nets on its side, dangling off of a system of suspending poles. I poked at my camera and it came to life to take two pictures before dying again, this time for good. I wished I had saved it just a minute longer, as when we came up next to the boat it was staffed by two of the most photogenic Americans I had ever seen: an old man in a French peasant’s hat – in fact he looked entirely like an old French peasant, the kind that a French filmmaker would make a documentary about, the only difference being that he was standing on a boat and wearing green rubber overalls. He had the creased, tanned, smooth-shaven face, deep-set dark eyes, and a steady quiet which seems to be the result of many years of hard work all alone. With him was a sullen-looking teenager in bright yellow rubber overalls and a blue t-shirt. Both wore white rubber boats.
The old man spoke with Roland, and the teenager and I looked on in silence. I could barely understand anything the two fishermen said. In fact, I think I understood nothing at all, except that there were clearly no shrimp. “Theah’s nothing heah but watuh!” the old man complained.

Roland said something like “Have you gotten anything?” but perhaps it was in French, because I could understand it only by the response. They were generally talking in English, I thought, but I really wasn’t even sure.

“A few pogiefish,” the old fisherman said, throwing his hand at the ground in disgust. For some reason they decided to load the pogiefish onto Roland’s boat. I helped grab the big bucket – probably sixty or so pounds worth – and bring it on board. Pogiefish looked about the size and shape of mature sunfish that inhabit our northern ponds – perhaps a bit larger, around ten inches long in general.

The two men spoke for awhile longer, and then we circled around and headed back for land, back through the gates of grass and towards Venice.

“Dat deah was Mr. Jesse,” Roland said. “Funny ding is, he got a twin brother to him dat is completely identical. You can’t tell dem apart ‘cept dat one weahs a gray shutt unduh his ovuhalls and de othuh weahs a blue shutt.”

“What if they switched shirts?”

“Well dis was Mr. Jesse, I could tell by the boat.”

I laughed about this for awhile, while Roland seemed to be thinking about something. “Dat deah was pabally his grandson. See out heah it’s oll and gas o you a fishuhman. My fathuh he still goes out like dat, but I get worried about him goin’ out all alone. My son I kind of discouraged him from goin into fishin. I like to see the young people get into it, now. I don’t know if I did right with my son. He’s not a fishuhman.

“But you see deah’s no shrimp this yeah. It’s been very cold, so we dink it’s just too cold for ‘em. But we don’t know. Usually by now it’s shrimp season.”

“Is there some fear that it’s something else?”

“Well we had dat oll spill a few yeahs ago and we’ve done all right but now we wondering, like maybe deah was a delay and now we seein’ it. So I wanted to see if dey had any shrimp.”

Their nets had been completely empty – not a single shrimp at all.

More Cajuns prefer Yamaha.

I called the harbormaster in the morning, around six. He seemed gruff and not likely to be helpful. “Yeah theh’s boats goin’ out. Jes go ‘round and ask the captains if they’ll tek you.”

This was one of the problems – I felt – with calling ahead. When on a telephone, the stranger’s best guarantee of securing a favor would be possessing some kind of power – an institutional affiliation, for instance. If I had called saying I was from the New York Times, he might look to do something for me. But when you are arriving as yourself – which I was – it is useful to show a face before you ask for anything. And once they pass on the opportunity to do you a favor, it’s easy to not do anything at all. I might have been better off just showing up.

So I biked on down to the marina, though by the time I arrived it was around seven o’clock, after showering and breakfasting – I was afraid I might not have any particular opportunity to eat for quite awhile once I got on a boat.

The marina was full of boats, but empty of people. I wandered about looking at the names of boats, some of which were normal – named after women, it seemed – but others were distinctive to the area, like “We Dat,” and “Ya Heard Dat.”  There was a little cafe there, but it was closed. I saw the harbormaster, who acknowledged me and then made it clear by puttering about that he had no time for me. I put my bike against a wall, took out a book, and waited. I asked the first shipowner I saw, but he said he wasn’t going out, he was just doing maintenance. Another said the same. I continued to sit there, and one hour became two. An older, gruff man showed up and hobbled his way toward a boat. I explained myself to him, and got a gruff response.

“Look now these here are company boats! These guys even if they wanted to they couldn’t take you anywhere, it’d be against the rules! Even if you paid ‘em they wouldn’t take you! Why don’t you go over to the commercial marina! There’s a bunch of shrimp fishermen there you’ll have a much better chance! Here you’re just wasting your time!”

This seemed to be the case, indeed. “Where’s the commercial marina?”

He looked at me like I was a waste of time myself. “Make a left, then another left.” And he turned around and hobbled off.

You can see the land around Venice is as much water as land. And that lily is Hymenocallis liriosme.

A left and then another left brought me to a long road – probably two miles long – with water on either side of it. There were some beautiful plants there – plants I had never seen in my life – and much garbage. Beer cans were a theme, and Bud Light in particular. To see an old twenty-four pack box in a stand of Hymenocallis liriosme was quite something. It wasn’t in the right place for a good picture, but I understand that a really good photographer would have posed the Bud Light somewhere perfect for the photograph. “Louisiana, land of Beauty and Bud Light.” In the distance was a large Chevron refinery, its towers looking Titans’ clarinets. There was a large la-z-boy chair next to a stand of some Louisiana irises, I felt that didn’t need any posing to make a good picture, so I snapped a shot of that.

Venice, Louisiana.

At the end of the road was the Venice Marina. This was much larger than the Cypress Cove Marina, and instantly I saw that the old captain’s advice had been good. There was a little gift shop – where I asked to buy a pen (somehow I had forgotten a pen) and was given one, buying a postcard to reward their good behavior – and a restaurant (closed until lunchtime) and a fish-cleaning operation. At this latter place I found a large young man wearing a hoodie sweatshirt sitting on top of a picnic table playing with an iPhone. He didn’t quite look like anyone else I had seen before: I supposed he was Hispanic, and he had a thick Mexican build, but he was very dark-skinned and quite tall. I struck up a conversation, telling him what I was looking for. Yes, he said, boats came in here, I just had to wait. “One o’clock, they start to come in.” So I sat down next to him. There was absolutely nothing else going on.

He said he was from Honduras – “Ondura.” He had been living in the States six years; he liked it. He had first worked as a barber, in New Orleans. He wanted to go back to it. “But the place I worked, they chenge the rule, man. Before I used to rent my chair, right? Wa good money. There a lot of Spanish in New Orlean. But then she chenge the rules, she want fifty percent. That esound right to you? Fifty percent?”

“Sounds high.”

A boat comes in for refueling.

“Right? She not doin’ the work, man, she just rent the chair. So I go around New Orlean, but they all say ‘fifty percent.’ So I get yob here man, cleaning feesh. It good yob, eat feesh every day, breakfa lunch and dinner. Good yob. But we work, man, summer when the feesh come in, it a lot of work.”

He showed me around the few cleaning tables. “You wanna feesh man? You go out there and get some feesh?”

“No, not really my thing.”

“We can cheep them. Cheep them anywhere. We have vacuum seal, you put the feesh in there, it sealed good, we cheep them, New Jork, Cheecago, cheep all over.” He showed me the vacuum seal machine. “You can cheep it right to New Jork.” There was a row of about two dozen different types of knives all used for the fish cleaning. It was the kind of work generally called “honest,” which is to say, dirty, dirty and difficult. Everywhere in America the basic pattern prevailed: butchering fish all day was work that would be reserved for immigrants from Central America. Even way down here, the pattern was the same.

He told me about his church, which he said was a kind of African church; he mentioned the name, but I could not quite understand him. He was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. He went to New Orleans for this church. “It especial church, from Africa.” He pulled out his iPhone and showed me a video of it: several black women in African garb stood at the front of the church, singing. It looked like one of those services that was not likely to be over in an hour, or three hours, for that matter. While this video was rolling, he took the opportunity, oddly enough, to complain about iPhones and technology: “A few jeer ago, man, it not bad, now, everybody on the phone, nobody look at you no more, is weird, man, weird. They on game, they looking down at their phone. Is too much. I don’t like, something wrong.” As I said, this video was playing on his phone as he spoke, and so I had to divide my attention between the two.
He had a girlfriend in New Orleans. He wanted to marry her, but she was not willing. “She say men no good, men lie. She got hurt. I say women lie too, but not the good one. She good, though, she a good woman. She in my church.” I suspected the distance did not hurt his estimation of this woman’s excellence. He clearly missed her. “I wanna get married, but she say no. So what can I do.”

Naim.

A boat came by, and Naim got up. He helped the boat fuel up – there was a gas pump at the dock. I spoke with the boat owner, who was not going out today. Really I had come too late in the morning – fishermen left early if at all. I wondered if I would not have to stay here a few days.

There was a bathroom upstairs by the gift shop. It was covered in graffiti, of the usual sort: “Phil Kent is a PUSSY.” “RUSTY LIKES DICK.” “Fred eats frog balls.” At the shop I asked for a recommended charter operators, and was given a list. “Do you have a recommendation?” “They’re all good,” the woman said. I decided to go through the list and call people. I would explain my situation and see if I could find someone to run me out relatively cheaply. But after speaking with four or five guys, and leaving messages for four or five more, I learned that most of the charter operators did not actually live in Venice: they came down from somewhere else specifically for jobs, and those jobs had to be lucrative enough to pay for their trip. The captains all recommended the same thing: “What you’re going to get is someone who’s already gone out that day, who’ll be willing to run you out quick after dropping off their customers. You’ll find someone. Someone will be willing to do it.”

So I was in the right place. I just needed patience.

I came down and saw Naim. “One o’clock,” he repeated. “Boats start coming in one o’clock.”

I had a few hours of daylight left me after Catherine’s departure, so I got on my bike for the first time and rode around town.

I will confess that I was confused by what I saw – I saw only contradictions. Biking through town I saw new homes everywhere, mostly of the cheapest, pre-fabricated or trailer variety. It appeared that Venice was a young place – probably built to service the oil industry. But by the river I came upon an old cemetery – a few ruined brick-and-plaster sarcophagi, above-ground as is local style. There were people born in 1841 who were buried here. One stone said that Hipolite and Roselia Buras had donated the cemetery in 1855.

At the southern end of town the levee came to an end, and outside the levees there were plants – mostly with names of energy companies I had never heard of on their gates like “MARTIN.”  And others whose names I knew full well, like “HALLIBURTON.” Known or unknown, they were all ugly places, surrounded by chain-link fence, and with joyless posted warnings about entering or smoking or being intoxicated or anything else on the facility. But in between these plants was a sign for a National Wildlife Refuge. I biked down its driveway to the water, read some informative placards about the hydrology and wildlife of the Mississippi Delta, and then continued on my way. Then there was a little marina, with shrimp boats all lined up, but they looked neglected and derelict. There was what we call “infrastructure” scattered everywhere outside the levee: the road threaded its way in between waterways, and on each waterway were docks broken and entire, businesses functioning and abandoned, rusting metal buildings, gravel parking lots, cranes, work trailers. Garbage was strewn everywhere, and the shoulder of the road was generously sprinkled with gravel and broken glass – precisely what a cyclist wants to roll over at the beginning of a long trip. In some ways it was one of the ugliest places I had ever been.

Halliburton Road.

I biked by a hill, which of course was artificial: the garbage dump. As I went by it, I slowly became aware that I had never – never – in my entire life heard so many seagulls. Of course there were seagulls here – the fact was so obvious that I hadn’t paused to notice it. But these were present in a number that simply astounded me. And the more I looked, the more birds I saw – mostly wading birds, which I did not know well, but certainly herons and egrets and ibises – large birds. Down Halliburton Road a pair of yellow-crowned night herons (Nyctanassa violacea) were nesting in a large bush, peering out at me as I peered at them.  And scattered in the ditches were strange monstrous lilies and beautiful irises and almost everywhere was a ragged but pretty senecio of some sort or other. It was a garbage dump in bloom, a bird refuge made of rusty metal and broken blacktop.

I found a side road outside the levee leading to a place called Cypress Cove, and I turned down it. This was the hotel my guide book had recommended, but we had been unable to find. There was a pretty marina lined with trim little boats glowing orange in the setting sun. I walked into the lobby of the hotel and spoke with the hotel manager there, a lovely woman named Terri.

Yellow-crowned night herons, Nyctanassa violacea, nesting on Halliburton Road.

“I’m planning on biking up the Mississippi River from here, but I don’t want to bike 2400 miles upriver from here, and not see the 25 miles downriver. But for that I need the help of someone who has a boat. Do you know someone I’d be able to go out to the Gulf with? I’d really like to do it while I’m here. But I saw the prices for charter fishing boats, they charge $750 to go out, and honestly I really can’t pay that much.”

“Oh for sure seven-fifty is a minimum. Yeah there’s no point in you doing that if you’re not going to be fishing. You know why don’t you speak with Mike Ballay [pronounced “ballet”], let me give you his number. He’s the harbormaster here, he’ll know everything about who’s going out and who’d be likely to take you. Let me give you his number.” She wrote it down on a little card. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning, early.”

“Early as in, seven?”

“Seven, six, sure. The earlier the better. He’ll be here by five-thirty, you can call anytime after that.”

Speaking with the harbormaster seemed like the right way to go. One way or another, I wasn’t going to leave Venice without seeing the Gulf. I didn’t care how long it took. But it seemed I was well on my way.

The sun was setting over the marsh as I biked back.  Something was ending, and something new had begun.

"Vegetables At Night." And not just the Waffle King, but the Royal Waffle King.

We got out of the Smokies after noon, and now we were pressed for time.  It was mid-day on Holy Saturday, and by Monday morning we would have to drive down to the southernmost point in Louisiana – almost two hours south of New Orleans – and then Catherine would leave me, driving the truck back to Kentucky.  She would end up driving all through Easter night, showering, and then immediately going to work Monday morning.

The clutch of the truck was fine – a bit sticky, but fine – and I stuck it in fifth gear and we did not stop.  Mile after mile of southland rolled out before us.  We came down into north Georgia and saw the odd limestone ridges – again, looking like a tree-clad West – and followed alongside one into the pines of Alabama, saw red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) blooming in the roadside ditches but could not stop, then were forced to a halt by the Birmingham traffic and continued on its other side, blasting into Mississippi where massive Magnolia grandifloras lined the highway.  We got out of the truck for gas and noted the warmth.  But it just kept going and going – I could hardly believe I was going to try to bike up the entire north to south length of this country.  It kept going, and it was empty – no people, no buildings, nothing.

We looked for a place to eat in downtown Meridian but there was nothing doing downtown.  After much fruitless searching I consented to eat in a chain, provided I had never heard of it.  So we ended up in a Huddle House, which seemed to be an even cheaper version of Waffle House.  It was perfectly fine.  I had hoped to dine in New Orleans but we were still hours away.

We came across the Rigolets (rig-oh-leez) and skirted along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain – huge black expanses of water, it was hard to believe this was the land side of New Orleans.  That city was doomed.  And indeed it was Lake Pontchartrain which had come up and broken the levees during Hurricane Katrina.

Only in New Orleans do things freeze at 72 degrees F.

And then there it was, surprisingly large, the skyscrapers glowing in the night, New Orleans: it was the largest downtown I had seen all the way across the country – it looked beautiful.  It looked doomed and beautiful.  We got off at the French Quarter, tried a hotel I knew and approved of, found it was full, then found another place on Rampart Street which was a bit pricier than we wanted but just fine for a Saturday night at midnight.

We had told ourselves we’d head out for beignets at Cafe du Monde, but instead we just collapsed.  We had been camping out in the rain in the Smokies that morning.  Now we were in New Orleans.