I drove the circuitous route from home to Abbeville down HWY 82 along the Louisiana coast and marshlands through Pecan Island, Grand Chenier and Cameron.  Crossed the Cameron ferry, endured the poggy plant stench, stopped at Holly Beach and turned north onto 27 to Hackberry through the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge up to I-10.  We chowed it at a Pizza Hut in Sulphur and then took I-10 for a short distance.  Crossed the frighteningly steep Earl K. Long Bridge and cut through downtown Lake Charles to get to the Old Highway 90 Route back home.  

We make this day trip about twice a year to clear my head and spirit.

My family really complained when I insisted that we go day-tripping.  They would have liked to stay home and be lazy all day. But the beauty of the day won them over.  Truly it was a heavily clouded day and we spent it under the threat of rain but nary a drop fell upon us.  We trailed the rain.  The roads were wet and tree limbs dripping, but we were never actually in rain. 

There is something about this landscape that moves and fuels me.  I am deeply in love with these rural, natural scenes and pray for their preservation. 

Our Louisiana coast is disappearing.  The areas we traveled to today are barely recovering–well not recovering– from the devastation of Hurricane Rita.  The losses from the hurricane and the need for assistance for coastal preservation are dire issues that I am not prepared to write about tonight.  Perhaps I will later…well, in fact I have written about hurricane losses in my play, Waterlines, which is part of the Sustained Winds project and will be performed at the 2007 Fringe NYC.  Hopefully our work will garner attention for the plight of Louisiana, and for our communal need for recovery–physically, fiscally, mentally and spiritually.

But of today, I didn’t get to stop and take as many pictures as I would have liked because there are hardly any turn offs that aren’t private property and no road-shoulders. The picture that I lost that I would have treasured was of a group of about six horses clustered together under a sprawling Live Oak.  Too, I would have liked to stop traffic on many bridges and take pictures from them.