It is a Choctaw word, “bayuk,” which the French explorers adopted for use in the Mississippi valley, calling any sizeable stream entering one of the bigger rivers a “bayou.” But then it seems they left it be hind when they returned home. The word is not listed in Cassell’s or Heath’s French dictionaries, so I suppose it is actually Choctaw-French-American. The Corps of Engineers could not give me an official definition of a bayou, or of a creek or a river. I would have expected these officers—soldiers, engineers, bureaucrats, all tidy men—to have had some strict system of classification and nomenclature, but not so. In this matter they defer to local tradition. If the people of north Arkansas want to call their fast-flowing, whitewater, mountain stream a bayou, the Illinois Bayou, say, then a bayou it is, and there is no objection from the Corps.
South of Monroe the river was out of its banks, lapping at the highway in places and pushing into the cotton and soybean fields. As it draws closer to the Mississippi, it joins a tangle of rivers and bayous that are flowing more or less parallel here on the alluvial plain, and sprawling in wide meanders. Roads and ferries were closed and I had to make detours. Highway builders in Louisiana work on the Jeffersonian assumption that west (and east) is the proper direction of travel. There are fine east-west interstate highways, but traveling north and south is slow going. But then road building is an expensive business here, with so much fill dirt being required for the elevated and literal high ways.
I stopped at Columbia to pay a call on former Governor John McKeithen of Louisiana. He lives on a farm here and keeps an office downtown. Something of the squire in these parts, he is perhaps the most notable figure living on the bank of the Ouachita. But he was out of town.
More failures: I couldn’t track down a commercial fisherman, and there are a few left, from Calion on down, netting catfish, buffalo and drum, in descending order of value. I turned up no song about the Ouachita, and it is certainly as deserving as the Wabash or the Swanee or the Red. I did find two poems celebrating it, both written in the 19th century, by Albert Pike and a George P. Smoote. I showed them to a woman who is a judge of such things, and she read them unmoved.
“Welcome to Jonesville/ Where the Four Rivers Meet.” It is the end of the line, Jonesville, population 2,620, some 30 miles by road and bridge from Natchez. Jonesville makes the further claim of being DeSoto’s ancient Indian town of Anilco, at the mouth of the Anilco or Ouachita River. No one knows if these Indians were the same as the “Ouasitas,” a small Caddoan tribe first mentioned by Tonti in 1690. They moved west in the 18th century and were absorbed by the Natchitoch Indians.
I stood behind the grain elevators of the Bunge Corporation and watched the Ouachita, still greenish, for all the flooding as it poured into the Tensas (pronounced Tensaw), and where they both suddenly be came the Black River. The fourth river, called the Little River, enters the flow a bit farther down. A half-mile upstream from the mouth of the Ouachita the Bunge Corp, has a dock and a big blower pipe, where barges are loaded with soybeans and other grain. Here at last was a volume shipper.
“Oh, yes, we use the Ouachita all the time,” the manager told me. “That last half-mile of it, anyway.”
Motel Life, Lower Reaches
This story appeared in the Oxford American magazine in the January/February 2003 issue. In April 2010, the magazine presented Charles Portis with an award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literature.
MOTEL #1
Back when Roger Miller was King of the Road, in the 1960s, he sang of rooms to let (“no phone, no pool, no pets”) for four bits, or fifty cents. I can’t beat that price, but I did once in those days come across a cabin that went for three dollars. It was in the long, slender highway town of Truth or Con sequences, New Mexico.
That cute and unwieldy name, by the way, was taken in 1950 from the name of a quiz/comedy radio show, and has stuck, against long odds. The show was okay, as I recall, a cut or two above the general run of broadcast ephemera, with some funny 1949 moments. But why re-name your town for it? And by now, a half-century later, you would think the townsfolk must surely have repented their whim and gone back to the old name, solid and descriptive, of Hot Springs. But no, and worse, the current New Mexico highway maps no longer offer both names, with the old one in parentheses, as an option, for the comfort of those travelers who wince and hesitate over saying, “Truth or Consequences.” Everyone must now say the whole awkward business.
I was driving across the state at the time, very fast. There were signs along the approaches to town advertising cheaper and cheaper motel rooms. The tone was shrill, desperate, that of an off-season price war. It was a buyer’s market. I began to note the rates and the little extras I could expect for my money. Always in a hurry then, once committed to a road, I stopped only for fuel, snake exhibits, and automobile museums, but I had to pause here, track down the cheapest of these cheap motels, and see it. I would con front the owner and call his bluff.
There were boasts of being AIR COOLED (not quite the same as being air-conditioned) and of PHONE IN EVERY ROOM, KITCHENETTES, LOW WEEKLY RATES, CHILDREN FREE, PETS OK, VIBRO BEDS, PLENTY OF HOT WATER, MINIATURE GOLF, KIDDIE POOL, FREE COFFEE, FREE TV, FREE SOUVNIERS. (Along Arkansas roads there are five or six ways of spelling souvenirs, and every single one of them is wrong. The sign painters in New Mexico do a little better with that tricky word, but not much better.) The signs said SALESMEN WELCOME and SNOWBIRDS WELCOME and TRUCKS WELCOME/BOBTAILS ONLY—meaning just the tractors themselves; their long semi-trailers would not be welcome. And there were the usual claims, often exaggerated, of having CLEAN ROOMS or NEW ROOMS or CLEAN NEW ROOMS or ALL NEW CLEAN MODERN ROOMS.
I decided not to consider the frills. How could you reckon in cash the delight value of a miniature golf course with its little plaster windmills, tiny waterfalls, and bearded elves perched impudently on plaster toadstools? I would go for price alone, the very lowest advertised price, which turned out to be three dollars. It was a come-on, I knew, a low-ball offer. Sorry, I would be told, but the last of those special rooms had just been taken; the only ones left would be the much nicer $6.50 suites. I would let the owner know what I thought of his sharp practice, but not really expecting him to writhe in shame.
The three-dollar place was an old “tourist court,” a horseshoe arrangement of ram shackle cabins, all joined together by narrow carports. The ports were designed to harbor, snugly, small Ford sedans of 1930s Clyde Barrow vintage, each one with a canvas water bag (“SATURATE BEFORE USING”) hanging from the front bumper, for the crossing of the Great American Desert.
But there were no cars here at all, and no one in the office. I gave the desk bell my customary one ding, not a loutish three or four. An old lady, clearly the owner, perhaps a widow, came up through parted curtains from her cluttered female nest in the rear. She was happy to see me. I asked about a three-dollar room, for one person, one night. She said yes, certainly, all her cabins went for three dollars, and there were vacancies. This, without bothering to crane her neck about and peer over my shoulder, by way of giving my car out there the once-over. Desk clerks do that when I ask for a single, to see if I am trying to conceal a family. These clerks are trained in their motel academies to watch for furtive movement in the back seats of cars, for the hairy domes of human heads, those of wives, tykes, and grannies left crouching low in idling Plymouths.
This old lady had come up in a gentler school. She was honest and her signs were honest and her lodgers were presumed to be more or less honest. She had caught me up short and rattled me. Who was bluffing now? I couldn’t just leave, nor, worse, give her three dollars and then leave, compounding the insult to her and her yellowish cabins. I paid up and stayed the night, her only guest.
My cabin had a swamp cooler, an evaporative cooling machine that is usually quite effective in that arid country. A true air conditioner (brutal compressor) uses much more electricity than a swamp cooler (small water pump, small fan). But then the cooler does consume water, an
d the economy of nature is such—no free lunch—that the thing works well only in a region where the humidity is low—under forty per cent, say. Where water is scarce, that is, and thus expensive.
It was dry enough here, but my cooler was defective and did nothing more than stir the hot air a bit.
I looked the room over for redeeming touches. It wasn’t so bad, beaten down with use and everything gone brown with age, but honorably so, not disgusting, shabby but clean, a dry decay.
The bedding may have been original stock. That central crater in the mattress hadn’t been wallowed out overnight, but rather by a long series of jumbo salesmen, snorting and thrashing about in troubled sleep. A feeble guest would have trouble getting out of the mattress. He would cry out, feebly, for a helping hand, and nobody in earshot. The small lamp on the bedside table was good, much better for reading than the lighting systems in expensive motels, with their diffused gloom. Motel decorators, who obviously don’t read in bed, are all too fond of giant lampshades, a prevailing murk, and lamp switches that are hard to find and reach. The bath towels were clean but threadbare, and much too short to use as wraparound sarongs while shaving. The few visible insects were dead or torpid. There were no bathroom accretions of soft green or black matter. The lavatory mirror was freckled and had taken on a soft sepia tint. Mineral deposits clogged the shower head, making for a lopsided spraying pattern, but the H and C knobs had not been playfully reversed, nor did they turn the wrong way. There were sash windows you could actually raise, after giving them a few sharp blows with the heels of your hands, to break loose the ancient paint. Here again the feeble guest, seeking a breath of air, would struggle and whimper.
I had paid more and seen worse—murkier and more oppressive rooms, certainly, with that dense black motel murk hanging about in all the corners, impossible to dispel and conducive to so many suicides along our high ways, I had seen worse rooms, if not thinner and shorter towels. There was plenty of hot water. I had the privacy of a cabin, and indeed not a single neighbor. What I had was a cottage, and a steal at three dollars.
Early the next morning the lady came tap ping at my door. She had a pot of coffee for me on a tray with some buttered toast and a little china jug of honey. It was that unprecedented gesture, I think, and the grace note of the honey—no sealed packet of “Mixed Fruit” generic jelly—that made the place stick in my head so, and not the price at all. I like to think the old cabins lasted out the good old lady’s widowhood. It must have been a close-run finish. And it comes to me now, late, a faint voice, saying the price was really two dollars.
MOTEL #2
A few years later. This one was in the Texas border town of Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, in Mexico. You expect it to be the other way around, with the older, primary Laredo on the Mexico side, and so it was in origin (1755) when the north bank of the river was Mexico—or, actually, New Spain then. You might also expect the Rio Grande here to be a mighty stream, so far down on its 1,900-mile run to the Gulf, but it’s more like a weed-strangled municipal drainage ditch than a Great River.
I was driving up out of deeper Mexico. On the U.S. side of the bridge I was greeted, if that’s the word, by a suspicious INS agent in a glass sentry booth. He asked me a few questions and directed me at once to the customs inspection shed. No doubt I made a good fit for one of his Detain profiles. Lone white dishevelled Arkansas male in four-wheel-drive pickup with winch. Subject admits to extensive travel in rural interior of Mexico. Tells lame story re purpose of trip.
The big shed was open along the sides but still very hot. I had to unload all my baggage from the truck, everything moveable, and spread it out on an extended table. A customs agent went first to the opened suitcase, so inviting, the bared intimacy of it. He made a long business of inspecting my paltry ward robe, lifting articles of clothing one by one with the deliberation of a shopper. Then he moved leisurely along to the loose gear—fuel cans, water jugs, cans of oil, cans of quack chemical engine remedies, tools, books. These things, too, he picked up one by one, and as he turned them over in his hands he appeared to be muttering words of inventory, thus—lantern, bottle jack, scissors jack, some sort of dried gourd here.…He lifted the books and read the titles to catch their heft and flavor, but made no critical comment.
Another agent was going over the truck itself with a flashlight, a small hammer, and a dental inspection mirror, with the little angled head. He rolled himself underneath, belly up, on a mechanic’s creeper, and peered into crevices and felt about in them. He made delicate, cache-detecting taps on body panels with the toy hammer. The searches are necessary, granted. I knew I had no contraband but the agents didn’t know. Still, the innocent—blameless in this matter, at least—grow impatient. At last, after a whispered conference, the two men gave up and said I could go. I had looked so promising, then let them down. Not that I was cleared, exactly, just sullenly dismissed for lack of evidence, and left to load everything up again.
I drove into Laredo for a bit and stopped at what, in my road stupor, I took to be a chain motel in the middling price range. I was wrong. The national chain had depreciated this one out and dumped it on the local market. An older couple I will call Mom and Dad had picked it up.
In the office lobby there were two women seated at a low table, drinking iced tea and having a chat. One was Mom. I asked about a room. The women looked me over. I was a mess, dead on my feet. For a night and the best part of a day I had been driving hard, without sleeping, bathing, or shaving. My khakis, heavy with sweat, were clinging to my flesh here and there.
Mom said, “We don’t take no show people here.”
“Show people?”
The other woman explained the situation. “It’s a carnival come to town down there. We were just now talking about it.”
So, this was just more of the Welcome Home party. First the fun in the customs shed and now I was accused of being in show business. I told Mom that I was no such romantic figure as a carnival worker, but only a road-weary traveler. Did she have a room or not?
She relented, though still perhaps suspecting me of running a Ferris wheel or a rat stall. This being the one where you put your money down, gaping rube that you are, and watch a white rat race about on an enclosed table top. The rat eventually darts into one of several numbered holes, but not your numbered hole. Or maybe she really didn’t care and was only showing off a little before her friend, who could now spread the word about Mom’s high social standards as an innkeeper.
She had given way pretty fast. It might well be that Mom enjoyed nothing more in life than filling her rooms with jolly roustabouts (“My boys”) and the more tattoos the better.
The room was okay, which is to say it was pretty far along on the way down but not yet squalid, just acceptable. A sharp distinction for those of us in the know. We can tell at a glance, from the doorway. The swimming pool was nearby, too. Just the thing in this heat. I took a shower and put on some trunks.
It was a big pool from a more expansive motel era, with a deep end that was deep, but with a derelict look overall. No one was about. The chain-link fencing sagged, and there were rips and gashes in the wire. The non-sparkling water was of a cloudy green hue and perfectly still. Floating leaves and styrofoam cups bobbed not at all. A Sargasso calm. Perhaps the pump was broken. No diving board, of course, the diving board lawyers having seen to that, even then. Only the stanchions remained, the chrome-steel pipes rooted in concrete.
I made a ground-level entry dive and swam one lap. The water had a prickly, tingling feel. It stung my eyes. The pool chemicals gone bad, I thought.
Now here came Dad at a limping trot, shouting at me, “Hey, get out of there! Can’t you read?” I was already climbing out when he started this, and he was still telling me to get out of the pool when I was standing there safe ashore, upright and dripping, before his eyes. Once a tape got rolling in Dad’s head, it wasn’t going to be cut short by any external event.
He looked around,
baffled, then saw that his DANGER/KEEP OUT/NO SWIMMING sign had fallen from the wire fence. He picked it up and showed it to me. Electricity, it seems, was leaking into the pool water from corroded wires and terminals near the underwater lamps. I asked Dad why he didn’t drain the dangerous electrified pool. Because, he said, it was only the great lateral pressure of all that water that kept the thing from collapsing in on itself, and he didn’t want to lose his pool. He pointed out cracks and bulges in the retaining walls.
I said I had suspected toxic chemicals and wouldn’t have thought of electricity coursing through a swimming pool. As for that, Dad said, his chemicals had gone sour, too, under the beating sun, and what with the stagnation…but they didn’t account for the prickle, only for the sting and the unnatural greenness and the sharp metallic taste of the water.
Wasn’t there a lawsuit here? I could hire one of the diving-board lawyers, preferably one in cowboy boots. Into the mixed bag of damages we could throw the pain I had suffered from Mom’s suggestion, before a witness, that I was in show business. We would pick Mom and Dad clean, seize everything, and kick them out of the motel, destitute, into the streets of Laredo. Then it occurred to me that Mom’s lawyer might have some boots of his own, made of animal skins even more exotic, costly, and menacing than those sported by my man. What if he put me in a line-up parade before the jury, full face and profile views, with some carnival guys trucked in from the midway? How would I fare? I saw, too, that on the witness stand, under oath, I would have to admit that I had actually felt better, perked up a little, after my dip in Dad’s electro-chemical vat. Best maybe just to let this slide.