I had a fine catfish dinner at a restaurant recommended by Lucy Chenier's office, and then I checked into a Ho-Jo built into the base of the levee. I asked them for a room with a view of the river and they were happy to oblige. Southern hospitality. I ordered two bottles of Dixie beer from room service and sat drinking the beer and watching the tow-boats push great strings of barges upstream against the current. I thought that if I watched the river long enough I might see Tom and Huck and Jim working their raft down the shore. Of course, river traffic was different in the 1800s. In the old days, there were just the paddle wheelers and mule-drawn barges. Now, Huck and Jim would have to maneuver between oil tankers and Japanese container ships and an endless gauntlet of chemical waste vents. Still, I trusted that Huck and Jim were up to the job.

The next morning I checked out of the hotel, drove across the river, then turned north and followed the state highway across a wide, flat plain covered with cotton and sugarcane and towns with names like Livonia and Krotz Springs. Cotton gins and sugar-processing plants sprouted on the horizon, the sugar plants belching thin smoke plumes that gave the air a bitter smell. I turned on the radio and let the scanner seek stations. Two country outlets, a station where a man with a high-pitched voice was speaking French, and five religious stations, one of which boasted a woman proclaiming that all God's children were born evil, lived evil, and would die evil. She shrieked that evil must be fought with evil, and that the forces of evil were at her door this very moment, trying to silence the right-thinking Christian truths of her broadcasts and that the only way she might stave them off was with the Demon Dollar Bill, twenty-dollar minimum donation please, MasterCard or Visa accepted. Sorry, no American Express. I guess some evils are better than others.

I left the highway at Opelousas, then went north on a tiny two-lane state road following what the map said was Bayou Mamou. It was a muddy brown color and looked more like standing water than something that actually flowed. Cattails and cypress trees lined the far bank, and the near bank was mostly wild grass and crushed oyster shells. A couple in their early twenties poled a flat-bottomed boat along the cypress knees. The man stood in the stern, wearing an LSU T-shirt and baggy jeans and a greasy camouflage ball cap with a creased bill. He pushed the little boat with steady, molasses-slow strokes. The woman wore a pale sundress and a wide straw hat and heavy work gloves and, as the young man poled, she lifted a trotline from the water to see if they had caught fish. The young man was smiling. I wondered if John Fogerty had been thinking of Bayou Mamou when he wrote "Born on the Bayou."