Albie was up early, so we got started earlier than usual.
Natchitoches is such a pretty place, I wanted to go downtown one more time before we left. Having a coffee and sitting by the Cane River before getting back in the car seemed like a grand idea, provided the music had stopped. We were downtown a little before eight but, alas, the only coffee shop in town didn’t open until ten, which was rather odd because there was a sign in the shop window that urged, “Start your day with coffee!” Well, I was trying.
With no coffee in hand, Albie and I strolled along Front Street for a while, then I took a seat on a bench by the river and watched the morning slip over Natchitoches. When Albie lies down, as he did next to me, he often assumes the position of the stone lions that grace the entrance to the New York City Public Library. His paws extend straight out, his neck is straight, and his head erect. He looks very regal and alert in that position. He remained like that for a few minutes, sighed, and then lay his head gently on the grass. Albie is so handsome; I could look at him all day.
Mercifully, the band that had been playing in the riverfront pavilion the night before had gone home, and the speakers mounted on the lamp posts had gone silent. Chirping birds and the muffled sound of car tires rolling over the brick-paved street up the riverbank behind us were all we could hear.
In a couple of hours we’d be in Texas, and just as I had wondered when North would become South earlier in the trip (and decided it was when we were driving on the Patsy Cline Highway near Front Royal, Virginia), I wondered when the Southeast would become the West. Probably, I thought, when we come to a replica of the Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat on top. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait that long.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said out loud. “Seriously?”
I don’t make a habit of talking to myself. I’m just self-aware enough to know it makes me seem like I’m losing it. But Albie was asleep in the back seat, so I was, for all practical purposes, talking to myself.
I thought we’d buried Gordon McKernan yesterday. But there were three more of his billboards north of Natchitoches and six or eight or ten around Shreveport—so many I lost count. His face was a constant fixture wherever we went in Louisiana and I was really tired of seeing his mug everywhere. It felt as if Albie and I and Gordon had been traveling together since Baton Rouge. Of course, I’d known from the git-go he was a lawyer trolling the entire state of Louisiana for business. Now I was desperately hoping he wasn’t a member of the Texas bar, too.
We stopped after a couple of hours in a small town to take a walk. I knew we were in Texas but didn’t know where. As we walked along First Street a group of women came out of a shop and admired Albie, so I asked them, “Where are we?”
The woman who answered was tall and thin and, I’d guess, in her late seventies. Her hair was done up in a beehive and she was wearing flared pants the bright yellow color of French’s mustard, a white blouse, and a yellow vest to match her pants. She looked like she was about to take the stage at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.
“Why, this is Hughes Springs, honey!” she said with a twang. Since I was obviously clueless, she added, helpfully, “Texas!”
“And look at you! Aren’t you just the sweetest thing.” Perhaps it goes without saying, but she was talking to Albie.
As in Natchitoches, there were loudspeakers mounted on lamp posts along the street blaring music. Whoever the powers that be are in these towns, and whoever decides what radio station everyone has to listen to as they walk down the street, really ought to reconsider. It’s Orwellian. And incredibly annoying. At least they were playing classic rock in Natchitoches. Here in Hughes Springs the only song I recognized was “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”:
All my ex's live in Texas
And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be
But all my ex's live in Texas
And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee
If I had to listen to this music every time I went into town to run an errand, I’d probably live in Tennessee, too, or even Mogadishu.
We walked around a corner and saw a festival of some sort in progress, so we wandered over. There were carnival rides and vendors selling funnel cakes, cotton candy, and corn dogs (they really could have used a kiosk that dispensed Lipitor), and dozens of people selling crafts of one kind or another under portable tarps. One of them, an older woman selling knickknacks, greeted Albie, and I told her we were on a road trip from Boston.
“I didn’t think you were from around here,” she offered.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked.
“You sound like someone I knew from Michigan,” she answered. “He played basketball.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to parry that nonsequitur, or what makes people sound like they’re from Michigan, but she was kind and was enjoying petting Albie. The fair, she explained, was part of the Texas Wildflower Festival, an annual statewide celebration of the season when Texas’s abundant roadside wildflowers bloom, a legacy of Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification program in the 1960s. As we started to move on she had one more thing to say.
“Welcome to Texas! Drive safely. The truckers will run right over you!”
I had been surprised that the speed limit on the two-lane roads we’d been driving since entering Texas was a very speedy seventy miles per hour, and still there were plenty of trucks blowing right past us.
“If the speed limit is seventy,” she added, “they’ll be pushing eighty.”
Like many parts of Texas, this corner northeast of Dallas is cattle country and between Hughes Springs and Paris we passed several ranches with gated entrances adorned with the name of the hacienda on top. It was all reminiscent of Southfork, the Texas ranch where the dysfunctional Ewing family plotted against one another in the 1980s television melodrama Dallas.
As we approached Paris that afternoon I kept scanning the horizon trying to glimpse this Eiffel Tower replica we’d heard about from our waiter in Natchitoches the night before. It was apparently the biggest tourist attraction, maybe the only tourist attraction in town. Surely, we would see it rising above the treetops, but all we saw were radio and cell phone towers and none were adorned with a red cowboy hat. Maybe, I thought, it’s a ways out of town, or perhaps we’re looking in the wrong direction, but we’d find it after checking into our hotel.
After we’d unpacked a few things and Albie had some water and a short walk, I looked up the Eiffel Tower on my iPhone. It was less than a ten-minute drive away so off we went to see the biggest thing in Paris. But even as Google Maps suggested we had arrived at our destination, there was no Eiffel Tower in sight. We were in a big, empty parking lot directly in front of the Paris Civic Center. Where in the world was this thing? Then, off to the side of the Civic Center, I saw it. It wasn’t the biggest thing in Paris, after all.
Now, it would have been unrealistic to expect a full-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, but something built a third or a quarter to scale wouldn’t have been unreasonable. The real Eiffel Tower, the one in Paris, France, stands over one thousand feet tall and it is intricate and graceful and ornate. But there it was, all of seventy feet tall, including the hat, according to the website I perused as I stood there trying in vain to ascertain why this was such a big attraction. It looked like a slightly oversized jungle gym, or a regular-sized jungle gym for overachievers, built using a child’s Erector set, just black piping assembled into a tower with a big red cowboy hat mounted at a jaunty angle on top. Yes, it was kind of shaped like the real Eiffel Tower, a splayed, arched base under a pointed spire, but all in all it was, to put it mildly, stupendously underwhelming. Albie seemed to think the whole thing was a gigantic fire hydrant.
To my utter astonishment, the website I was studying to get the dimensions of the thing offered this fascinating tidbit: “The average visitor spends one hour here.”
Really? An hour? A full sixty minutes? This was harder to apprehend than the Lilliputian scale of the tower itself. What could one possibly do here for an hour? You can’t climb it or swing from it or even find a nearby café from which to admire it. The red cowboy hat at the top doesn’t even rotate or spray water or blink on and off. I can only imagine that for the “average visitor” the last fifty-nine minutes of the interminable hour they loiter here are spent in an embarrassed silence as they try to figure out why they spent any time at all finding the place.
We did not spend one hour at the Eiffel Tower; I’d have passed out from boredom. So, about five minutes after we arrived, we hopped back in the car to check out downtown Paris which would, hopefully, redeem our decision to spend an entire afternoon and evening here, hopes that were soon dashed.
There wasn’t much happening in town. Actually, there was nothing happening in town. Empty and forlorn storefronts lined the streets; the only eatery in sight was a Subway sandwich shop on a corner in the main square. There was a lovely fountain in the square, and we took a seat on a nearby bench, but once again we were subjected to the bizarre practice, now firmly fixed in my head as a feature of southern towns, of being forced to listen to a radio station selected by persons unknown being played through loudspeakers mounted on lamp posts. At least the music was good: an all Beatles radio station. But between songs we had to listen to a fast-talking AM deejay prattle on about the weather and the discounts being offered at various car, RV, and motorcycle shops around town. Peace and quiet doesn’t seem to be much in fashion in these towns. Once again, as in Tupelo and many other towns we’d passed through in the southland, there was the intolerable ear-splitting sounds of pickup trucks and aging muscle cars either without mufflers or modified to make the maximum racket, and drivers intent on burning as much rubber as humanly possible. This cacophony was quickly becoming the official soundtrack of East Texas, too: cars, pickups, and motorcycles competing to see who could be more disruptive of the civic peace and, once they had passed, the return of music being blared through public loudspeakers. It’s a wonder anyone in these towns can hear anything anymore. Then again, maybe that’s why they have to keep cranking up the volume, on the motor vehicles and the music; because no one can hear anymore. It’s a vicious cycle.
What were people trying to say with all this noise? I recalled something Voz Vanelli, the restaurateur and raconteur I met in Tupelo, had told me. We were talking about how one bad review on social media can really hurt a business like his and how business owners can ill-afford to ignore such reviews. The few negative reviews he’s had, he told me, were all written by men.
“For many of them,” Voz told me, “writing a bad Yelp review is as much power as they have in their lives.”
Maybe Voz was onto something, something that may explain the gnawing resentments and sense of displacement so manifest in our politics, especially among men in economically struggling towns, men who feel powerless, maybe even emasculated by their diminished circumstances. They are drawn to politicians who give voice to their anger, resentment, and grievances, especially someone who is willing, figuratively (or in our current circumstances, almost literally), to say “fuck you” to everyone they think is responsible for their plight. Maybe all this noise coming from their cars, pickups, and motorcycles is a primal scream of sorts that says, “Look at me; pay attention to me.”
When we’d had our fill of the Beatles, after Ringo had wrapped up his stirring rendition of “You’re Sixteen,” we went off in search of an afternoon treat. Among the shuttered and worn-out storefronts we found an open shop with a sandwich board out front that said, “Candy and Ice Cream.” Perfect. Ice cream was what we were looking for.
The place was huge, about the size of a small banquet hall, and mostly empty save for a glass case housing some weary-looking pastries. We were the only customers (maybe not just at that moment but for several months or more), and it took a minute for a man, the proprietor I assumed, to make his way to the front from somewhere in back. He seemed indifferent to find customers in his store and greeted us with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
“Hi,” I said, “we’d like some ice cream, please,” even though there was no ice cream anywhere in sight.
“Sorry, we don’t have ice cream,” he replied. Rather than point out that the big sign in front of his shop said, “Ice Cream,” which he probably knew, I just thanked him, and we left. It certainly didn’t seem like a busy place, and I had a pretty good idea of why his business might not be booming, but it seemed so pathetically sad that even with plenty of time on his hands to make a couple of minor changes he hadn’t bothered to get a different sign, one that didn’t promise “Ice Cream” to unsuspecting tourists in search of a frozen treat.
As we continued our walk it seemed, though maybe we just missed a lot, that all Paris really had going for it was that it shared a name with a city in France. Everywhere we looked, from the masthead of the local newspaper to the city logo, the word “Paris” was spelled with an image of the Eiffel Tower (the local one with the red cowboy hat on top) where the “A” would normally be. The city’s bus system, comprised as best I could tell of a few small shuttle-type buses, was called “Paris Metro,” again with the “A” in Paris denoted by the tower with the red cowboy hat. Like the “ice cream” shop, it all seemed kind of sad. Paris, Texas, bears as much resemblance to Paris, France, as I do to the late musician formerly known as Prince. But you go with what you’ve got and if sharing a name with the French capital is the best thing Paris has going for it then, by all means, they should make the most of it.
Now, we had only one restaurant recommendation for Paris and it came from the same young waiter we’d met the night before in Natchitoches who recommended a visit to the Eiffel Tower. There was ample reason now to question his judgment, but I figured with nothing else to go on we’d give the Mexican restaurant he told us about, the best in Paris he assured us, a shot. I did not write a negative Yelp review, but the takeout burrito was the consistency of soup and it sloshed about in the Styrofoam container I’d been given to convey it back to our hotel room.
It would be a fair criticism of my judgments about Paris that we were there for less than twenty-four hours, and that we no doubt just missed whatever it is that makes people proud to be from Paris. But unless the traveler lingers for many days, perhaps even longer, in every place he or she visits, the same critique can be made. The best he can hope for is a glimpse of a place, and some charm us and some do not. Some beckon us to return for more, some make us ready to move on. So far, Paris was squarely in the second group.
By early evening we’d only been in Paris a few hours, but we seemed to have already exhausted its possibilities. I bought Albie a soft serve vanilla ice cream cone at the Dairy Queen next to our hotel on the ring road that circles Paris, but then decided we should give the town one more shot. Surely if we drove around we’d find a nice park or another place to take an evening walk, something, anything, that might give us reason to fall, if not in love with Paris, but “in like” with it. Half an hour of driving later and we couldn’t find a single place where I even wanted to get out of the car. Maybe it was my irrational fear of dilapidated, vacant buildings and overgrown empty lots. Whatever it was, we called it an early night and headed back to the hotel where I left Judy another voice mail message. She’s a hard woman to reach.
In the morning we’d be leaving for Okemah, Oklahoma, and it turned out, happily, to be one of those places that beckons us to come back.