johnbyronkuhner.com

http://dearmckenzie.com/about.php The eastbank of the river is not heavily developed in Plaquemines Parish, but periodically along the river you will see chain-link fence behind which sit large industrial complexes; I saw a grain elevator that smelled like Honey Nut Cheerios, pouring grain directly into a tanker ship: no packaging, just grain dumped straight onto seabound steel. I didn’t take pictures of the elevator, because I was cautious: because a few photos had resulted in a run-in with the law earlier in the day.

noisomely It happened like this: I came to a large facility which took up both sides of the road: on the right a large yard was filled with big black hills of coal, being pushed around by machines. On the left, on the river, were docked big ocean-going vessels as well as smaller river barges. The levee ran right through this facility, and I was riding on the levee, so I went right through it.

I was curious: no coal is mined in Louisiana. What was it doing here? Was this a coal-fired power plant? I yelled down to a workman walking along the riverfront:

“Hey there! What are you doing with all this coal?”

“Mostly goin’ ovuhseas!”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“It comes down the rivuh in those bahges, then we transfer it to the big ships and out it goes.”

“Gotcha thanks.”

There was our “energy independence,” which as we all know is a fraud: we were tearing apart entire West Virginia mountaintops, but shipping the coal to distant ports. This was a transfer facility, where riverboats meet ocean vessels. Just down the levee I could see precisely what they were talking about: a machine unloading a barge, and coal being dropped into the hold of a massive ship. I took a few pictures, and continued on my way.

Within a minute I was aware of someone driving like a lunatic on the levee behind me. The levee’s top is wide enough for only one automobile, and this pickup truck was taking up the whole levee-top and coming at full speed. I got over to the side and of course it stopped right next to me.

“What the HAIL ah you doin’?” It was a gruff, older white man. He looked like he could have been a dispossessed shrimp fisherman – which indeed, he might have been.

“Uh-oh, am I in trouble?”

“You shuwah as HAIL ah! The po-lice are on their way!”

“For what?”

“This levee heah’s PRIVATE PROPEHTY.”

“I’ve been riding on the levees for miles. There are no signs – the signs just say, ‘No motorized vehicles.’”

“Gimme your camera!”

“Is there any law against taking pictures?”

“Hail YES! You can’t take pictures of any of this, it’s a Nine-eleven thing”

I thought about this one. I actually didn’t doubt that he already had called the cops. This was a perfect cop situation: they’re in a rural place with nothing to do, and here comes an out-of-towner they can play cops and robbers with. It was not, in other words, a good situation for me. That morning I had camped out on someone’s property and been found.  They already had something I could have to go to court for.

“You want me to delete the pictures? I don’t care about the pictures, I just thought it was interesting the way they were moving the coal into the big ships. I don’t care.” So I held up the camera for him to see, and deleted the two pictures I had taken. “See all the others are of plants or people. I’m sorry about this I’m not trying to cause any trouble. I’m just a tourist. I’m biking the whole Mississippi River, all the way up to Minnesota, so I just figured this was part of the trip.”

“Well you gotta watch out theah’s all kinds of crazy stuff you can’t just go around takin pictures! Gimme your driver’s license.” And I did, and he copied my info down. “The cops are gonna be heah soon.”

I took my license back. “Listen I have to make it to St. Bernard State Park tonight, that’s where I’m camping, so I need to go. I’ll be cycling down the road. Everything will check out, so I’m not worried about it. If the cops want to stop me, you know where I’m going.”

This I felt was the best solution: make the cops have to stop me again, if they wanted to. So I biked off, getting onto the road for speed. A few hundred feet down the road, I heard the sirens. They stopped at the coal facility. Then a few minutes later as I rode, a cop car came by me, but, apparently satisfied, the cops kept on driving and I kept on pedaling.