America is a beautiful thing…

In Morgan City, Louisiana I stayed at the Morgan City Motel, a small, lonely $60.00 room.

Jim’s room was directly across the parking lot from mine, he was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette. Sixty and the first mate on a tug, he joined the Navy when he was eighteen and has spent his life at sea. He’s worked with the same crew for twenty years; 28 days at sea, 14 days off. The tug is used to tow heavy equipment between land and deep-sea oil rigs, It’s another week before he ships out again. He’s been married twice and getting his second divorce and is worried about their ten-year old son. He takes medication for his blood pressure.

I went back to my room and rolled a joint and sat on the front step and after a few minutes, Juan shuffled across the parking lot with his cane and his cigarette and asked to sit next to me. Juan’s seventy-six; he was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City. He’s married to a woman who lives in Virginia Beach, he hasn’t seen her in thirteen years. Juan started in the Navy, too, and has spent his career at sea, tugs, cargo ships, tankers. He’s seen so many places, Cairo, the Philippines, Alaska, the Eiffel Tower.

Juan’s got neuropathy in his feet and struggles to walk. I asked him if he had family in town or friends. He told me he’d shipped out of Morgan City many years ago, he’d liked the town and so he came back. He’s been at the Morgan City Motel for a couple of months, he came from Florida. He doesn’t know anybody in Morgan City except the motel staff and fellow residents; it was like he didn’t have anyplace else to go. Herbert, the maintenance man at the motel, has been making sure he gets out of bed in the morning and takes his meds. He used to have a motorized scooter but it was stolen. He’s worried about immigrants and crime, he talked about it at length. When I got up in the morning, there was an ambulance at Juan’s door. Herbert had called for it.

I went on a swamp tour with Captain Caviar. He spent thirty years fishing for choupique (pronounced “shoe pick”) for their caviar, and so the sobriquet. He sold the business and now Captain Caviar spends his days wandering the swamps with tourists, he gets a lot of Germans. A Russian couple in tall waterproof boots wanted to be dropped off on an island, he refused, too dangerous. The two of us spent four hours motoring the wide and tiny channels of the bayous under a deep blue sky and picture-perfect clouds, the Spanish moss-dangling over our heads from the live oak and cypress, the snow white egrets, the deafening silence when he turned off the engine, the alligators’ invisible presence. Our vessel was a 20’ flat bottomed aluminum boat with a 150-horsepower Suzuki outboard that pushed us fast on the big channels and was whisper quiet so I could only just hear it in the narrows. We motored past Pirate Island, famous for its booty; the booty rumored to be buried there by the pirate Jean Lafitte and the booty driven off the island by mosquitos after just one day on the TV show Naked and Afraid. He pointed to the shore where somebody caught a 13’ 1” gator just the other day.

When I got back to the motel, Herbert told me that Juan had been transferred to a larger hospital in Baton Rouge.