05)22(05 its 735pm

Kate’s watercolor in varying greens and golden brown is beginning to take shape. We’re sitting on the dock at our campsite, on top of the waters that are mainly still save for the frequent jumping of catfish, slow quiet swimming of alligators, and skimming of huge dragonflies. The air is warm and sweaty, my shirt that was clean and fresh as of noon today is gross and limp, and the skin on my face feels like a light layer of butter was smeared evenly over it.

The light is beautiful end of the day light, cranes cross the pale blue and orange sky above us, and birds sing exotic calls to eachother out over the bayou.

This is one of the more interesting places I’ve ever been, and its a good thing I’m more or less tolerant of the natural world and all of its strange almost threatening existence, otherwise I would be scared immobile by the immensity and abundance of life of all forms flying and slithering and swimming and buzzing and moaning.

Two nights ago was our first experience of the dense bayou environment. We pulled into camp at Sam Houston Jones State Park, 15 minutes north of Lake Charles, LA. It still hasn’t quite settled in how thick and pervading the ambience is here, and it is difficult for me to get used to how much wildlife there is, how much humidity there is, how much water there is. Right now I’m particularly affected, as we just abandoned our perch on our little dock because these enormous wasps were hovering around and walking into the wood bannisters, as if it were home to them, and definitely not to us. Lots of things I can deal with in a sane way, wasps, however, are another story. I just don’t react in a rational manner, I freeze up, and if anything even remotely seems to come near me I writhe in a manic way and close my eyes. Wasps are not really my friends. And man are they big here. Really really big wasps.

But this is not to say that I am not thoroughly enjoying the scenery and experience… I like it. I love that we are sitting on a bayou right now, and that we are in the heart of cajun country. It was Sunday today, and all day long we passed fisherman after fisherman and encountered the friendliest people everywhere. I mean genuinely friendly, friendly like our neighbors at the campsite, whom we had not spoken to yet, offering to get us anything we needed from town because they were making a run for supplies. And further proceeding to walk over to our site and chat with us about life, travel, family and Louisiana. This same neighbor, who truly just genuinely was being friendly, insisted that we take an oscillating fan, brand new, so that we could have some relief from the humid Louisiana nights while camping. It was amazing, and based on our experience thus far, not uncommon at all.

We found ourselves in a fantastic vacant museum yesterday in Lake Charles. Its few rooms were filled with civil war artifacts and recreations of early to mid century pharmacies and stores. The gallery adjacent to it was filled with remarkable 5′ by 5′ charcoal drawings of people, insects and dogs done with intricate detail. And out back this magnificent 300 year old white oak sprawled wider than I’ve seen a tree reach before, with limbs over 100 feet long with the bottom of the limbs sometimes resting on the ground because of the enormous weight.

Now the light has faded a bit, and it is still warm, and suddenly very peaceful. An ideal time for sitting and sipping the ice tea we made. We’ve seen scores of immaculate southern mansions standing guard over well huge and well kept front yards, and I can just imagine the feeling of this country, sitting on a screened porch and watching the night finally settle in. Its nearly impossible to sleep in the heat that lingers in the jungle like night, and so we’ve been crawling out of bed in the middle of the night to just sit and talk until a cool breeze settled in. It becomes a pace of life, this blanket of heat and languidness. Its as slow as possible.

We left Austin with our head replaced on our shoulders, refreshed and ready for the traveler’s life again. East Texas was a long easy drive, save for Houston, whose massive oil company skyscrapers reach out of the hazy polluted sky. From roadside appearances it is a huge city, that kind of reaches for miles in every direction. East of there, there are a few spotted tiny towns, mostly based around the traffic of Interstate 10. As soon as we crossed into Louisiana it felt like a whole different world, the thick swamp atmosphere taking over everything. The highway becomes a blanket of 20 to 30 foot high trees and dense undergrowth, and the bridges over fingers of water begin to mark the path regularly.

As we explored the sprawled city of Lake Charles the population became different as well, a heavily mixed community with black and white folks generally being very friendly, polite and helpful. Crawfish and seafood shacks lined the roads, pointed at often by rusted and hastily arranged lettered signs, the most common and charming being the big red arrow with yellow lightbulbs pointing off the road with the plastic letters often falling and misplaced. The accents begin to change as well, with a sort of heavy drawl gracefully finishing words in interesting ways, usually with a casual sort of tone. I feel very obvious in my ignorance of what Louisiana is all about, but it is beginning to set in and rest over me like the humid, almost edible air.