But The Levy Was Dry (USA Day 152)

We woke to rain: thick, heavy, drowning rain, the likes of which we haven’t seen since those Colorado afternoon storms. With a short and flat day, we weren’t too worried, but as the flood waters began to seep into our basement bedroom, we realised that this sort of weather wasn’t just an impracticality. A tropical storm was making its way north through the Gulf of Mexico: Olga, her name. She wasn’t due to make landfall for another day, but like Reggie the anxious dog, the sky was crying in anticipation of her arrival.

The idea was to find a gap between two downpours and leave, but it was a fool’s game. As soon as we’d said our goodbyes and closed the gate, down came the rain and squelch went our bikes.

The route was easy, but progress was not. We rode the levy that protected riverside Louisiana from the encroaching Mississippi. Like guards patrolling our border, we inched along the path, spitting, blinking, making sure that the majority of the water stayed on our left. Four inches fell between the time we left and our arrival in Lutcher. It felt like four feet.

We didn’t see New Orleans finish, but at some point we noticed that the houses had been replaced by oil refineries. All the fossil fuels mined in the Gulf of Mexico get brought upriver and processed here, within bulbous tubes and chimneys held up by post-apocalyptic metal frames, blinking with lights presumably so aircraft don’t bump into them. The biggest, owned by Shell, seemed to go on forever. By the grand front entrance were write large on banners some of the corporation’s buzzwords: ‘Family’, ‘Education, ‘Service’, ‘Community’.

“Don’t see ‘Environment’ anywhere,” said Amy.

Further along, a huge corn processing factory had the boastful line, ‘Cargill: Feeding The World.’ Another refinery claimed to be ‘Fuelling America’s Spirit’. From our position, all it looked like any of them were doing was belching hot smog into the sky, but we’ll take their word for it.

The only time we were required to descent from our levy was when our road crossed a spillway: a huge wetland floodplain populated by egrets, herons and swamp. The waters had been held back by a huge dam that ran alongside us for a good mile. In regular spots to our right were scraggly old trees, which revealed upon closer inspection to be telephone poles overtaken by vines. The road announced that is was closed, and that to go on may result in drowning. We trusted our instincts and rode around the barrier, but soon realised that drowning was not the real reason for the closure. Given the plain’s tendency to get soggy, the road had completely disintegrated at unpredictable intervals, each time crumbling away to so much silt and gravel and often a channel of stagnant swamp water. We pulled our bikes through saturated mud, up over lips of buckled tarmac, wondering why on earth nobody had told us not to come this way.

There was a period of about half an hour where it didn’t rain. In solidarity, we remained fully sodden for the duration, then the sky picked back up where it had left off and the balance was restored. Our hosts accepted us in most graciously, though we insisted we didn’t wear our shoes indoors, and once they’d seen the state of us, they agreed. Their dog, Truman, had a Trump collar, which I’m guessing he chose because their names were similar.

Storm Olga swept in as we ate smoked steak and drunk large cups of the house favourite, Diet Dr Thunder, which is like Dr Pepper but you drink it during a storm. It feels like months since we’ve done any touring: California was such a sunny dream, it barely had the daily grind of some of our harder, eastern days. Today was a soggy reminder of what bike touring can sometimes be.