| My Adventure By
Tom Kelly I have wrestled with the problem of how to tell you this story since late last summer, and there is no dignified way to confess: I really didn't attend the Louisiana Forestry Association convention in Lake Charles at the end of August, even though I was in the city on the day of the convention's main meetings, and ultimately did come up with reporting on the major events. What I really did in Lake Charles that day in August was a damn sight more exhilarating than most of the LFA meetings I have been to in person through the years--but I'll tell you the truth, I discovered that I enjoy sitting in long-winded, even boring, meetings more than my adventure in Lafayette. (And don't worry; my wife knows all about it, and we're still married.) The trip started out uneventfully enough--up a bit after 3:30 a.m., on the road at Dodson by 4:30 a.m.--plenty of time to make the registration, meet and greet, and find a seat for the business meetings starting around 9 a.m. at the fancy-sounding L'Auberge du Lac Resort in Lake Charles. (If my French is working, that's only "the Hotel by the Lake", as is most everything in Lake Charles, watered by the Calcasieu River which rises in the Piney Woods of Vernon Parish, down the road just a shout between Simpson and Slagle, and meanders on to the Gulf of Mexico, crossing the Intracoastal Canal after connecting Prien Lake to Grand Lake and Calcasieu Lake down in the wetlands of Cameron Parish.) Daybreak caught me somewhere in Allen Parish, past the entrance to the new Roy O. Martin plywood mill, on through Oakdale and Oberlin, past highway construction on U.S. 165, and rice fields and cattle pasturage where I once rambled in a past life, chasing ag news and local events on behalf of The Jennings Daily News. The pace and congestion picked up as I turned onto Interstate 10 at Kinder, within hailing distance of the Lake Charles destination as the clock ticked on past 7 a.m. It soon became apparent that I was on the crest of the morning commute wave, heading into The City. Quickly, there were warning signs along the roadside announcing construction ahead. And sure enough, there we were, in a hurry, at a crawl--impatient commuters, coast-to-coast truckers, highway construction equipment, and I, calculating the time remaining until the meeting downtown was gaveled open, all in a wad inching forward in a single lane for, oh, quite a spell. The clock ticked on past 8 a.m. Eventually, I approached the marker announcing the Interstate loop bypass, got to it, turned and got back up to speed, relaxing with the anticipation that I would still make the opening, beyond meeting and greeting, straight to business at the meetings. Of course, the bypass turned out to be the looooong way around, and I began to search for marked exits to the L'Auberge, located on the lakefront in downtown. Passed one with a L'Auberge billboard, but no indication to exit. Passed another; no exit indicated. Passed another, without an exit indicated, and . . . Holy shhhh. . . ! I'm past the city, on a no-turnaround Interstate lane, and ahead in the distance, looming like a thunderclap is . . . The Bridge! All interest in the LFA meeting collapsed. I pulled off the traffic lane onto a shoulder about wide enough for a slow-moving wheelbarrow and stared in disbelief. I said to myself, "Self, you ain't going to drive across that bridge!" There was a swamp on one side of me, and a tall concrete divider separating the east-west traffic lanes on the other. Looking in the rear-view, I began to calculate that if I backed slowly and carefully, taking care to stop when west-bound traffic approached me from the rear, I could eventually back up to the last exit, and somehow get turned around and head to the L'Auberge. I did this exercise for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and gradually it dawned on me that there was no way at all that I could execute that plan. The bridge, seeming to ascend into the low clouds, and to curve gracefully into infinity, loomed ahead. The impossibility of overcoming traffic and getting to an exit, loomed behind. The concrete divider precluded any thought of a turnaround. I, a certifiable acrophobic,(I get dizzy changing light bulbs) was stuck. I thought momentarily of calling 911 and requesting a helicopter extraction. (I could have done it; I carry a cell phone.) With knees trembling like I have never experienced since the time I almost flew a Cessna 175 into a tree beside the Ruston airport landing strip, I said, "Self, you gotta drive over that bridge." I waited for an opening, pulled back onto the roadway, put my little Ford Ranger in third gear, got to the far left lane, gritted my teeth and set sail. At the bridge, I kept eyes focused on the inside lane, kept a firm grip on the steering wheel while traffic whizzed around me on the right hand side, and only exhaled at the far end of the bridge. Glancing at my watch, I figured by now that I could proceed onto main eastbound I-10 route back across the Calcasieu River, whip off into downtown, park at L'Auberge, and make the meeting by the time the second speaker took the floor. (Under no circumstance would I have driven back across The Bridge, even if I could have found a loop turnaround). And thus I peeled off at the eastbound exit and arrived directly in . . . another traffic crawl . . . 18-wheelers inching bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see, toward the not yet visible semi-high-rise Calcasieu River bridge on the west side of Lake Charles. I inched forward by degrees, and as time sped by, it finally became obvious that if I made it made to L'Auberge, it would barely be in time for lunch, after all the speaking presentations were over. So what I did was, I came off at an exit, crossed under I-10, found myself in Sulphur, and after realizing I was not in Texas (that's past the Sabine river, took the next northbound highway out of town, passed through DeQuincy and some other nice peaceful places, and made it back to Dodson by around 3 p.m. I am grateful to Janet Tompkins of LFA who furnished me with enough material that I was able to fake the rest of it and report on the 2007 convention, safe and sound. The 208 meeting is at the Paragon Hotel and Casino in Marksville on August 26-28. I happen to know there are no high bridges between there and Dodson. Oh, and I am officially informed by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development that The Bridge at Lake Charles is 8,500 feet end to end (that 1.6 mile long), and 135 feet from average mean water level on the river. If you see the greatly reduced photograph below this column, those little black dots about the size of fly specks, are cars crossing The Bridge. I am probably not in one of them.
|
