Category: Louisiana

After all our anxiety about the “devastating” hurricane, we ended up with absolutely no effects at all in our area – we didn’t even lose electricity. We did lose Internet for a few hours, and there were some interesting winds late Monday afternoon, and we lost a couple of somewhat big tree branches, but that’s it. How lucky can we get?! We can’t say that for the rest of the state, as huge areas are without power and many may be without for a month.

Since we were unable to concentrate on much of anything pre-hurricane, we rode our bikes around town again on Sunday morning. Once again, the weather was beautiful. More houses were boarded up, and Chelsea got more photos, thinking we would be able to do some great before and after albums. There was a group of firefighters and police outside the station, so we pulled up on our bikes and chatted for a while, introducing ourselves around. We told them we’d be here for the storm, and we’d holler for help if we needed it.
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Well folks, it looks like we are in the crosshairs for Hurricane Gustav. We’ve been closely watching the weather channels, and it’s pretty much focalized on our area, but as we know, that can change anytime. Everyone around here has had the pre-hurricane jitters for the last few days. Everyone’s really calm, and there’s a lot of laughter and stories about prior hurricanes, but the food, water, batteries, and dry goods are flying off the shelves.

Lynn Hair took us up to Wal-Mart in Crowley LA yesterday afternoon where we got food that can be cooked easily and quickly on our camp stove (think ramen, soup and oatmeal). They were completely out of water already, except for a few palettes of lower quality small bottles of water, and there is no camp stove fuel to be found, but we still have several liters with us. Lynn found water last night at Sam’s Club in Lafayette so she got some for us.
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Gueydan has one really big festival each year – the Duck Festival (the town bills itself as the Duck Capital of America). The festival and parade are a really big deal hereabouts, and draw people from quite a distance. They’ve got duck-calling contests, skeet shooting contests, a beauty pageant (there’s a queen for nearly every 2 yrs in age difference!), duck carving, and a duck and goose outdoor cook-off. There are at least 4 Cajun bands that play each day, and the grounds have an arcade along with a crafts show.
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Of course, it’s not just the services that define a town, it’s the people, and the people have been the biggest reason we’ve stayed here so long (okay, the food is great, the music is great, there’s always something to do, we’re in a great house, and the weather has been near perfect the last 8 weeks or so, too). I’m going to give you a cast of characters in brief, of our last few months.

TJ and Cassie – Elray Schexnaider did some work for TJ and his daughter Cassie, and when Elray found out we were going through Gueydan he told TJ that we were coming through and that we needed a place to stay. TJ and Max Hungerford are the two characters who met us on the highway and took us to lunch that first day we were here.
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Surrounded by rice farming, crawfish ponds, and cattle ranches, and billing itself as the “Duck Capital of America”, Gueydan is a small town of 1200 people, on Hwy 14. It’s 24 miles west of Abbeville, 12 miles east of Lake Arthur. As the crow flies, it’s about 20 miles inland (north) from the coast, and about 10 miles south of I-10. It’s right at the intersection of Hwy 14 and Hwy 91.

A bustling and prosperous town in the oil boom of the 60’s and 70’s, Gueydan declined in the oil bust of the 80s and never quite recovered to its former level of growth and activity. Though there are at least a half-dozen vacated buildings on Main St., some in very bad repair, the others are occupied, with steady car and foot traffic. The buildings are well maintained and the streets are clean. There’s a general feeling of cleanliness and being well maintained throughout the whole town.
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We really miss Fred; he’s become a big part of our lives, so we’ll take any chance we can to see him. One Sunday we made arrangements to come and see him in Abbeville. We agreed that we’d ride over on our bikes (about 24 miles), fly with him in the afternoon, and then he’d take us back. It didn’t work out quite as easily as we’d hoped. First of all, we stayed up until 3 a.m. with a binge of blog-writing, album prep, and website posting, so we didn’t get going until about 9:30 or 10, after only a few hours of sleep. Then we were dealing with the awful traffic on Hwy 14 (we didn’t know alternate routes yet), and the heat and humidity were incredible. Chelsea was showing signs of heat exhaustion after only about 7 miles. We finally limped into Kaplan (15 miles from Gueydan) in the face of a rainstorm, both of us dying. We collapsed in the air conditioning at MacDonald’s and kept trying to get Fred, but we couldn’t raise him at any of his numbers. We had that familiar feeling of “well, what now?”
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A chance to see a small private rice mill in operation? How could we turn that down? Jamie Gayle, of Duck Capital Computers and Patti’s Book Nook, managed to arrange a private tour for us of Stansel Rice Mill, and on Chelsea’s birthday, no less. Located only a mile north of Gueydan, the rice mill is set among rice fields, tucked back off a quiet road in a small community of a few houses and the rice mill.

Travis Richard now runs the rice mill that was started by his grandfather just over 50 years ago. It’s a low-key place, neat and clean and straightforward. The rice processing is in one building; the rice dryer is in another; and the office, silk-screening room, and packaging are in a third. We started out in the rice processing area, with Travis getting the machinery going for the day’s run.
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July 20th, 2008

Since we were still in the area, we talked Fred into coming to visit us in the ultralight so we could get another flight – not knowing how long we’d be there. There was quite a bit of searching as we tried to find someplace he could land. The local crop dusters said no because of insurance reasons, and we still didn’t know the area well enough to know what to do. If only we’d known Pat Hair then! We finally heard that there was an old strip near the “parish barn” just outside Gueydan. We described it to Fred as best we could, and after church on a very hot Sunday, we headed out to find it on our bicycles. We thought it was only a mile away. Sure enough, just outside town, there sat Fred in his ultralight, in a field right next to the highway.
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White Lake

In July 2002 the oil company BP-Amoco donated a 71,000-acre wildlife preserve known as the White Lake Property to the State of Louisiana. White Lake is managed by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Used as a hunting preserve by BP-Amoco, it’s an area of freshwater marshes, some pastureland, and cropland suitable for growing rice and crawfish. Every winter there are huge numbers of ducks, geese and other water birds in the marsh. The marshes are flooded and drained seasonally, providing food and water for the birds, and the residual rice from rice farming also provides food. The area is known as the finest duck hunting area in North America – Gueydan is the gateway to White Lake and identifies itself as the Duck Capital of America.

An Advisory Board has been assigned the task of setting out the longer term plans for managing the area, requiring a good balance between conserving the natural beauty of the area and opening it to the public. Currently there are plans for increased fishing, bird watching, sightseeing, and for a beautiful pavilion with nature walks and conservation education. BP Amoco provides money each year for maintenance and improvements, and the state collects fees for hunting, trapping, farming leases, alligator trapping, and the collection of alligator eggs.
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We told Max about the resident mouse in the house, and on Sunday (after attending church services next door) he took us to Dollar General to buy cleaning supplies and mousetraps. He bought bleach, scrub pads and toilet bowl cleaner. We supplied some pieces of old cheddar cheese and Max set the mousetraps before he left. We didn’t have to wait long. Within two hours – snap!… went the mousetrap. We disposed of the mouse immediately, leaving all the other traps out – certain that we’d be catching more. But as it turned out, there was only one very happy mouse making a lot of mess.
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