January 12, 2005 - Son of a gun, gonna have fun, looping through the Bayou.

Since we hadn't really seen southern Louisiana very well, we decided to stay over another day at our campground outside of Baton Rouge and make a driving tour that would loop around to the south. After a quick breakfast of hot oatmeal we jumped in the truck and headed south on Louisiana 1. Locally it was known as River Road and did in fact hug the Mississippi about as well as any road could follow a river making a series of S bends so twisted that they made the course of the river on the map look more like a wet noodle that had been accidentally dropped between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Although we had hoped for scenic vistas of the Mississippi, we just didn't get any because the road was uniformly lower than the levees holding in the river. In fact, my GPS said we were at - 9 feet altitude, which would have put us below Mean Sea Level. Our only glimpse of the river occurred at the Paquemine Locks State Historic Site where we stopped to tour the old lock house and lock complex. The park ranger was exceedingly polite and helpful, showing us a movie, personally guiding us around the lock house exhibits, and even getting us glasses of spring water. The lock house was composed of a large, open boiler room plus an adjacent pump room and office, and the entire building was made of beautiful white-glazed bricks that just gleamed in the sunlight.

The politeness of the park ranger extended to showing us the upper floor of the lock house and letting us out onto the narrow balcony on the second story, from which point we could see the Mississippi on the other side of the levee. The ranger's office was up there and he not only had a great view of the passing barge and ship traffic, he also had a radio scanner tuned in so that he could hear the ship to shore communications!

After touring the lock house we walked across a narrow catwalk spanning the lock itself, and it looked really huge to me although I'm sure that by modern standards it is probably quite small. The lock appeared at least 50 feet deep and about 60 feet wide and maybe 300 feet long, and the walls were made from concrete and steel-apparently the same guy who constructed this lock later designed the locks for Panama Canal. The main reason for the lock was as a shortcut so that ships could travel from the Baton Rouge area to the Gulf of Mexico without having to take the tortuous route downriver past New Orleans. In fact, by using the lock and the bayou leading directly southward, ships cut 156 miles or so off the voyage.

Continuing downriver, we passed one of the old plantation houses that abound in this area of Louisiana. Apparently sugar cane was the cash crop before the Civil War and remained so at least in part into modern times, although I'm sure King Cotton was also raised on the fertile floodplains. Some of these old mansions offered tours, but I can't really enjoy visions of a luxurious and opulent life style built on backs of slave labor, so I passed it up.

We were aiming next for an Acadian Wetlands Cultural Center, but we almost missed it as we drove through Thibedeaux. If you get down this way, keep your eyes peeled for the modern brick library smack in the center of the town, because the cultural center is located on the first floor of that library. The center consisted of a temporary exhibit (I think) of beautiful black and white pictures of the bayou area and a very nice set of permanent exhibits about the history and culture of the area.

The permanent exhibits started off with a timeline that put the forced relocation of the French Acadians into a historical context ranging from the Colonial Period up to the present time. Then came more detailed exhibits on selected aspects of Cajun culture, and I thought the insights and artifacts were absolutely fascinating. The music section had a motion sensor that started playing the music the moment you walked into the room, and although I could not understand the words the music was extremely lively and engaging. Instruments used by Cajun musicians were on display including, of course, the ubiquitous fiddle and banjo, but also lesser-known ones like a washboard, spoons, an accordion, and a mandolin. The washboard was particularly interesting because it was shaped something like a breastplate on a suit of armor, and was apparently meant to be worn over the shirt of the musician. Can you imagine how hot that would make you while playing in the summer in that part of Louisiana?

Other exhibits showed how the Acadians had adapted to the unique challenges of living in the bayou and coastal areas of Louisiana, like building their houses on stilts, burying (dead) people above ground, and changing their diet to include local shellfish and seafood. Quite different types of skiffs and fishing boats were developed to meet the needs of fishing in the shallow waters. Similar ingenuity was used for adapting woods like cypress to many daily uses-the museum displayed a cypress rocking chair that reminded me somewhat of simple Shaker designs except that it had a bit more curvature to the arms.

But to me the most intriguing items were insights into how the Acadian subculture was different from mainstream U.S. culture. The large, extended families and close-knit family ties were one hallmark of the culture. The pro-marriage cultural values were reinforced by mild but not-so-subtle social sanctions. For example, when a couple were married, all the older siblings of the bride and groom who were not yet married had to dance barefoot during the festivities! I'm fairly sure that social pressure to hurry up and get married was also provided by the parents in no uncertain terms, and probably reinforced by the local priest. It would be a priest, by the way, since back then they were all Roman Catholic and even during our tour we never saw Baptist or, heaven forbid, Protestant churches in any of the really small towns.

We had lunch in the coffee house a half block back up the road from the cultural center before swinging eastward to an aviation museum. I guessed that it would be at the local airport as it would be easier to get planes there, and I was correct. But I hasten to add that the State of Louisiana is expanding the museum to also cover the cypress logging industry at the turn of the 20th Century, and it will be relocated in a much larger new building off the airport by the middle of 2006. So if you want to see some classic airplanes and learn about the history of aviation in this area, and I would recommend that you do, you might have to look around and follow the signs to the new location.

I, for one, didn't even know that aviation had any history in the boondocks of southern Louisiana. But indeed it turned out that a Mr. Wedell, backed by the wealth and enthusiasm of a Mr. Williams, developed some of the fastest racing planes in the U.S. in the 1930s right at that airport. Who knew? He was so successful that he was in the running to build the pre-WWII generation of U.S. pursuit fighters before he died in the crash of a Gypsy Moth, apparently due to structural failure. The histories of all the significant players and then history of development of each of the racers was covered in enough detail for the general public although I would have liked more details on the weight, wingspan, airfoil design, power plant, horsepower, maximum airspeeds, stall speeds, and so forth of each of Wedell's designs.

The airplanes on display included one reconstruction of the "We-Will", Wedell's first design, a beautiful white Beechcraft Staggerwing, a silver Stearman (I think), and a twin-engine plane used to ferry President Eisenhower from Washington to his farm in Pennsylvania. The were perfectly preserved, gorgeous examples of each type, and I just thought it was a bit of a shame that they never got out to fly any more. After all, the only thing an airplane is built for is flying, and to the extent that any machine could be said to be happy, I expect an airplane would be happy only when flying like it was designed to do. Some of us are built for flying also, I guess, but I don't know how many. It was Munoz, I think, who succinctly stated that point of view in St. Exupery's "Wind, Sand, and Stars", when he said that flying was "worth the final crack-up".

After a quick pass at other rooms with pieces of space shuttle equipment in them we finished up at the gift shop where I purchased a F4U Corsair stamp plus a two key ring with pewter models of the Corsair and Spitfire attached. Heaven knows we had enough key rings, but I just couldn't resist. That pretty much wrapped up our day; we drove back on a different route that got us home shortly after sundown. One overall impression I had from the entire loop we drove is that I had never seen so much water-covered land in one area in my life. I mean, there was water around cypress trees (swamps), water covering meadows of grass (marsh), water in the furrows of sugar cane fields (slushi?), water in roadside ditches or canals of some kind (mosquito heaven?), and water in rivers both big and small. In general, water was underneath or at least somewhere in the vicinity of everything blooming thing, and that took some getting used to. I also have some more pragmatic questions concerning how folks there got there septic systems to drain and what kind of a well you could possibly sink to get drinking water from a swamp. Maybe those are silly questions, but to me the answers would impact the quality of daily life quite a bit, even more than having the bodies of one's ancestors above ground in concrete boxes.

Fortunately when we returned to camp some kind soul had retracted our awning, because the wind had kicked up quite a bit during the day and I had been worried that our awning might have departed for points west. Rather relieved, we settled in to our usual evening round of a quick and simple dinner followed by working on Daddy and Baby. We certainly missed having other folks to chat with in the evening like when Lloyd and Sandy had camped with us, but those dull, boring evenings did result in keeping up with the journal and pictures. The scope of these recurrent tasks is indicated by the fact that when Monika checked Daddy for all the pictures we had taken on our trips since January of 2003, she found 35,000 pictures stored there! I have used several hundred of those pictures when posting the Wanderungs 1-7 on the Web, but I think the Gentle Reader can breathe a deep sigh of relief that he or she has not had to wade through the other 34,000+ of them! We briefly considered reading our book at the shank end of the evening, but were both too tired for that so we just turned in for the night.