Thursday, December 19, 2019 Louisiana Ruse

This is an excerpt from The Raven: Northwest Minnesota's Original Art, History & Humor Journal, 2001, about an epic 43-hour bus trip from Fargo, North Dakota, to Slidell, Louisiana with my close friend, the late Jerry Solom, of Wannaska, who walked on, on July 23, this year. Ever the adventurer, Jerry provided his family and friends a great multitude of stories, such as this, one of which I was fortunate to have experienced, taking place over two weeks time in May of 2000, just before he and a crew of three: Jerry, Terry, and Ben Nelson sailed Jerry's home-built steel sailboat, Indian Summer, to Norway; Jerry's wife Marion, joining them the last 200 miles from the Shetland Islands. 

In this story, we are but the prep crew: Jerry, his son Terry, friend Stuart Mickelson from Warroad, and 'Wannaskawriter'.

We arrive in Slidell at last!

The Greyhound bus weaved off the busy, four-lane street, as a mass of hot rubber tires, painted steel and tinted-windows, and stopped with a great hiss of air brakes outside the dingy converted bus station in Slidell, Louisiana, the hot, dusty sun-bleached afternoon of May 7th., a Sunday. The terminal had been a gas station once judging by its worn looks, but had been ‘remodeled’ into a red, white and blue state-of-the-art, nationally affiliated bus station complete with one regulation bus station candy machine, two upholstered bench seats, the fragrance of deeply-soiled carpet, and over-sized slanted windows that from the top, leaned out over the foundation and held the flattering reflection of city litter strewn against its walls and the gravel parking lot.
 
But we were just damn glad to get off the bus and stretch our legs at last. Two taxi cabs sat parked at opposite sides of the concrete block building, one black and one white. The black car was pen-striped in gold and boasted on its doors, trunk and hood in script font that it was the finest taxi in Slidell. The white taxi promised nothing except a way to get where you wanted to go, which suited our needs just fine. Besides, we were so used to the finest transportation services via the bus line, that we decided we’d just try something else since we had a choice this time, so we took the white cab. 

We stuffed all our luggage into the trunk. Jerry Solom sat up front with the driver as his son, Terry, friend Stuart Mickelson, and I got in the back seat for the ride to the marina. 

Looking through my window, I thought the city went by in a blurred image of sheet metal buildings, old neighborhood grocery stores, sea food signs, billboards, oncoming traffic, and bayous under bridges; I could see tall aluminum masts behind trees and chainlink fences as we passed marinas all along the route.
 
We were entering a Louisiana theme park, it seemed, where interesting-looking houses on short piers sat under a canopy of rich pastel-green leaves, flowers and vines, and were gloved by tall straight-trunked trees ‘way back off the narrow, curvy, asphalt road we were on. I wondered where the crowds in the tourist shops, on tour buses and golf carts were. 
 
To me, the palm trees and spanish moss seemed strangely phony. Everything was like a sort of stage prop, cloth and plastic representation of some exotic place, some island in the South Pacific, some fantasy adventure park that we had entered. I half-way expected the taxi to stop at an admission booth and someone dressed in a grass skirt and coconut brassiere, with their employee photograph and name badge pinned onto their banana-leaf hat, step out to assign us a camping spot and offer us free tall, iced drinks. Where were my rolling prairies, my northern lakes, my cool breezes, my unpopulated scenic vistas? We were in a completely alien ecology system and I didn’t know my way around. It seemed very strange to me--but I was determined to embrace it with an open mind-- and a lot of drinking water. Man, was it ever hot down there... It was only May!
 
We unloaded the taxi near the boat and surveyed the marina that was to be our home for the coming week. Bonfouca Marina in Bayou Liberty was thankfully an informal place, a sort of pegged-edge peninsula where sailboats of every description  bobbed up and down at their mooring posts between high and narrow weathered plank docks. Fish leaped from the water every where you looked, birds flew overhead; buzzards soared on thermal drafts against the backdrop of blue sky and gigantic white and gray clouds that sped their way north; oddly colored tame ducks waddled near the water quacking loudly to one another. The place had a welcome, warm festive air about it, no wonder a person could develop a fondness for the area and not want to leave; it did have its allure. 
 
A single-lane gravel road, bordered on both sides by big fields of neatly mowed green grass, threaded its way west from the marina’s main gate. Swinging an abrupt south it idled along a stand of dense woods, turned west again, then south to branch off as a loop past the “live-aboards” (Those people who live on their boats year around) on a peninsula south of us, or as a dead-end past our dock another twelve or fifteen slips.
 
Small boats motored slowly past on the main channel, a short distance away, on their way toward Lake Pontchartrain; white egrets stood like statues near the edge of the water and awaited a swimmingly quick meal. The brake lights of automobile traffic could be seen on the road beyond the other marina, between the forest of sailboat masts and antenna whips.
 
An oasis of welcome shade below two huge live oaks north of Jerry’s boat would serve as our main eating and cooking area; an old wobbly wooden picnic table our dining and work table, and Jerry’s 400 cc Kawasaki motorcycle he kept chained to a tree minus its gas tank and covered by a tarp, our main source of transportation; a walk-able distance away across the grass was the laundry, shower and bathroom facilities. This was to be our home for the week: enjoy.

Let's go to work!

Jerry walked down to the Indian Summer tied at the dock and climbed aboard; he unlocked the main hatchway, opened it and disappeared below. Once Terry was on deck, he took the equipment Jerry handed him from inside the boat and passed it to Stuart on the dock, who passed it to me on shore. I laid the hatchway cover and the wind vane steering apparatus, on the grassy strip above the water’s edge between the boat and the road and learned this was where we would set up the equipment tent too, just as Terry began doing just that very thing.
 
Nah!
 
In an effort not to get too carried away with all this busyness the first day in Louisiana, we regrouped at the picnic table after the tent was erected and the equipment stored inside it, to begin prioritizing a list of really important things we needed to feel like humans again after our “memorable” (Thanks to Jerry) bus ride:
 
1. Cold Beer 
2. Pizza
3.
4.
5.
6. Showers
 
Jerry volunteered to go buy beer, ice and pizza on his motorcycle while the rest of us team players would diligently work on the rest of the list. However, after Jerry left, 3, 4, and 5 seemed rather vague and we opted to concentrate our efforts on No.6, thereby having at least one thing to show for our efforts when he returned. Few things have felt so good this year so far...

Relaxation, high fashion and great conversation

Jerry returned with a narrow-brimmed Panama hat, ice, cold beer, and the pizza after a couple hours and at once was envied by those of us not owning such a fine head-mounted adornment; ice, cold beer and pizza aside. Stuart wanted one of those fine brimmed straw hats right away, Terry too was taken by its simple dried vegetation-like design material--but me, I had my trusty purple, yellow and white Minnesota Vikings cap that would do just fine I was sure. I couldn’t see myself wearing such a silly looking thing such as that straw hat--but wisely left my options open and my opinions to myself lest I cause some ill feelings so early in our tenure together.
 

L-R, Standing: Terry, Stuart; Sitting: WW, Jerry

Conversations that evening on the boat after the mosquitoes and no-see-ums came out were phenomenally interesting and edifying, as us four mild-mannered thinker-types sipped beers and ate pizza, and discussed a diverse and varied scope of subjects that truly educated people--unlike ourselves-- gathered around their nightly social fires to debate in white-shirted earnest elsewhere around the globe.
 
The night was magical; the halyards against the mast virtually hummed with vibration from our lively anecdotes about racism in the Southern states--what we know and what we don’t: our observations about everything on the way down; farming; health issues; employers; Terry’s difficulty of finding non-real jobs; the routing for the Norway trip; parenting styles, and difficulties of communication between the sexes;--the latter created much laughter and knowing smiles all around, carried us through the rest of the night until we all sleepily headed off to our beds.

"I couldn't see myself wearing such a silly looking thing such as that straw hat."