Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Coming to Know a Place

192 Coming to Know a Place To say that beginning writers resist revision is a redundancy. If they understood its necessity they’d already be unbeginners. Writing teachers ease them into it by telling them to do a “Save As” with their documents, so they’ll always have the original drafts to go home to. Nothing is lost, we say, and it’ll be okay. Older writers too sometimes abandon work at the very moment that frustration with not-knowing might have led to a breakthrough. We toss aside drafts in a heat-panic, like throwing off blankets in the middle of the night—get off me! we cry. None of us know the scope of the task when we start. But getting to know the sentences’ landscape and people is necessary, and all we can do is stick with it. In reality, there’s no going back. r Crazy Larry called from Chicago to say he’d been trying to imagine my new life in Louisiana. His mental draft was pretty vague—that rural area down there, he said, field hands and old cars like you’d see in Havana—and I let it go on for a while because he was amusing. When I finally told him he was completely wrong, he demanded a truth, if his wasn’t it. Certain facts come easy, such as the population of Lake Charles (71,000) and the greater metropolitan area (200,000). There’s a small state uni and a community college, a decent library system, several small museums, any coming to know a place 193 number of good restaurants, and a river that flows down through three lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, thirty miles away. It’s Acadiana. But my impressions are still like coddled eggs, unset and easily broken. Our priorities have been to care for the family, get moved in, and learn new jobs, so we don’t know much about the region, haven’t taken long drives or even been to any festivals, though Lake Charles is called the Festival Capital of Louisiana. I never know the places that students name when I ask where they’re from. The pharmacist, letting a long line of customers build behind me, insists on explaining—twice—how to get to the road headed south out of Baton Rouge—he begins to draw a map—that has all the former plantations—the phone rings and the drive-through buzzes but he carries on—and insists we stop at the one French bakery—the cream puffs are good, but oh lord he could just eat that bread for dessert—that outranks all the rest. r The real name of the city we left behind,Champaign,is a geographical term for open, level country; prairie cut with streams. A little to my dismay, it’s champaign here too, but its use is more diversified: rice, hay, and sorghum are grown; innumerable bayous (streams) support fish hatcheries as well as shrimp, crawfish, and oyster aquaculture; above all, one notes the horses and cattle standing in pastures that start at the city limits and stretch to the Gulf, where oil rigs like tiny Monopoly houses dot the horizon. In an attempt to better understand, we attended the Southwest District Livestock Show and Rodeo, now in its seventy-fourth year.The event produces scholarships, they say, and the university mascot is after all a cowboy on a bucking bronco. The domed coliseum where it’s held is “under the operation of” the university and hosts campus sporting events, but the money for its construction was raised by a self-imposed parish (county) tax. It seems the dome, with its adjacent livestock pavilion and agricultural arena, gets far more use by ranchers and farmers in the region. A minivan is unusual enough here to draw comments from strangers, and ours would be easy to find later among the pickups. There was pleasure in walking across the dirt and grass parking lot, not some hot-baked 194 coming to know a place concrete plain, in being slowed to the pace of man and beast, and in anticipating a long afternoon with nowhere else to be. A gigantic trailer silkscreened with action shots of pro rodeo action sat at the entry gate. Its back door was being used as a porch by a dozen cowboys on folding chairs, hats pulled low, drinking coffee and talking...