Blaine Lourd - Born on the Bayou

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To Crystal, my wife, who is joie de vivre personified, and to my three sons, Brice, Cole, and BooneI love watching you play.

I ought to go upright and vital,

and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love New Orleans is how most people respond when they hear that Im from Louisiana. The truth is that New Orleans was the only thing President Thomas Jefferson really wanted in the Louisiana Purchase, but oftentimes in life, luck and being in the right place at the right time are everything.

New Orleans certainly has a rich history as a seaport, cultural center, and entertainment destination, but there is an another entire part of the Pelican State that is much more rural and exotic, and to get out of New Orleans to the other parts of Louisiana is to get into a place that is like no other, with a people like no other.

To reach these cities and small towns, you drive west over the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest freshwater swamp in the world. The Basin, as everyone in Louisiana calls it, encompasses over 1.4 million acres from the top of the state, which borders Arkansas, to the westernmost area of the state, which borders Texas, all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The lowest part of Louisiana is arguably the wettest, wildest, and freest part of the country, with over three hundred different species of birds, fifty different species of mammals, and dozens and dozens of species of reptiles and amphibians. In the heart of this spooky maze of bottomlandfilled with pine trees, live oaks draped with Spanish moss, small water passes, marshes, and bayousis New Iberia, and thats where Im from.

New Iberia is in the heart of Cajun country. Its Main Street has not changed much since the 1800s. If you travel east on that street from the antebellum landmark Shadows on the Teche, which borders the bayou, you will find small shops, lawyers offices, and an old gambling hall, which used to post prizefights and now posts old men playing dominoes. Moving south over an old drawbridge, youll pass a nursing home that used to be the main hospital, and even farther south, youll be led to old Loreauville Road, and then the old-money homes that border the main waterway, the Teche. On one side street you might see an old abandoned bait-and-tackle shop, an elementary school, and a baseball field, followed by rows and rows of cane.

Ten minutes or so from there, crossing water many times and passing the oldest sugar mill in the parish, youll find Bluehaven Drive. Down that blacktop, all the way to the end, there stands a wood-and-brick home with large, slanting roofs, and a red brick chimney with brown and green treetops towering high above it, hiding more water behind them.

Back in 1973, when my family first moved into it, Bluehaven was in an area of Iberia Parish that the townspeople called the country. Our lot sat at the end of a quarter-mile road that ran parallel to the bayou and was lined with large oak and cypress trees. It was rumored that the farmer who owned the land would sell off a few pieces here and again to pay off old gambling debts. For a long time, the road we lived on was dirt, grass, rock, and gravel, and while driving home at night, we used to see the glaring eyes of rabbits, opossums, and raccoons staring back at us from the rain ditches. The front yard of the house had large spans of Bermuda grass and a gigantic magnolia tree that blossomed broadly every spring. The deep side yard of the home had a small citrus grove that, for many years, the patriarch of this family tended to with great pride.

Mostly when I think about that place now, I think of him, standing in our garage among his lawnmowers and hunting decoys, a Miller High Life in his hand. In those days he hadnt hit it big yet, but if he couldve bet on his chances, hed have been all in.

My father was a salesman. Throngs of high school graduates, liberal arts majors, frat boys, and C students become salesmen. Others, like Dad, become unofficially designated as such. It is the fallback position. Born of great confidence. My fathers favorite line when I was a boy was I never had a bad day. For most of my childhood, I believed that.

In the late fifties, an affable college dropout like Dad had several choices for work in south Louisiana. He could become a sugarcane farmer, work for the Wildlife and Fisheries Department like his father, or go into oil. Dad chose the oil businesshe wanted to tie his star to growth, and growth in south Louisiana meant oil.

My father was a betting man, like his father before him. But salesmen are made, not born. No one likes rejection. So there is a considerable premium to be earned for having to listen all day long to lines like Howd you get my number, boy? Id like to come down to that high-rise office of yours, pull off your head, and shit down your neck. Rejection pays. Always has. Always will. A salesman who takes rejection well can make money. My father was a great salesman.

The oil business in the South translates into awl bidness. In 1972, when I was ten, before the oil embargo, oil was a good business. After price controls were instituted by Nixon in 1973, it was a great business. Oilmen are not dumb. Price controls prevented oil companies from passing on to consumers the rising cost of crude imports. Swifter than the politicians, they saw an opportunity. So when price controls were instituted, oil companies reduced imports and cut gasoline sales to independent gas stations in order to keep their own branded outlets supplied. The lines and shortages that form our collective memory of the oil crisis were the result of price controlsnot, as is popular belief, the Arab oil embargo.

During the following years, Congress instituted a number of measures to remedy the situation, but they all had one thing in common, just as they always do. They distorted the market and created perverse incentivesin this case, incentives that made America more reliant on foreign crude. Its like skating to where the puck was ; politicians and money managers do it all the time.

However, at the time, the oil embargo meant great business for the Southern oil and gas states. Though the embargo caused misery for the rest of the country, from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, there was no business better than the awl bidness. Dad had people working for him making $100,000 a year whose wives would not allow them to manage their own checking accountsa level of wealth as disproportionate to merit in the oil business as it is cyclically known to be on Wall Street. These realities would shape our family profoundly, but not until later.

My father dropped out of college in 1959, a few years after he met Mom, a shy churchgoing blonde from Texas named Sherion. She was in awe of him. He would go to her house after school and lie on the couch while she pored over her homework. She thought he was so smart because he never had to study.