January 13, 2005 - Drive to Shreveport, Louisiana

The wind howled and it rained cats and dogs during the night, but we were snug in our trailer. When lightning bolts and the consequent thunder woke us up, we could just nonchalantly turn over and go back to sleep, which is a luxury we have not always had. Since it continued to pour down the next morning, I slept in, figuring that there was no sense in rushing to get ready to leave only to have to hitch up the trailer in a driving rain. We had a cold cereal breakfast after 8 o'clock and the rain had abated a bit by the time we hitched the trailer and started on our way north and west toward Dallas, Texas.

Along the way we drove through some of the most deserted landscape I have seen in the U.S. The bayou country and even the pine forests that supplanted it when we ventured north appeared to have almost no inhabitants for long stretches. To some extent I imagine that I could well have been mistaken and folks were living just over the next hill or hidden in the forests, but I still feel that region of Louisiana did not boast a lot of people per square mile.

The shifting of the ecology as we drove along was often surprisingly abrupt. As long as we stayed on the latitude of Baton Rouge, we drove through a pure swamp, mile after mile of it. The bridge on US 190 was just like the bridge I recalled in that section on Interstate 10 a short ways to the south, that is, 10-20 miles of absolutely straight and level 4-lane bridge built on pylons driven into the swamp, boring but an engineering achievement to be sure. As we turned north the swamp vegetation gave way to pine forests as soon as the land had any vertical hills at all, no matter how minor. I guess that even small folds in the land increased the drainage to the point that pine forests could dominate over swamp vegetation, but it was curious to see the types of trees shifting suddenly as the landscape changed. The rain finally stopped as we approached Shreveport, but as the sky cleared the temperature also dropped like a stone so we both changed into warmer gear when we stopped to refuel.

At Shreveport, we decided to pull in early for the night rather than face driving the rig through Dallas rush hour traffic to get to our next campground. I once drove the rig through a Washington D.C. rush hour when we brought it home on Wanderung 4, and I had absolutely no wish to repeat the experience. We found a reasonable campground at an RV dealer on the west side of town beside Interstate 20 and set up camp early for the night. Having a couple of hours to spare allowed me to do some trailer repair and maintenance while Monika did a load of wash. After buying $11 worth of parts at the parts department of the dealer, I replaced a broken window crank handle and installed a magnetic catch on the bathroom door-we needed to keep it open when not in use to allow all circulation from our portable electric heater and avoid the water pipes freezing. A small plastic lever used for securing the stove vent flap while traveling had also broken off, so I fashioned a new catch from a small metal wall hanger and installed that.

These tasks sound so trivial that I expect some folks cannot understand how they managed to occupy me for a couple of hours. But other folks who have experienced what happens with household repairs can probably sympathize with the fact that even tiny jobs take much more time than they "should". In fact, I cannot seem to ever finish the simplest job around the house, like changing a light bulb, in less than 15 minutes on the average.

For changing a light bulb, the subtasks run something like:

1. get stepladder and necessary tools from garage and put the stepladder underneath the fixture with the burned out bulb
2. use tools to remove cover or shade from the light fixture
3. unscrew bulb
4. insert new bulb
5. replace fixture,
6. return stepladder and tools to garage

Monika also hung up a new 2005 calendar from the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program that listed the predicted high and low tides for each day. Not only that, it also had a red line depicting the relative size of the tide over the course of each day, and that was interesting. January 10th, the day we took our swamp tour, had particularly large tides according to our calendar, but one week later they were predicted to be much less. I'm guessed that had something to do with the coincidence of the sun and moon's effects on the tides. Not only that, the calendar was free and had some beautiful photography of the bayou area.

The legend for January's satellite image of the Mississippi delta was that Louisiana's biggest environmental problem was losing land. It claimed that the state had lost 1,900 square miles between 1932 and 2000, and I read elsewhere that the current rate of losing land is 50 square miles per year. The dire consequences of this land loss were depicted, but no solutions were offered. Since fools step in where angels fear to tread, let me first offer a possible causal chain and then an unpalatable solution.

The causal chain is:

• burning oil, coal and natural gas leads to
• carbon dioxide leads to
• global warming leads to
• ice cap melting leads to
• rising sea levels leads to
• loss of low lying coastal wetlands.

Personally, I think that each step of this causal chain is a relatively well established scientific fact, but I'm sure some folks will want to quibble. If the chain is true, however, then solution to loss of coastal land is to stop burning more fossil fuels than the earth can readily absorb. So how much does Louisiana really care about the wetlands? Enough to stop pumping oil? I strongly doubt it, and the Bush administration's refusal to sign the Kyoto global warming treaty means that the Federal government is also unwilling to do anything that would help.

Since nothing is likely to change that causal chain, you might want to come and visit the Louisiana bayou while it's (mostly) still here, just as you might also want to see the mountains of West Virginia before they are leveled. I was so surprised to see an aerial picture of how some areas of mountains have simply disappeared by the coal companies using decapitation mining-that's where they scrape off the entire top of a mountain into the nearest valley to get at a coal seam. Apparently it is cheaper to do it that way, and the Bush administration has obligingly changed the interpretation of the reclamation clauses in strip mining regulations to allow it. Instead of mountaintops soaring majestically above the valleys, you get these kind of sawed off stumps of mountains just a few feet higher than the filled-in valleys. The consequences to the mountain and valley ecologies is disastrous, but increased coal burning also means more downwind air pollution of the National Parks like Shenandoah National Park, and more global warming and land erosion for the State of Louisiana, so it's kind of an all around lose-lose proposition. Seriously, since the law states that the underground mineral extraction rights supersede the rights of the property owners on the surface, there is no way to stop this process and you really might want to see the mountains before they are bulldozed away, because they surely are never coming back to their original state.

I got down from my soapbox for a quick dinner of soup and crackers, and afterwards we had a musical evening. Monika played the dulcimer while I read the first chapter in Winston Churchill's "The Great Democracies". Then she took a break and played some computer games while I practiced on the recorder. Actually, I don't exactly practice so much as jump in and play tunes, which is more fun. My tenor recorder was basically in the same range as my voice, so by playing a tune I could also learn it well enough to sing it, which was more fun for me although possibly less fun for any listeners. I also checked on the accuracy of my playing by having Monika do "Name That Tune" after each pass, and fortunately for my ego she always guessed correctly. After the concert we read a bit in "The Road to Ubar" before turning in for the night.