Two girls june bug young and free hopped in a green four door and escaped Easter on the journey South. They had provisions — baked beans, marshmellows, Fat Tire ale, a carton of Camel Reds and a slightly moldy tent, and the weather was just fine.
Today’s story centers around their time in New Orleans and the surrounding vicinity. As recent reports detail the horror of the events that unfolded there, the negligence of the government, the disparity of race and economy in the country of the United States, the ultimate power of nature over man, and the backlash that occurs when we think we have the upper hand and misuse ol’ Ma Nature, this story simply aims to tell their tale in scattered phrases such as memory dictates.
It was already dark when they arrived at Lake Fontainebleu State Park where they planned to spend the night. A fat black woman wearily eyed the two when they pulled up to the stand to buy their camping permit. With a thick drawl, she leaned on the window, spilling out rather than leaning out and asked,
“Now ya’all know there’s gators in Lake Fontainebleu, right?”
Gators? Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, the amount of times these girls had even said the word “alligator” couldn’t have added up to the fingers on both hands. Only people who know alligators, who deal with alligators and who talk alligators become weary enough to shorten their name to “gators.” ( I might add here that the author of this article, who considers herself to be an excellent speller, had to check whether there are one or two “l” s in alligators. There are two.)
“Gators,” the girls quivered.
“Yup. And right ’bout now is gator matin’ season.”
One gator. Two gator. Three gator. Four.
“Now, if you see a gator,” the woman continued, “best thing to do is to run ’round a tree.”
“Run ’round a tree,” the girls repeated and bobbed their heads.
“Yes. Run ’round a tree cuz gators can run fast, but they can’t turn so quick.”
Further into the park, it became apparent that even if instinct told one to run straight, one would have a hard time doing so. The foliage grew thick. In the dark, vines that wrapped around trees seemed to be snakes, and large palm fronds seemed to be serpentine heads. The girls pitched their tent, and revived themselves from their long day of driving with that nourishment of the gods — marshmellows and beer.
The beauty of Louisiana wilderness is the same beauty of jazz — there’s detail and mystery in the shadowy places that can only be noticed if you give in to listening fully and wholly. In that damp, dark spot on that Spring night, the girls listened to some of the strangest sounds they had ever heard — the whispery creak of bugs, the wholesome belching of frogs, and after a few beers, the rustling of a larger animal very close to their campsite.
A thrashing in the bush startled both of them. Could it be a gator? If one chose not to run from a gator, what options did one have? Should one ignore the gator? Make noise? Be quiet? Was it really a gator?
Whatever it was, it had started to hiss very loudly. Didn’t gators hiss?
They did the only reasonable thing they could possibly do. They got in the car and called one of their dads with a cell phone.
His response, essentially?
I don’t know a damn thing about alligators, but I know that you should have come home for Easter instead of running off on this little Spring Break trip of yours.
The daughter always fantasized afterwards about how her father would have felt were she to have been eaten that night.
“I should’ve told her to run around the tree,” he would say. “Run around the tree!”
Since they were already in the car, the girls decided to drive out of the park to find a place to buy firewood.or, even better, starter logs. The wood in the park was too damp to light. The general plan was to ring the campfire with fire, put a few feet barrier of dirt around the nylon tent to prevent it from catching on fire and make it through the night alive.
There weren’t many stores around the park, and there were even fewer that were open. They settled for a convenient store with LIVE BAIT. When they asked the clerk whether they had firewood or starter logs, a rough looking man standing next to the counter turned to them and asked,
“You’re not staying at Lake Fontainebleu, now are you?”
The girls concessed that they were, not stopping to think he might be a mass murderer and more dangerous than a gator.
“Dontcha know it’s gator matin’ season?”
When he turned from them, they noticed that he only had half an ear. The other half seemed to have been chewed or scratched off. This did not console them.
Returning home to their camp empty handed, the girls decided to pluck up their courage with a few more brews. As the thrashing grew louder, one of the girls decided that since animals of any sort logically must be turned off by chemicals, she could squirt some dishwashing soap around the perimeter of the campground to dissuade any beasts from entering. The other girl, enraged by her fear, set off into the woods with a beer bottle in one hand, hoping to throw it at the creature and scare it away.
There, in the thick of the swamp, was the biggest, meanest, scariest…..
racoon they had ever seen.
Giggling at their foolishness, the two girls fell asleep and left the racoon to lick up the dish soap.
During their time in New Orleans, they danced to jazz on streets full of sherbert colored houses. They talked to homeless men and rascal musicians and part time whores with day jobs. The girls sucked in the smells of spicy seafood, old booze and sun-warmed magnolias. They wandered through city parks full of banyan trees — trees with branches so wide and thick that they seemed to be reaching out to the whole world.
Life in New Orleans seemed so rich, so full, so exuberant — perhaps even embarassingly so to those with more modest Midwestern sensibilities. But what a relief it was as well — to be able to witness people expressing themselves so dutifully, to see people reach down to the bottom of their souls and come out with the baubles and pearls of their lives and to flash them around, to rip off the bandages and proclaim that the wounds hadn’t yet healed. Big brassy horns hailed through the late night as shots could be heard in the poorer neighborhoods where in one such place stood a free dance studios if, as the outside sign instructed, you didn’t bring in your gun or drugs.
Since they were on a limited budget, only once did the girls have their dinner at a restaurant. They shared a steaming hot bowl of jambalaya. It was complex, loud, messy and satisfying, just like New Orleans.
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