Port Arthur Journey

Highway 165 has never been an exciting road. At least in Monroe, though, it has restaurants and life-endangering gas stations on either side. But here in Oberlin, Louisiana, there's no such excitement or threat, just miles of lopsided terrain. To my left, pine trees tower over my Oldsmobile Alero, just to remind me that the right side has nothing but dry dirt, wannabe wheat, and coke cans filled with dirt. The left side is smug with its branches blowing in the wind, a picture of success, contentment, and preservation of the ideal. But I know the truth. Its success was effortless, at least in the eyes of the right side whose cans and twigs are suddenly pressed down by the construction cones. Little girls with bangs should go sit next to the cones and make clover chains. Their classmates measuring the topography underneath the pines across the street would think them strange. "Three inches," one might say. "I wish I would've brought my pink ruler," cries another. But those exclamations are made irrelevant by the fear of the third: "What's Cathy doing by that cone?" Cathy might be too far-gone now; she might even try to have a picnic on concrete. Anyone can wear a beret and a full skirt in an open field with barley and rye, but only Cathy can scrape a poem on the inside of a coke can. Her class will probably be visiting a landfill next, so they won't get to see Highway 12 or the town of Ragley.