[AGL] Port Arthur #9

[J. David Moriaty]

Last week a weather report promising four days of dry air and below 
average temperatures lured me to Port Arthur for my sometimes monthly 
inspection, this time made more urgent by reports of a 4-hour 
thirteen-inch rain the week before. And I wanted to find what the hell 
my Starks, Louisiana real estate agent was up to, because I had heard 
nothing since we'd signed the contract to sell the place on the Sabine 
River.

The Saint Augustine grass glowed like green neon in the setting sun as 
I pulled into the drive. Outside a gray cloud of marsh mosquitoes was 
waiting for me to open the front door so they could rush inside and 
plague me for the rest of the evening trying to invade my ears. Without 
my reading glasses I can no longer locate them, much less take accurate 
aim.

In the hall light the orange oak stair rail was a dull grey green. With 
my glasses on I could see the mold eating the vestiges of the lotion my 
mother's hand had deposited on the rail two years earlier when, with 
her failing vision, she had mistaken the bottle for hand soap and 
greased everything she touched.

The house is full of ghosts. The table Clark Santos drug in from the 
upstairs porch so we could eat lunch still sits under its tablecloth in 
the upstairs bedroom. Jaxon's cigerette is stubbed out in the ashtray.

Two black spots on the living room ceiling showed where the upstairs 
porch and the fireplace chimney flashing had leaked in the 80 
mph-wind-driven 10-inch rain of the preceding day. Although the 
thermostat said 68, I turned on both the upstairs and downstairs 
central units to dry the house, turned on the toilets, ran water in the 
drains to fill the p-traps, then fled to The Schooner to get my gumbo 
fix while the house dried out.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Puddleducky.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 95442 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/austin-ghetto-list/attachments/20061102/ac835435/Puddleducky-0001.jpg
-------------- next part --------------

1940 Puddle Ducky? with seat belt. Did you have one of these?

Port Arthur is gradually recovering from the effects of Hurricane Rita 
with actually operational stoplights and few remaining blue roofs only 
a year after the storm. Most of the brush piles are gone, filling both 
the city dump and a new annex out the Proctor Street extension to 
multi-story heights, still so water-logged as to be unburnable.

The blank-faced wandering negroes are gone, washed out of town in the 
hurricane. In their place is a minor renaissance of housing repaired 
with insurance largesse, most notably in the neighborhoods along the 
canal, and even in the neighborhoods across from Rose Hill there are 
1900's mansions newly resplendent advertised for $145,000.00, an 
astounding bargain anywhere but Port Arthur.

The once rusted, moribund refinery units are all glittering with new 
paint, and construction cranes are everywhere: Chevron's remaining part 
of the old Gulf facility will double, as will the part newly acquired 
by Valero. Shell plans to triple, (along with Fina) and even the 
notorious Huntsman facility (the former Texaco) is all aluminum paint 
and cranes. Obviously nonbelievers in peak oil.

On the way to the restaurant I was only challenged by a single street 
racer; on the way back two had to be blown away for not understanding 
the meaning of M3. This much hasn't changed.

The Schooner now offers fine wines and imported beer, but has only a 
vague idea of a proper salad. However, as the cajun in the next booth 
remarked, "Dat Greek sure do know how to make de gumbo".

People who grew up next to corn fields assure me that the supermarket 
corn, however fresh, is not worth eating. Corn, they say, loses its 
flavor within the hour of its harvest, and must be rushed from plant to 
pot to plate to be properly enjoyed.  I think this must be a taste 
acquired in early childhood, for I can't tell the difference.

But broiled flounder, that's another story; the flounder must be rushed 
from gig to plate in less than 24 hours, or it loses its sweet delicate 
texture and becomes bland and rubbery with a hint of fishiness; or, at 
worst, tough and bitter. It travels not at all; only the most expensive 
of Austin's restaurants can offer a simulacrum, and that only by 
same-day air freight from private fishing fleets. The flounder at the 
Schooner is, at best, ambrosia, at worst eatable as any $100 restaurant 
in Austin.

The other restaurant of note, Sartan's, came to mid-county Nederland 
from fame in Sabine Pass.  Flounder there is only served the day it is 
caught, otherwise it is unavailable. The decor is spartan: plastic 
folding tables like you get at the U-Rent, an all-you-can-eat generic 
fish menu, a help-yourself salad bar that is always totally depleted, 
gluey baked potatoes; but flounder fit for the gods. The house 
specialty is barbecued crabs. Their other location (following a family 
split) is on the Gulf Freeway between Houston and Galveston.

Back at the house I turn off the AC and retire to the glassed-in 
upstairs porch to watch the boats on the canal. In the blackness the 
oil rigs glitter six miles away on the Louisiana shore.  Two river tows 
pass, and a fuel barge, then, as the crescent moon sets, the ghost 
ships: pushed by seagoing tugs: a black, unlighted hulk of a once-proud 
navy cruiser heading to the mothball fleet at Orange, then another 
mystery ship, its masts and booms illuminated by flood lights, hull red 
and black with rust.

Last summer, just by chance, I saw the aircraft carrier Oriskany being 
towed to a grave off Florida.

A Coast Guard patrol races by at 50 mph, and I retire to the front 
bedroom and turn on the ancient  Quasar TV, famed for its red screen 
phosphors, in its place on the shelves of mildewed books. The on switch 
gives me a small shock as it comes alive.

The weather man is puzzled: the Neches River is cresting at five feet 
above flood stage; the Sabine is six feet below flood stage at Bon 
Weir, but one foot over flood stage at Deweyville. There are no dams 
between Bon Weir and Deweyville. My Louisiana property is above Starks, 
just up from Deweyville.

The next day I get up early and head for Starks.  At highway 12 and 
Louisiana 109 the Sabine has the forest flooded for twenty miles, and 
the trailer houses sit in their own lakes. Heading back highway 12 from 
Deweyville to Vidor, the barr ditches are running in the direction of 
the Sabine; obviously the Neches is overflowing into the Sabine and 
that explains the mystery of Bon Weir being high and dry and Starks and 
Deweyville under water. Just before the intersection of 12 and highway 
87 I encounter the new suburbs of Vidor and Beaumont: middle management 
building McMansions on 5-acre tracts of St. Augustine replacing the 
forest primeval, now reflected in their lakes like moats of mediaeval 
castles, waterline at the window sills.

The news that night tells me Highway 12 was closed due to high water 30 
minutes after I passed.

j.dave