Iway

The bearded old man wearing the coveralls and tattered baseball cap leaned into me at the bar and whispered, “Be careful.” We were at the Dirty Rice Saloon just outside of Iowa, Louisiana along Route 90. Janet and I had spent the day driving the western half of the Cajun Nature Trail that ran along the extreme southern coast of southwestern part of the state and we were hot and miserable and very much in need of a beer. We had tried to get a place in Sulphur but we quickly found out that place was too edgy for us. It was filled with transients and we drove down the frenetic traffic of Route 10 to Iowa and found us a place that was much cleaner and quieter. We then went out for our beer.

Actually we were looking for a margarita, but the woman tending bar in the smoky joint sort of winced when I mentioned that drink. We settled for Buds and Janet had her bottle wrapped demurely with a napkin. We munched on roasted peanuts and read the graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings and read the electronic message board behind that bar that flashed missives about regulars that were ribald and included many invectives. We listened to the old man singing before his electronic keyboard that kept a beat and the heavy-set bass player with his face nearly hidden by his baseball cap and thought that this was all right. But, then the old man picked up his accordion and started playing Cajun music and suddenly people were up dancing; skinny as a snake old men in cowboy shirts dancing with young women. A big woman tittered in a barber chair near the band. The bartender asked us where we were from and why we were in Iway; I guess we didn’t look like regulars. When I told them she hooted and announced to everyone in the bar that we were here and then tried to get us to drink shots. Everyone in the place cheered and we waved. The bartender took our pictures for her MySpace page. The band began to play more passionately and then the old man came over to me.

“Be careful,” he whispered. “I came here three years ago….and never left.”

A long while later Janet and I were back in our hotel room after dodging the many Sheriff’s vehicles lining the short route from the Dirty Rice Saloon and our hotel and we were trying to figure out how to pronounce the name of the town we settled in for the night. Iowa? Iawo? Iway? It looked like Iowa, but with the mix of accents it was hard to determine. We settled on Iway.

We had left Lafayette that morning after a hearty breakfast at Dwyer’s Diner on Jefferson and headed off for the Cajun Nature Trail. The day was hot and the sun was unrelenting. We passed through small towns like Abbeville, Esther and Pecan Island. We passed vivid green salt marshes that stretched forever and interrupted only by random stands of trees in the far distance. The blue sky was decorated with clouds and whenever we stopped on the side of the road to look at a bird or an oak or a ship far out in the Gulf of Mexico, the silence was absolute. We were very alone.

We entered ground zero for Hurricane Rita in 2005, Holly Beach. She hit this desolate area a month before the catastrophic Katrina and Holly Beach took the full brunt of the storm. Everything was wiped out. There were 6 people living in Holly Beach one year after the storm, that’s how devastating the storm was to the area. There were a few houses rebuilt in Holly Beach, but many of the structures were just mobile homes with canopies covering them. It was eerie to drive through the footprint of the little town. Street after street was laid out, streets crisscrossing each other, but whole blocks were just empty, grass growing where houses once stood. We drove onto the wide beach and watched a lone fisherman standing hip deep in the Gulf haul in fish after fish. I collected some sand to add to my collection of sand from around the world.

It was frightening to consider what it must have been to see a hurricane bearing down on your location and there was nothing you could do but flee. House after house we passed on the remote LA82 was either brand new, rebuilt since Rita, or was scarred and abandoned. We were told hundreds of oak trees, some hundreds of years old, were lost in the area of the Lacassine Refuge, miles inland from the coast, torn from the ground by Rita.

One place that had survived not just Rita but Audrey in 1957 was Sha Sha’s in Creole. The restaurant is not that hard to find. There still are not a lot of buildings in Creole, like Holly Beach, and it’s right on the corner where there’s a traffic light, the only one for a good long way. We ate lunch in this squat, neat restaurant and had some damn good bread pudding with rum sauce for a dessert.

We traveled all the way along the coast clear through to Port Arthur in Texas and then turned right around again and drove back to drive through the Sabine Refuge area. Despite the strong, fierce sun we walked the 1.5 mile wetland trail with its boardwalk that weaved through the marshes just recently reopened a few months ago and looked at all sorts of birds through the binoculars that I had brought. (Ricky would have been proud.) We saw an alligator in one of the waterways and dodged fire ant mounds along the trail. We got on the road again, passing prairies and cattle with great herons, their white feathers ablaze in the sun, looking for bugs kicked up by the beasts. We passed through Hackberry, home to the first oil drills sunk in Louisiana. There were signs of the oil industry all through here, including several oil drills rising into the sun. By the time we reached Sulphur we were hot and miserable and the sight of a monstrous petrochemical plant was not very appealing. Thankfully Iway was in our future. By days end we logged around 250 miles.