As a result, I’ve got some promising ideas for Campbell Young #5 (including a particularly gruesome death involving a horde of flesh-eating crawfish in the Atchafalaya Swamp), and am looking forward to sitting down to some serious writing in the next few months.

It was great to be gone, but it’s great to be home. And if you happen to be in Picton tomorrow evening (Tuesday, July 31), we’ll be at Steve Purtelle’s Acoustic Grill on Main Street about 5:00 p.m., enjoying a drink with our friends. Join us if you can.

So ends our blog. Thanks for your company.

Dean Wilson, our Atchafalaya Swamp tour guide, had given us a large piece of bald cypress driftwood, which we had been carrying with us for the last week. Even after we discovered that it was infested with ants, we sprayed it with Off! and kept it with us. When it started to smell, I encased it in a plastic garbage bag and we kept it with us. However, when the unfortunate young woman assigned to our “case” removed the still sodden contents from the interior of the Jimmy, just about everything within a twenty-foot radius suddenly smelled worse than a week-dead armadillo on the side of a Texas highway. “What is this?” she asked me, and I said, “It’s a piece of bald cypress driftwood from the Atchfalaya Swamp south of Lafayette, Louisiana.” “Well,” she said, “you can’t take it with you.”

An hour later, back in Canada, the Jimmy smelled much better, and by the time we reached the home of our friends, Jane and Whitey Hamill, in London, Ontario, we were much relieved that the driftwood had been disposed of. And we were so happy to have home-cooked food again that we consumed an alarming amount of Whitey’s expertly barbequed steak and Jane’s pasta salad and garlic cheese bread, and the next morning an equally alarming amount of bacon and eggs and toast and jam. Not only was it good to eat home cooking again, but it was good to be with friends again. Complete strangers had been very good to us during our travels, but now we were home.

And this afternoon we took another tour, this time of the Buffalo Trace Distillery, where some of the finest whiskeys in the world are produced. The aroma, as you walk past the old brick storage buildings (six floors of bourbon ageing in thousands of white oak barrels) is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever smelled — more beautiful even than steak, or roses, or babies.

Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, had adjoining bedrooms; hers still contains the air conditioner she had installed the day after his funeral in 1962. His hatred of air conditioning was well known within the family. When I mentioned this to the young man who admitted us to the house, a history major at Ole Miss, he related the following story: “Apparently, one of the grandkids said to Estelle, ‘Wouldn’t Pappy be angry with you for putting in an air conditioner?’ to which she replied, ‘I am sure he would want me to mourn in comfort.’”

At one point during our visit, Karen asked if she could buy a potholder Mary Ann was working on. “This is the foist potholder I ever made, and you wants to buy it!” Mary Ann said. She got to her feet, embraced Karen, then me, then signed the potholder, as did Ritamae and Mary Lee. This is one potholder that will never hold a pot, but will occupy a place of pride on our kitchen wall.

1. MAISON BOURBON

The Dwayne Burns Band: Dwayne Burns, trumpet; Earl Brown, tenor saxophone*; Matthew Clark, banjo; Mark Wayne, bass; Aaron Washington, drums.

Among other tunes, the band played ‘St Louis Blues,’ ‘Mack the Knife,’ ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street,’ ‘Tin Roof Blues,’ ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ (twice), and ‘St James Infirmary.’

* jammed with tenor great Johnny Griffin in Germany in the ’70’s; evacuated out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, lived in four different places before he could return six months later

2. PRESERVATION HALL

The Tenor Summit Band: John Gilbert, Elliot Callier, Daniel Farrow, tenor saxophones; Ralph Johnson, clarinet; Carol Leblanc, piano; Sidney Snow, bass; Cary Brown, drums.

Among other tunes, the band played ‘Blueberry Hill,’ ‘Ice Cream,’ ‘Muskrat Ramble,’ ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ and ‘St James Infirmary.’

3. FUNKY PIRATE

Big Al Carson & The Blues Masters: Big Al Carson, vocals; Harry Sterling, lead guitar; Harold Scott, bass guitar; Ron Joseph, drums.

Among other tunes, the band played ‘Crossroads,’ ‘Soul Man,’ ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,’ ‘I was High,’ ‘Pull Up Your Pants,’ ‘Take Your Drunken Ass Home,’ and ‘St James Infirmary.’

Karen and I loaded our folding chairs into Dean’s fishing boat (powered by a 60-horse Yamaha outboard) and off to the swamp we headed. At first we travelled along a wide brown river frequented by tugboats and barges, but then a sharp right turn took us into a narrow channel and before we knew it we had entered a primordial world abundantly populated by giant tupelo and cypress trees, sycamore and persimmon trees, by trumpetvine and button woodbush, by egrets and ibises and barred owls and yellow-crowned night herons, by beaver and coon and otter and mink and alligator (we saw one — a big one — swimming away from us; we followed its trail through the algae), by catfish and mullet, by banana spiders and fishing spiders.

We also saw signs of man: hundred-year old pull-boat roads, wire mesh crawfish traps, beer cans jammed on branches. As we roamed through what seemed to be an endless maze of channels (sometimes we had to kneel on the floor of the boat in order to pass under low branches), Dean collected garbage from the water: plastic pop bottles, a child’s pink inflatable raft. At one point he commented that Louisiana is not only the most naturally rich of the United States, but also the most politically corrupt, which makes his work all the more difficult. “Whoever thinks he can prosper in Louisiana without selling his soul to the devil,” he said, quoting an author whose name he couldn’t recall, “either doesn’t know Louisiana, or doesn’t know the devil.”

CAMPBELL YOUNG AND PRIAM HARVEY RENT A ROOM FOR THE NIGHT

The desk clerk studied his computer screen. “I’m afraid all I have left is a handicapped room, which I can let you have for seventy-nine dollars plus tax.”

“A handicapped room?” Young said.

“Yes sir, it’s outfitted for handicapped people. Wider doors, railings in the tub area, and so on.”

Young placed his huge hands against the counter and leaned forward. “Isn’t there a law about that sort of thing? I mean, if we’d parked in a handicapped parking space in your parking lot right outside here, we’d get a ticket, right? What if a handicapped person shows up an hour from now and wants to stay the night, and we’re in the handicapped room? What then? We’d probably get a ticket for that, too, right?”

Priam Harvey, who was standing next to Young, said, “I’d find that very embarrassing.”

“I assure you, gentlemen,” the desk clerk smiled, “we do this all the time. Once we’ve given out all our regular rooms, we’re allowed – ”

“I’ve got a handicapped friend up in Canada,” Young interrupted. “Confined to a wheelchair. Former cop. Bullet in the neck. I don’t think he would find this as funny as you do.”

The smile disappeared. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean anything. As a matter of fact, I have a cousin – ”

“How much did you say for the handicapped room?”

“Seventy-nine … well, I suppose I could give you the manager’s rate.”

“It’s almost seven o’clock,” Harvey said, looking at the clock behind the clerk’s head. “Couldn’t you throw in the night rate, too?”

The young man frowned at his screen. “Well, all right, but the best I can do is forty-nine dollars, plus tax.”

“Fine,” Young said, “we’ll take it.”

Then we drove through driving rain down to Evangeline Downs, in Opelousas, where I lost money on sure things named Raygan’s Lane and Captain Buddy. (Karen won on a nag named Felsenthal; she bet it because the jockey was a woman. I mean, come on!) The best thing about Evangeline was the Cajun buffet: all we could eat for ten bucks (shrimp creole, crawfish etouffee, fried catfish, red beans, dirty rice, chicken and sausage gumbo, bread pudding with whiskey sauce).

And lastly, we retired to an eerily empty America’s Best Value Inn. Just as some of the towns we drove through in Texas reminded me of Peter Bogdanovich’s film, ‘The Last Picture Show,’ so our motel was reminiscent of the hotel in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining.’ Just add a pinch of Tennessee Williams southern-style decay.