Judged:
1
Never speed through a South Louisiana speed-trap town with a six pack of beer in the passenger seat, and no driver's license!
ViewsHound Bronze Prize Winner
By John Flores
...And there was the local corruption—the mobster element that was always mixed with Louisiana law enforcement to make for some colorful situations.
Like the time I paid a fellow sailor to borrow his classic Mercedes for the weekend so I could drive down to Grand Isle, about 100 miles south on the coast, to spend the weekend at the Tarpon Rodeo. Naturally irresponsible at that point in my life, I normally failed to carry any form of I.D. on my person. On that bright summer morning, taking the helm of a fast and very cool car, I had a six pack of beer in the passenger seat and a foot made of lead. This was a bad combination, and about halfway down to Grand Isle, in the middle of the vast marshland, I was stopped in a little speed trap town of Golden Meadow.
The cop asked for a license, or a form of photo I.D., and I didn’t have any. The open beer between my legs didn’t help my case. He threw me in the slammer and said:“I never saw a sailor with enough money to get a car like that!” The sheriff there at the small jail wore diamond rings on his fingers, the first tip-off that he might be involved in some type of shady behavior. As it turned out, my uncle was the doctor for a big mafia figure who spent a lot of time on Grand Isle and that person also knew the sheriff of Golden Meadow.
When I called the motel at Grand Isle to say I’d been arrested for stealing a car and wouldn’t be there to meet my uncle, Dr. Flores, the girl who answered the phone hung up with me and immediately called her daddy—the big mafia guy—who called the sheriff. Within a few minutes, I was on the road again. I found out how South Louisiana worked—the hard way. There are too many stories to tell in the space of a small column, but it is good to remember those days even for a little while.
The Station New Canal was created in the early 19th Century, and withstood many hurricanes over the decades, but finally about a decade ago it was boarded up and the light turned off—for the first time. The U.S. government sold it, and built a much larger station a couple of miles to the west—still the busiest SAR station in the country. But it’s not a lighthouse.
Hurricane Katrina completely wiped that old station, with the historic lighthouse, off the map six years ago. Now, a lot of people on that northern side of New Orleans are still trying to find the money to rebuild it. Using the original lamp from the old lighthouse—at least it was not blown away.
I was surprised by Katrina destroying the station, because it weathered many in the past. We witnessed two during my time there.
I drove to the old station some years ago, before Katrina, to stop by and see it, remembering when it was a very important place for boaters and fishermen on that giant lake for so many decades, and was surprised that it had been closed. Lake Pontchartain is about 30 miles wide and about that long, so anyone on a boat at night needed that light to get their bearings if they were miles from shore. It was a life saver, just seeing that light on a stormy night.
Sitting there I could almost hear my old chief cursing at me, as he always did. I looked around and it was only the lake’s endless wind, as if roaring in anger that time had stolen the last light of Lake Pontchartrain
Aquarius