A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

Between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon, Pointe a la Hache lost over 50% of its population, so there are a lot of abandoned properties in the town, especially along LA-15, which runs parallel to the east bank of the Mississippi River. Hope and I picked one more or less at random to photograph.



There was some damage around to the back of the house, nothing that looked like it would be impossible to fix. But if whoever lived there lost a steady income thanks to the oil spill, maybe they couldn’t afford even minor repair. Or maybe they just couldn’t afford to keep it up; those old houses need constant repair, and they are really hard to heat and cool. It’s sadly ironic that what made them suitable for the climate in the days before central air/heat—raised off the ground, high ceilings—now makes artificially cooled/heated air leak out of them like water through a fishnet. Too, since the levees were built they don’t get as much natural a/c from river breezes. And of course insulation has come a long way in the last 100 years.



Someone’s keeping the property mowed, but the house is starting to both sink and crack, and vines are growing over the outside. Left to itself, it will be unrepairable within not too many more years.

Fire is one of those things I've learned to ignore since moving to south Louisiana. There's always a column of smoke billowing into the sky somewhere on the horizon, and it's always just someone torching a canefield or a pile of brush or a bunch of garbage. We have a semi-tropical environment, which means rain all year 'round, which means it's never dry enough for fire in a rural area to get out of hand. Very different from my upbringing in California, where every summer some idiot's improperly doused campfire winds up burning down half the state.

I had my photography group's meetup here last month. Pointe a la Hache is the parish seat, but since Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon it's almost a ghost town. It's right on the east bank of the Mississippi and the primary business was fishing, so both of those things really hurt the town. There are less than 200 people living there these days, and the only business left is a combination diner/convenience store. (Unless you count the Catholic church.)

The damage to the courthouse precedes the hurricane, though. Some idiot who was about to go on trial in 2002 decided that burning down the courthouse would be a good way to destroy the evidence against him; instead he was convicted of his original crime AND arson. Parish business is now conducted in the town of Belle Chasse; there have been several ballot measures to move the seat there officially but they always get rejected. Sentimental reasons, I suppose.

This is from a roll that I shot in the Smena 8M and recently had developed. I’ve never known this camera to have light leaks before, but I shot the first half when I went to Rayne (this was taken in the “wrong way” cemetery), and didn’t finish it until I went to Madisonville, a few months later. I suppose it could have gotten jostled at some point. Also, the film shot in this camera has to be removed and wound back into the canister by hand inside of a lightproof bag, due to the fact that the original take-up spool is missing and I had to cannibalize the inside of a film roll. Another possibility is that the bag wasn’t as tight on my wrists as it should have been; however, the second half of the roll was mostly free of light leaks, which points to the former scenario as the more likely culprit.

Anyway, light leaks are one of those things that give digital perfectionists fits and make them prone to dismissing all vintage/toy/plastic camera enthusiasts as hipster dilettantes. They like to point out that the effects of these cameras, if for SOME reason they are desired, can be replicated with Photoshop. To which we reply, where’s the fun in that? Stop being such a control freak and see what happens!

I drove to Sabine Pass a few weeks ago, just for the day, it was the first time I’d been in Texas since driving out to Louisiana from California in 2010. Interestingly, this is right in the area where my mother grew up; although my maternal grandmother’s family has lived in the same area of south Louisiana for several generations, my grandparents lived in Port Arthur, Texas for many years and their three eldest children were all raised there. I think Sabine Pass was its own town when my mother was growing up, but now it’s within the city limits of Port Arthur.

I primarily wanted to see the Sabine Pass Light, which is actually on the Louisiana side of the Pass. But all the online directions I found direct you to the Texas side, I think because there’s no longer actually any road on the Louisiana side. The Light was de-activated in the 1950s, and the last private owners donated it to Cameron Parish in the 1990s, and of course they haven’t done shit with it. If a hurricane came along and wiped out the road any time since then, I doubt they bothered to fix it. But I may try to get there from the Louisiana side, or at least see how close I can get, because I couldn’t get close enough to get any good photos from the Texas side.

However, I don’t count the day wasted, I drove around and found some other interesting things to photograph. I like that drive too, it’s straight down LA-82 (and then TX-82) for most of the way. It’s a highway, but it’s a 2-lane rural highway with pretty scenery, and to get across the Calcasieu River I took the Cameron Ferry. Louisiana used to have dozens of ferries; nowadays I think there are 8 of them left. You can take I-10 to get there, but it goes so far out of the way that it doesn’t actually save you any time.

One of the places I found was the Sabine Pass Battleground. There was a Civil War battle fought here. I liked the contrast between the little shell-scarred bunker, and the weird modern machinery hulking in the background. Sabine Pass is like that, it’s very rural but surrounded by refineries and everywhere you look there’s refinery towers or oil-drilling equipment looming over you.

I recently read a book called Visit Sunny Chernobyl, in which a journalist, inspired by the titular trip to Chernobyl, decides to visit the world’s most polluted places. One of those places is Port Arthur. (If the Keystone XL Pipeline ever gets built, the American end is going to come out in Port Arthur.) But even with all the refinery crap cluttering up the scenery, it doesn’t really LOOK polluted, at least not in Sabine Pass. The sky was blue, the vegetation was all healthy, and there were birds everywhere. Not all pollution is immediately visible, I guess. It’s not anything obvious like oil spills or smog, but you know it’s there when you look at the cancer rates for the area. Chernobyl is beautiful too, according to the book I read. The flora and fauna are all flourishing in the area. But people who go there have to wear radiation detection badges, and can only stay so long.

I was there about a week before Hope and I went to Fort Pike, so I couldn't help but compare them. Gaines is in much better condition than Pike, which is not surprising, because Louisiana really doesn't have their shit together when it comes to parks and historic sites.

Apparently this is where Admiral David Farragut said the famous line "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!", during the Battle of Mobile Bay, in the Civil War. I thought it was odd that they would put it on all their signage and pamphlets, since Farragut was a Union admiral. But you know, we're all the same country now, so kudos to Alabama for refusing to give in to that stupid us vs. them grudge-holding mentality that is one of my least favorite things about the south.

Don't get sentimental about it, they're for eating. I feel vaguely bad about eating frog legs, I always picture little disabled frogs rolling around the bayou in tiny wheelchairs. I mean, I know they kill them when they cut the legs off, and it's not like I think being dead is preferable to being legless. It's just that my brain is a bizarre place. But they are tasty--like a chicken and a fish had a baby. It's about 35 minutes' drive from Abbeville, north in Acadia Parish.



St. Joseph's Cemetery is "backwards": they dug the graves north-to-south, and burials in every other Catholic cemetery in the world (as far as is known) are done east-to-west. They're supposed to face the rising sun, symbol of Christ's resurrection. No one knows why they did it; probably it was just an accident and by the time they realized they'd fucked up it was too late to do anything about it.



Open mausoleums always disturb me. Either they're vampires that never came back (or zombies?), or they got yanked out and thrown on the trash heap because their descendants stopped making payments. This is one of the reasons I want to be cremated.



Stained glass in the church. The pelican is the state bird of Louisiana, but it's also a heraldic device that conveys self-sacrifice for the greater good: in medieval times, pelicans were thought to feed their young with their own blood.



There are a lot of murals in the town, most of them frog-related. This one looks old, it was on the Five & Ten Worthmore Building, which has been in business since 1936. That's right, Rayne has an actual Five & Ten store. (Also, the ice cream store sells bubblegum cigarettes. It's like the Town That Time Forgot.) I'm halfway convinced that the store is some kind of museum underwritten by the town, because most of the merchandise looks like it's been sitting on the shelves since Nixon was in the White House. All the plastic wrap had gone yellow and brittle.

Hoyt's Cologne is often used in Hoodoo, mostly in things to do with gambling. (It does sometimes occur to me that Hoodoo practitioners might not need works to attract money quite so often if they gambled a little less.) There was no Hoyt's Cologne inside, but they had a pretty cool little religious section. Other than a few frog tchotchkes that they probably sell during the Frog Festival, it looked like the only merchandise that people actually buy. They had some items that I've never seen at the Catholic bookstores, like a Seven African Powers medal--that's more of a Santeria thing--and a Saint Expedite holy card. He's an official Roman Catholic saint, but Catholic bookstores never seem to carry his stuff. Probably because he's such a favorite of spirit workers.

First off, I have to admit that it was dumb of me to schedule the meetup 2 days after I drove back from Alabama. Getting back in the car and driving 3+ hours was the last thing I wanted to do. However, I've been trying to shoot Fort Pike since last spring; it was closed for months after Hurricane Isaac, and when it finally re-opened last fall, first weather and then the holidays kept getting in the way.

Technically, the forts are within the city limits of New Orleans, but they are way the hell far away from anything. Macomb is part of the Venetian Isles community, which is outside the levee system, and it's taken a real pounding in the last few decades. They had made some attempts to clean it up enough so it could be open to the public, but essentially gave up after Katrina. Pike, which is on the Rigolets, the strait which connects Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico, is even further away from the city. It's fared better though, and has periodically been open to the public.

These are just the digital shots, I shot a roll in the LC-A+ that has to be developed. I also shot my last pack of Impossible Project color film; I bought a 3-pack when they allegedly improved it and was just as disappointed in it as I'd always been. The last pack has been sitting in the fridge for a year and I finally decided to get rid of it; surprisingly, all of the photos are worth keeping. Apparently the trick is to refrigerate it until it's a year past expiration, and THEN use it.





It looked like the state made some kind of half-assed effort at restoring this one room, which had new plaster and a few pieces of wooden furniture, then went "fuck it". The plaster was filthy and coming off in chunks.







I'm not sure Macomb is accessible by land anymore. It might be around the other side, but it was so beat up looking that I wasn't even tempted to try and enter it. Hope and I drove past it and went into a bar to ask directions, they were like "It's basically across the street". We were looking right at it before we saw it, it's almost camouflaged.

The Pink Slim Dress has a dumb name but is an awesome camera. It's the SuperHeadz knock-off of the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim, which it re-created faithfully except for the Viv's annoying habit of breaking if you breathe on it too hard. It's great for photographing large buildings, like LeBeau was before a bunch of gas-huffing chucklefucks burned it to the ground--I used it last spring, when Trish and I photographed the house in slightly better days.











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