Cajun Adventure, Post-Hurricane Rita
(continued)
It seemed like an accurate prophecy, judging by a lot of the folks we’d met down there. Either they have no dental insurance and can’t afford dental care, or they have bad diets and oral hygiene, or some combination. Whatever the reason, lots of people are missing lots of teeth. With the teeny tiny houses standing on cinder blocks, many in disrepair, Cajun country looked poor without the help of a hurricane.
But as we discovered dancing and working with them, folks in Acadiana have great wealth. They are rich in fun despite their poverty in material things. They are always ready to laugh, always ready to tease. How many American towns like Lafayette, with a population of 200,000 people (now 300,000 with New Orleans evacuees), could keep musicians busy seven days a week?
After we parted, Josh returned directly to his Marine base in New Orleans. He had been in Lafayette just to visit his family for the weekend, and to listen to music.
Tuesday: New Iberia and Avery Island
Tuesday was a short workday for Anna and me. It was my first day trying to navigate by myself to New Iberia. I failed miserably, and Sister Ancilla’s hand-drawn map didn’t help. I turned the wrong direction and created an hour-long detour that took us almost to Crowley and back. Flat land, flat land, flat land all the way, with nothing familiar in sight. During that hour, I felt like crying several times from sheer frustration, but I’m not much of a crier. Had I been able to let out my frustration, I think I might have felt better.
“Well, Joe’s from Crowley, so at least we saw a little of where he’s from,” I said to Anna, trying to look at the bright side. Thank God for cell phones that work in the boondocks, because I was able to call Una at the Diocese offices and get corrected directions. Turns out that Sister -- of all people!! -- had written something wrong on the map. She wrote “Acadiana Hwy” instead of “Evangeline Hwy.” Very un-nunlike to make a mistake, in my experience.
Bob and B.J. had a good chuckle at my navigational woes when we arrived in late morning. Huey’s big joke was, “I’m gonna tie a string to your car before you drive home, and you can follow it back next time.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out that Bob wanted to do a professional job of final mud-smoothing work on the drywall seams, so Anna and I busied ourselves pounding nails and adding another coat of mud over the drywall nails. I swept dust and debris for a couple of hours. I had forgotten how much sweeping is involved with remodeling – that was what Mike and I did every day when we remodeled our home in 1981.
It was colder than earlier in the week, around 60 degrees, but bright and sunny, so we decided to take the late afternoon for a trip to Avery Island nearby. Avery Island is the home of the Tabasco sauce factory and the “Jungle Gardens,” an amazing transformation of old salt quarries.
We decided to tour the gardens first. Joe had raved about a Buddha statue there. According to Joe, the statue was a gift to Americans who rescued it from robbers who stole it from ancient China. The paths winding through the amazing 250-acre gardens encompass about four miles, a bit much for late in the day, so we decided to drive through. We stopped here and there to admire the amazing bamboo plantings. We searched the many lagoons for alligators – no luck on such a cool day. When we finally found the Buddha, we were surprised to find him young, the Prince Siddhartha. It was an amazing large statue many times life-size, made of carved and painted wood. According to our guide sheet, Siddhartha Gautama “sits cross-legged in the center of the sacred lotus flower… quite as he did 800 years ago in the Shonfa Temple near Peiping, where he had been placed by the Emperor Hui-Tsung during the Tsung Dynasty between the years 960 and 1127 AD.” Wow. He was old.
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| gail grenier sweet photo | gail grenier sweet photo | gail grenier sweet photo |
Anna and Siddhartha, Jungle Gardens, Avery Island. |
Siddhartha, Avery Island Jungle Gardens. |
Explanation of Buddha Statue, Avery Island. |