Cross-Country Ramble 35: Event-Filled Sunday

Date: 3/27/98 7:54:48 AM Central Standard Time

Some days are uneventful: you get up, check out, eat, bike, eat, bike, snack, bike, check in, nap, shower, eat, watch TV, do email and sleep. Sunday was not one of those days. It had more packed into it than most weeks.

We made it to Christ Episcopal Church in Covington, Louisiana, just in time for the readings. Like most regular church attendees, I've heard the parable of the prodigal son a hundred times. The sermon following focuses on either 1) the repentance of the wayward son or 2) the ungratefulness of the elder son or 3) the love of the father. This time, we're getting variation three. My mind wanders. I recall that Luke wrote his Gospel account in about 70 AD. Why did he choose to include this parable? Why was it important to him? I imagine Luke reading this story to his congregation of Jewish and Gentile Christians in 70 AD.

Flash! One of those cartoon light bulbs goes off in my head. To the original hearers, the story's about them! It's a story of faithful Jews, Johnny-come-lately Gentiles, an issue that divides them and a love that unites them. For me, this makes this old parable into real story about real people with real issues. I'm excited for days.

At the coffee hour after the service, we hear that there's a bike path which will take us most of the way to Slidell, our days' destination. "Head out route 22 toward Abita; you're sure to see it."

We take their word for it and head out route 22 to see what turns up. It's a beautiful biking day. The sky is blue, we have a breeze at our backs and temps are in the low 70's.

The first thing to turn up is a little restaurant alongside the road. It's lunchtime; we're hungry; we turn in. Our first hint that this is not your ordinary roadside cafe is that we see a guy out back with an 18" tall white cook's hat on. Of course we don't have reservations, but someone has canceled and they can work us in. I'm feeling a little underdressed; my biking shoes click on the hardwood floor.

What a menu! The brunch starts with mimosas. My first course is a veloute (soup) of artichoke & oysters. Elegant and smooth! Our second is poached eggs with a complex cheese-based sauce. Tasty! The accompanying orange translucent fish eggs burst in our mouths. My dessert is crème broulet. Smooooooth! Carol's is fresh fruit over blood orange sorbet. Intense! This is a lunch that will live in our taste buds forever.

The promised bike path turns off just a few hundred yards down the road. It's a beautiful bike path--a six feet width of smooth asphalt on an old railroad roadbed right out of BicycleLand. Everybody's out biking or rollerblading this beautiful Sunday. I'm particularly touched to see the number of biking parents out with their kids, who are either biking or rollerblading.

Mostly we have the swamp alongside. Trees are growing out of the water. We see what must be Cyprus knees, several egrets and a big blue/gray heron. It's so quiet, we can hear ourselves think. We can talk quietly to each other.

We're thinking that this path will take us all thirty miles to Slidell. But it doesn't. You can see that the roadbed goes on, but the path isn't finished yet. A passing jogger gives instructions that get us quickly to a path along the shore of Lake Ponchetrain. Folks are out at the shore picnicking, wading and just walking on this, one of the first nice days of spring.

The bike path starts up again for a while, and then ends again. Three guys in a rusty van out of the movie Deliverance pull up. I suppress fear and we talk. They tell me we'll have to swim the bayou to get any further via this route. I bike ahead a bit to check. They're right. We're looking forward to finishing our day on 9 miles of busy US 190.

A kid on the rustiest bike I've seen since I was a kid pops wheelies around us and asks about our bikes and where we're going. He knows a great way to get to Slidell which only requires us to go half a mile on the highway. He starts giving us instructions, then gives up and says he'll show us.

We're back on the highway a moment. He's obviously chagrined at how we ride, on the side of the pavement with traffic. He scares us, too, riding against traffic on the wrong side of the road. As cars come, he either runs off on the shoulder, or simply changes to a lane the car isn't in. When there isn't traffic, he's running circles around us popping wheelies.

Happily, we're not on the highway long before his "short-cut " starts. It's a great route, paved and with hardly any traffic. There's one really interesting part: a half-mile stretch of unimproved roadbed and a trestle you can see the water though. We turn this way and that so many times that I'm completely disoriented.

It occurs to me that we've put ourselves completely in the hands of this hyperactive 13-year-old. He tells us his name is Nero. He's only lived on this side of the lake since December; he moved up here from New Orleans last December to live with his grandmother. He's learned the back routes to Slidell because that's where the fun is. After guiding us for over an hour, he tells us we're close to Slidell now, that we can make it the rest of the way on our own. It's getting dark and he needs to get home. One of his instructions is that when we get to a certain tee in the road, we can go either way. We can do that, we figure.

We go on, following his instructions as best we can. It's getting a little chilly in the late afternoon. Are we really heading toward Slidell, or is this some kind of strange hoax? We cross a bayou on a floating bridge. None of the things we see are on our map.

Aha! A city limits sign. It's Slidell! There's a "vacancy" sign flashing ahead and we've still got a few minutes of daylight left. What a day!

Ken

Ramble 36: Dauphin Island