[AGL] Port Arthur #9

[michele mason]

Beautiful description—made me wish I'd been there to see it.
I'm going to ask Mike how to turn off the List for awhile. Its not that 
I can't deal with the "over-educated". I've survived years of it and 
just dismiss them with good wishes. I just need some time to get things 
done and I  find it irresistible to read everything. So if you want to 
reach me you have my address. Stay well and let me hear from you from 
time to time.  mm

On Nov 2, 2006, at 9:42 PM, J. David Moriaty wrote:

> 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.
>
> <Puddleducky.jpg>
> 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