All routes lose their novelty when driven daily, some when driven even weekly. Everyone knows that we drive in familiar places much like our cars would if they had an autopilot. We stop “seeing” anything around us. Our mind simply remembers our surroundings from all of the previous times it has “seen” the red house on the corner, and the sugar cane field over there. It is easy to miss something with our mind working this way. The I-10 corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans lost its freshness for me quite a while ago. Now that I am back in Idaho, it is much easier for me to connect with my first thoughts about the road; it must be that I don’t see it everyday any longer. I am not lulled into a trance as my jeep drives over the rhythmically placed slabs of concrete road sections.

On a normal day (think of a time before the storms, think of heavy commuter traffic flying from to and from the suburbs) traffic screams down the expressway, with heavy forest, swampland; I’m really not sure what all grows there; it is simply the greenest, densest spread of deep dark green growing things I have ever seen, closing in on the road from either side. The growth is so thick that it is impossible to separate the individual growing things from one another. The freeway is literally carved from the growth, intruding on the growth. The power of the plants is almost scary; it is easy to imagine the plants taking over the minute people stop using this path. The only breaks in the overpowering green, aside from the interstate, are the narrow, groomed areas surrounding gas pipelines and powelines gliding off into the green.

Years ago, before Louisiana, I would wonder at the stories on the evening news featuring a pair of brothers or a little girl going missing, only to be discovered three days later in the woods, a quarter mile from their home. Why didn’t they find them as soon as they went missing? I would wonder. Here, in the West (at least the high desert portion) you can literally see miles in any direction. It is impossible to get lost in the woods that close to home. Green; that is how people can go missing and bodies can be buried literally in their own back yard with no one noticing the body for sometimes years.

Not only is there more vegetation in general in Louisiana, everything is a different color. The green of the plants is different; the brown of the earth is different; everything looks different. With my sheltered view of the world, I assumed that plants were plants, dirt was dirt, people were people and bugs were bugs (that is another story all of its own) anywhere you went. Louisiana taught be differently. The dirt has a red tinge in Louisiana, though not as red as the dirt in Tyler, Texas, which seems to rust before your eyes because of the earth’s incredible red color. In Idaho, it is a soothing gray brown. Plants in Louisiana are green, very green. In Idaho, plants are healthy, getting enough water, but still aren’t as bright; they seem to have a brown quality to them even when completely saturated.

So where am I going with this? I don’t know. I was thinking about the road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and how often I used to travel it at break-neck speeds until I forgot what it looked like. Now the wonder that I first experience when driving the route is coming back to me a bit, and I wanted to write about it. That is all there is to it.

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