Driving east from Louisiana,
posted by jeremy on March 29, 2005
Up bright, early, hung-over, barely past noon, we throw whatever & nothing into the car & kiss NO goodbye. We hit I-10, cruise out across Lake Pontchartrain, past Slidell into Mississippi. The flat saturated landscape blurs by, as do jacked-up pickup trucks doing 90, seemingly super-charged by Bush/Cheney & NRA bumper stickers. We shout conversations back & forth, sip coffee, listen to music & generally mock the South’s sense of ad design. Herons, seagulls & pelicans float out across the numerous waterways, marshes, swamps, McDonalds & rivers. We pass Diamondhead, D’Iberville, Escatawpa & Pecan. To the south, out of sight, lies the Gulf of Mexico, nearly the exact reason we move...
We pass into Alabama, into Mobile & cross Mobile Bay on the longest causeway I have ever seen. The water below us looks deep but is apparently quite shallow. Clumps of reeds form strange hairy islands out in the distance where it seems dolphins should play. We pass the Styx River Water Park, innumerable abandoned trailers, gorgeous half-hidden idylls, exposed but for seconds from my vantage. I can name none of the trees that we see, none of the shrubs, plants, flowers, few of the birds & this fact resounds clearly... I simply do not know this place.
& we talk of the lushness of the forest, the inhumanness of it. The farther south we go, the more the ecosystem seems a coniferous tangle, an alien jungle, a rough go for bipedal apes. The increasingly horrendous architecture betrays that this is a region only recently suffering mass influx, where permission-to-enter was granted only by modern technological circumstance: Air conditioning, DDT, antibiotics, automobiles, etc.
Finally, we pass the Perdido River into Florida, whose name, derived from the Spanish, means “feast of flowers.” We plan on stopping in Pensacola but our initial impressions (Feast of fucking boring) dissuade us. We cross Pensacola Bay on the Pensacola Bay Bridge, another very very long chunk of concrete & stop for gas in a hurricane-torn town named, ironically, Gulf Breeze.
Pulling back out onto 98, the traffic seems suddenly much much worse, the cars full of college age kids & suddenly two neurons get together & certain synapses tango...
“It’s spring fucking break...” Rachel moans desperately.
But with the bad comes the good. Just moments before sunset, we pull off the main fare & look for beach access. We find a lagoon, a bridge & a spit of sand named Navarre. Navarre turns out to be a prime example of human stupidity, at least in terms of real estate development versus mother nature... i.e. Crappy Design vs. Hurricane Ivan...
Who do you think won this one? We drive past beach houses, condos, 10 story hotels, all in various states of repair, disrepair, total goddam annihilation.
Splinters & craters: The ruin of the unworthy... It’s truly delightful, so delightful that I forget to take so much as a single photo. We get out of the car & go for a walk in the eerie half light. Neoprene-clad surfers slowly slip in from the dark riotous ocean. Rachel does ninja flips in the white sand, getting said sand in black underwear, the bane of beach ninjas everywhere. After a period of ridicule-inducing particulate extraction , we climb back into her VW & push on, SE.
We spend the next two years or so crawling along in traffic from Navarre to Fort Walton Beach & then to Panama City. The entire distance, almost completely, is either strip mall, super strip mall or landscape being leveled for future strip mall. We pass the same franchises over & over & over, as though the entire countryside is on continuous loop, a ruined CD skipping, skipping, skipping & the traffic, simply put, sucks Robert E. Lee’s ass. Rachel goes through a period of denial, then depression, frustration, rage & finally acceptance. I just sit, a simple useless passenger, wondering how much longer this kind of damage can go on. It’s all so unbelievably fucking ugly...
We finally make it to Panama City & find a quaint looking fish house that claims to have been open since 1964. We decide that they must be doing something right & venture inside. We are seated immediately & are forgotten about even quicker. Eventually Rachel asks a server for service & we then go thru the usual rigmarole of Where y’all from?, a famous Southern ritual that can prove quite difficult for the rootless children of our brave new world...
“Uhh, Ohio, Oregon, Uhhh, just down from New Orleans. Goin’ to, uhhh, Florida... Here, I guess. Anyway, I’ll take the amberjack sandwich.” I respond, succinctly.
“Boston. Olympia. Portland. New Orleans. I’ll take the raspberry vinaigrette on that salad.” Says Rachel. The server tells us her own condensed story & then disappears to place our order. After finishing our decent-but-nothing-fancy-iceberg-lettuce-kind-of-meal, we get back on the road and start looking for the cheapest motel we can find. We settle on the USA Motel, which puts us back a not-so-mere fifty bucks.
Still, the bed in our room is the kraken of mattresses, immense. Now, we embark upon hardcore relaxation, Rachel with her weed & me with my beer... & after watching roughly seven hours worth of bad cable, sleep finally, thankfully, eats us.
But morning, it always comes too soon & we have to get moving, out into the rain & too fast traffic, heading back west, chasing an unseen sun.
The next few hours are white knuckled as we pass thru several exponentially worsening monsoons, visibility eventually idling at maybe twenty feet. We slow to forty, thirty MPH, while semis whip past us as though this deluge is but a light spring shower. Soon a significant portion of the traffic begins to pull onto the shoulder & just as we consider doing the same, we pass thru a final furious wall of rain into a sunlight so dazzling & abrupt we both burst into shocked laughter...
“So fucking weird!” I yell, as Rachel accelerates.
Dusk finds us on the Gulf coast once again, this time in Biloxi. A waxing moon hangs bright & heavy above us as we walk barefooted in the litter-strewn sand. Casino lights shine in the distance as I observe, with a strange fascination, an orange rubber glove undulating in the surf...
Eventually, sand & water, as ever, inspires, demands of us, simple play...
& the nearby traffic is muted by a thousand miles of white noise as we toss a large pinecone back & forth, happy & young, content enough, headed, if not home, then at least to where we belong... for now.
