Yes, this is the same Avery Island from Neutral Milk Hotel's incredible debut album On Avery Island. It's also a nature preserve and the site of the Tabasco headquarters. In fact, on Avery Island Tabasco acts not only as overlord to all who inhabit the salt dome but also as an edible food-like spice for every meal of the day (I heard you can put it on watermelon to give that boring 'ole melon a whole new twist!) and as currency (bottles are traded based on commodity prices for, well, mainly other bottles of tabasco– there are several flavors– collect them all!) and as a powerful hallucinogenic (one must consume 2 gallons to feel any effects, so I guess once you get there you've earned it). There are many other uses for this versatile flavor-enhancer that I won't have time to get into today, you can read about them on the internet.
Kidding aside, Avery Island (not actually an island, a natural raised mineral deposit) was the beautiful home to alligators, cicadas (or grasshoppers, I'm not sure) the size of your fist and several other visitors who, like us, were drawn in off the highway by the magical billboard. It was also home to many an old-growth oak tree covered in Spanish moss. "We begun to come to trees with Spanish moss on them, hanging down from the limbs like long gray beards. It was the first I ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and dismal." (Huckleberry Finn)
After hitting up the gift shop for both the park and the factory, we parted ways with this magical "island." We set sail for our real destination for the day, Grand Isle. Grand Isle is the closest town we could figure to the delta and we thought it would be important to see where the great river spits out into the ocean. The island was also where some of the first oil from the BP disaster washed ashore, so we wanted to see if we could find any traces of the spill. The road to Grand Isle was surprisingly beautiful. We encountered expansive wetlands, which are being destroyed daily by companies which encourage the intrusion of saline water by cutting canals through the marsh. This is particularly important because the wetlands (according Raleigh) offer the first line of defense against hurricanes. A very interesting and politically charged topic, but not necessarily the topic of the post.
BP's presence was felt more and more as we closed in on the coast. The beaches were shut off, there were eerie white tents housing twenty-four hour clean-up crews and there were news trucks smattered across the town. We were lucky enough to get out on a pier and catch a glimpse of the damage, and the clean-up effort. It didn't look too bad from where we were, the water didn't appear to have any more oil in it than Galveston would on a normal day. The beaches had already been cleaned and apparently the winds had shifted and the oil would be hitting further west from where we were. I wish we could have explored a bit more but it was a two hour drive back to New Orleans and we were hungry. And you wouldn't like me very much when I'm hungry.
We ate at an amazing restaurant, Atchafalaya and then went out on the town. Today, we've been recovering and working on our various projects. Walker is recording as I write this with Native America.
I'll just let the pictures tell their story from here. Enjoy.
But before the photos, Walker's got a great little piece of audio from an interview yesterday. It's a Katrina horror story from this man:
Raleigh tells a great story.
katrina story
More soon,
Logan
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