Kinship of Rivers Project: Unfortunately we were stuck in New Orleans for several days

This is Christopher Staudinger hanging up river flags at his folks' house.

He's a river friend of Ping's, a poet, and an excellent all-around dude. We met up with Chris in New Orleans with the original plan to pick him up and then zip off to Venice at the end of the Mississippi to meet up with river friend and shrimper Mike Waddle to hang flags and catch some shrimp together. Well we checked the weather forecast, and judging from the high winds, heavy rain, and 15-20 degree temperatures we figured that shrimping was unlikely to happen that night, so Ping reluctantly made the call to spend the night in the drab town of New Orleans, where there really isn't that much to do at all.

I, of course, was devastated, as it happened that I was to be turning 25 at midnight, and what's more, my friend and fellow LIU writing student Jack Carr was incidentally stuck in New Orleans that night as well, and the last thing I wanted to do was turn 25 under such circumstances. Unfortunately such things were entirely unavoidable, and after an excellent dinner of shrimp pasta made by Chris's awesome family, we made the decision to venture out into the cold to see Walter "Wolfman" Washington.

Here's the shrimp pasta recipe!

Well, to make matters worse, once we arrived at the Maple Leaf Bar, we discovered that in addition to an excellent musical ensemble, Sunday night also featured a crawfish boil, which entailed buckets of crawfish, shrimp, clams, crab legs, sausage, boudin, pork chops, and corn on the cob dumped out onto long tables for everyone to eat as much as they could. Needless to say we were sorely disappointed by these circumstances and made even more uncomfortable by the large quantity of crawfish boil we had consumed pretty soon after that fantastic shrimp pasta. The music was also incredible.

Earlier in the evening, we had consumed a King Cake. Everyone's always eating King Cakes in New Orleans during carnival. Baked somewhere in the King Cake is a plastic baby Jesus. If you get the plastic baby Jesus, you get...

...to buy the next King Cake! It's not really much of a prize. Anyway, guess who got the plastic baby Jesus?

...Blogger Extraordinaire right here. Well, as luck would have it, someone at the bar gave me one of them king cakes. The knife we used to cut it hit the baby, so we all dodged a bullet there, and nobody owed anybody else a king cake.

We hung the flags up at Chris's house, where his parents put us up. I just have to say it one more time, thank you so much Mary and Ed for your awesome hospitality, your excellent food, everything!

This was pretty cool.

Most people make river flags about rivers. This artist decided instead to make a flag about Dennis Wilson of the beach boys complete with instructions on how to download his album Pacific Ocean Blue on the internet!

Wizards of ladder safety

This is one of my new favorite poems:

The river is awesome
The water is cool
When its hot
It feels like a pool
I really like rivers
like my school

The next day, since it was still too cold and windy to venture out to Venice to do any shrimping, we drove back out to the Achafalaya Swamp to meet up with Roy and Annie Blanchard. Roy is a 74 year old cajun fisherman. He built his house all buy himself (well, Annie said she busted her fingers hammering nails with Roy too,) with sinker cypress timber he had found in the basin. There's no cypress logging any more, because all of the good trees were felled, like I mentioned in the last post. Well, there's still some logs in the basin that had too much sap in them to float and sank to the bottom. Over time, the sinker logs lighten up and start to float, and Roy collected these whenever he found them in the swamp, and used them to build his house. He said the only thing he had to buy was nails! (And flooring, roofing, wiring, stuff that's not made out of wood, etc.)

Here they are signing books in their lovely living room. You can see up above Roy's head, there's what looks like a big old deer trophy. It sticks out a good three feet into the room. Roy killed it himself! He does just as much hunting and fishing at age 74 as he did when he was my age, only I never had to build any houses from timber I found in the swamp.