July 9th, 2008
Getting Here
Our day of arrival in Gueydan was really memorable. We awakened by 5:30 or before, as we had to load Lee’s truck and be on our way with Lee to meet Elray for breakfast at CCs at 6:30. We had stayed up much too late, as usual, getting things done, so we were really tired. We were completely packed except for last minute things, and I finished off cleaning the bathroom while Chelsea vacuumed the front room. I will never forget seeing Lee’s face as he asked “What she doin’ in there?” When I replied that she was vacuuming (at 6 a.m.), he rolled his eyes in exasperation, and told me that she should quit that. I assured him there was no chance of that, as we were going to leave them with a clean house. 🙂
After moving our goods to his truck, we had a whirlwind breakfast with Elray (we had beignets!), and then Elray drove us up to Kaplan where we started riding. It had been close to 5 weeks since we had ridden with the trailers, so it was definitely a change in pace. By the time we got started, it was already quite hot, and we started out tired, to boot. But it felt really good to be on the road, and we had an additional boost by getting admiration and encouragement from a group of older men speaking Cajun French in a local gas station/minimart where we stopped for a bathroom break.
I should back up a bit and tell you that before we left, Elray had called a friend of his in the next small town, Gueydan, about 15-18 miles down the road. That was just about a perfect distance to ride for our first day, and especially considering that we were getting a bit of a late start. As far as we knew, this man, TJ Fontenot, was going to host us for the night, and then we’d take off the next morning for the next small town. Elray had let TJ know that we would be there about 11:30 or so, and he gave us TJ’s address.
So there we were, riding along. However, we hadn’t known about the riding conditions, which were just brutal. The heat was high; there was no shade of any kind, anywhere; the traffic levels were really high (and we’re talking huge semis barreling along at 70 mph); there were no shoulders; and the road conditions were appalling. The road is broken at the edges, creating constant really deep potholes, and our trailer axles were taking a beating. There were no shoulders at all, and we couldn’t go in the middle because of the extremely frequent oversized loads on trucks coming through. Five miles felt like fifteen miles.
We made it steadily along, despite the conditions, but we couldn’t relax at all. We had to stay on high alert because of the potholes, and if we rode out in the lane to avoid the potholes, we had to watch for traffic and then get back over, usually right on top of more potholes. My trailer kept losing its load and we kept having to stop and adjust it so it didn’t rub right through the duffle bag. On top of that, we had to pull over frequently for the oversized loads coming through. We finally stopped for a longish break and got going again. We were still on time, although a bit late. Right about then we passed some sort of outbuilding at an intersection which had a big sign on it “If you lived in Wright, you’d be home now”. We laughed at that, because we would have loved to have been “home now” for the day!
Shortly after that, in the midst of some big traffic, a nice car went by us going the other way, with two guys in it waving vigorously. It was pretty unusual to see such waves, especially since the girl in the truck following them spit out the window towards us. Chelsea couldn’t tell if it was because she was being rude, or just happened to spit, or if the car ahead of her had annoyed her, but it unnerved us. And sure enough, about 3 minutes later, here came that same car, a nice-looking late-model car, with those two guys in it, pulling up next to us. We had a bad moment there, wondering what on earth was up. I was ahead of Chelsea as usual, and they were hanging back talking to her, so I had to ask her what they were saying, meanwhile dealing with the potholes and the traffic. Finally Chelsea said that they were telling her “we’re the people you’re staying with” or something to that effect. We finally pulled off the road to see what was up.
Turns out that we had just met TJ Fontenot and Max Hungerford. They encouraged us to pull up to an outbuilding just ahead, and they told us that they would go back and get a truck and come for us. We settled in with our camp chairs and sun umbrellas, and sure enough they were back in about 20 minutes. We loaded the goods onto the truck and then Chelsea went with TJ in his Cadillac, and I went with Max in the truck. They took us directly to TJ’s house in Gueydan.
I should take a minute to describe Max and TJ. TJ is somewhere in his early 80s. He’s “retired” now, but is still quite active. Having grown up in a small town about 20 miles away, he made his money in gas – he was the first Amoco distributor in the area (and became the largest), and even though he tells the story about his first big lucky break, it’s clear that his business acumen was what carried the day. He and his family are now involved in various large-scale real estate investments – his daughter Cassie lives in Gueydan, dividing her time between Gueydan and Houston, Texas. TJ has another daughter in Houston as well, and he spends a reasonable amount of time there, but Gueydan is where his heart is. He is a passionate duck hunter, and took us to his office, showing us some of the ducks he’s caught, and some photos taken by a great photographer – all of ducks. TJ loves to reminisce – his wife died a few years ago and he lives alone, a few blocks from Cassie. He is still driving, and still tossing over ideas for new business ventures.
Now in his early 60s (just barely crossed the line), Max grew up in Gueydan, but now lives with his wife in Lake Arthur, a town about 12 miles to the west of Gueydan, where he’s been for some years. Max has been in the oil industry for 40 years or more, and has probably done nearly every type of job within the industry. He is now a consultant and works at jobs when he wants to – picking the jobs he wants to work. From everything we’ve heard from the wide range of guys we’ve met who either currently work in the oil industry, or who have done so, it’s a tough field, full of burnout. Max, from what we gather, is very ready to have something else to do, but he’s not ready to make any substantive changes yet. He will work heavy hours, under tough conditions for many months, and then he’ll take a number of months off. We happened to meet Max at the tail end of an extended period off work. TJ had pressed him into service as a driver, and the two of them had been taking long driving trips around Louisiana over the prior two weeks or so. Max is also active in the Gueydan United Methodist Church as a member of the board of directors.
While they each have very different styles, they are certainly each very assertive and take-charge kinds of guys.
So, back to the day of arrival. The rest of the day was an absolute whirlwind. Neither Chelsea nor I knew what was next until we finally dropped into bed that night. For starters, Max and TJ had decided that we would go out to lunch. Neither of them were aware that we wanted to stop and take a shower and change clothes, or at least cool off and get some of the sweat off us, so we begged for a few minutes for a bathroom break. We washed our faces and hands in the bathroom sink at TJ’s house, and quickly pulled on our Patagonia Vitaliti dresses – a total of about 5 minutes. We ended up driving about 12 miles to the next town, Lake Arthur, for lunch at Nott’s Corner, a local institution. I will say, lunch was awesome. There was virtually no conversation with us, despite the fact that they didn’t know who we are – we were pretty amazed by that. We spent the time listening to Max and TJ discussing their schedule, and TJ reminisced about the area (it was great fun hearing his stories). Then they’d talk about where we would be spending the night (it became clear early on that we wouldn’t be staying with either Max or TJ).
I will never forget riding in the beautiful car, with the beautiful music on the beautiful sound system, watching the scenery go by, listening to these two men discuss our futures with no input from us. Chelsea and I just kept giving each other wide-eyed looks as all kinds of possibilities rolled out of them. After a rolling tour of Lake Arthur, we headed back for Gueydan and TJ’s house. On the way back, it sounded as though Max and TJ would be taking us all the way on through to Cameron, LA, well on down the road near the border to Texas, and putting us up in a hotel for two nights. I finally had a chance to whisper to Chelsea “I don’t think I want to go that far tonight”…and she whispered back, “Me either!” We figured at some point we’d take a stand when we found out what the real options actually were.
We arrived back in Gueydan, apparently to get a truck to take us down to Cameron, when Max had some kind of brainstorm. He said something about “the old parsonage” and that it “wasn’t pretty” but we could stay there. He went over to get it opened up and put the air conditioning on, while TJ took us on a driving tour of the Florence Club – a private duck hunting club just south of Gueydan on Hwy 91. We met up with Max again at TJ’s house, and followed him over to “the old parsonage”.
The old parsonage turned out to be a delightful 3-bedroom 2-bath house right on Main Street in Gueydan, right next to the Methodist Church. It’s about 70 years old, with lots of beautiful windows, wonderful hardwood floors in both the living room and one of the bedrooms, and has a big kitchen. There’s even a big television in the front room with a VCR and DVD player, and a pool table in the back room. A wealthy donor built a brand new house for the pastor, right next door, so the church has been using this house as a youth house, meeting only a few hours a week in it.
While we were unloading our things from the truck, TJ brought in the mayor of Gueydan, Bob Hensgens, who lives across the street from TJ. It turns out that the City Hall is right across the street from the old parsonage, too. After being introduced all around, Bob suggested that we meet with him the next morning and we would be made honorary citizens in a little ceremony. We’d receive certificates, lapel pins, and have our photo taken for the newspaper. It sounded like fun to us, so we agreed. It did mean we’d be staying another night.
When we were finally alone, we took stock of where we were. The television was on, the air conditioning was on high, all the ceiling fans were running, and beautiful sunshine poured in through the west windows, creating a warm look with the hardwood floors. Though the house was great in some aspects, it had some serious downsides as accommodations. The house hadn’t been used in several months, and it was extremely hot and smelled pretty funky. Furniture, books and papers were piled helter-skelter. The main item in the front part of the living room was a ping-pong table, surrounded by old chairs, a tv on the floor, old filing cabinets, and a bedroom dresser turned on its side upright.
The bedroom we would have chosen to sleep in was covered in folded-up cots. The kitchen was a disaster – a mouse had clearly been happily living there, having made nests in a number of spots, and having left its little droppings all around the kitchen and living room. It had torn up a number of things, and the cabinets were full of really old food and dishes that we hated to touch, along with mouse droppings and droppings from other critters. The bathrooms had clearly been cleaned, but the toilets were growing mold (as bathrooms left in hot environments are wont to do), and the floors had been clearly been swept sometime, though not recently. It was obvious that the furniture was all cast-offs from other sources, in varying degrees of cleanliness and repair.
We were pretty overwhelmed, and just sat and stared at the television for a while. I think we must have watched at least 3 programs, before the agony of watching television (we never watch tv) overcame our apathy. We decided to figure out how to put together a couple of cots, and after much faintly hysterical laughter and a few pinched fingers and toes, we got the job done. We were greatly relieved that we didn’t have to sleep on the floor!
To this day we have no idea what we did for dinner that night, but at some point we crawled onto the cots to sleep. We had no sooner settled in quietly than we heard not-so-subtle rustling. Of course we were awake like a shot, and I turned on the overhead light in time to see something that looked suspiciously like a mouse shoot out of my trailer and head under the heap of cots. We didn’t know what to do, so off went the light again. The rustling didn’t take even 3 minutes to start up again, so on went the light, and away went the mouse. I’d get up and rearrange my things in the trailer, turn out the light, go to bed, and we’d start over again. We had absolutely no idea what to do. Finally in total exasperation, I had Chelsea help me put everything in the refrigerator. Though the refrigerator was an issue in itself, our food was all in bags, and we knew that mouse couldn’t get it there! We finally fell asleep about 1:30 a.m.
After this rather inauspicious beginning, little did anyone know we’d fall in love with the place, and be staying 2 months or longer!