Travelogue: Chicot State Park and the Great King Cake Assault of 2019
What am I doing with my life? I'm on a collision course with 40, and I'm getting so close, I can smell his breath. It's a mysterious scent, of future things I know not what. Is that hair-loss? Obesity? A sudden stroke? A crushing realization that my life has been a complete failure and that it's too late to right the ship? Dentyne?
What's a guy to do, except go hiking in some swampy woods, and eat so much king cake, he's blowing a BKCC so high, the world-weary cop who pulled him over just shakes his head as he slowly lowers his face to his palm and sighs, "What are you doing, son?" I don't know if all those verb tenses are right, and I don't even care. I'm almost 40. Does it even matter? As the President tweeted the other day:
I knew I wanted to brutally assault some Poupart's king cake, and as that fine baking establishment is based in Lafayette, Louisiana, I decided to try to find a hiking path as close to there as possible. I settled upon the Arboretum Trail in Chicot State Park, which sounds disturbingly close to Chico State Penitentiary, though the only bars in Chicot are cypress trees, and the only wardens are the alligators, and Marjorie, an angry early-retiree who restlessly wanders Chicot's swamps with an ever-sharpened trash pole. Rumors say she's murdered five squatters with that thing.Watch out for Marjorie.
After I dropped my son off at school, got on the highway, and crossed the Mississippi, I decided to eat a healthy breakfast, since I knew what I'd be doing to king cake later that day. Unfortunately, Taco Bell was closed, so I went to Bergeron's Boudin & Cajun Meats in Port Allen and got a barbecued beef sandwich and a Monster energy drink.
The employees at Bergeron's did a great job of giving me actual real-life interaction-driven Nicsperiment Travelogue material, as I usually just have to make all these things up.
Upon entering Bergeron's, I immediately noticed they were playing the swamp-pop/zydeco classic "Tee Na Na."
"Man," I said to the two women behind the counter. "It's been too long since I've heard this song. Nice to be back on my side of the river."
"Oh, yeah, baby," one of them said. "We only play the good stuff here. We get people dancing in here to our music all the time. We had a man in here the other day. We were playing 'Let's Get It On,' and he got up on the table and started dancing."
"Wow!"
"That's right. He's was up on the table, and I said, 'Preacher, I ain't never thought I'd see you dancing like that.' He looked at me and said, "Baby, I'm human, too!'"
As I laughed with approval at the burgeoning comedienne, the straight-shooting other woman took my card for payment, and read my name. I somehow have one of the most South Louisiana sounding names possible, and yet, one of the rarest names, so rare in fact that only one other person on Earth (according to Google) shares my first and last name combination, and he's chief executive officer for some British company based in Hong Kong, and needs to share the wealth. C'mon British ex-pat The Nicsperiment!
This entire Bergeron's section of the Travelogue has to be the longest streak of me not just making crap up in Nicsperiment history.
Anyway, as she knew not only the rarity of the name, but surely every single person on the West side of the Mississippi for a fifty-mile radius, the straight-shooting woman read my last name out loud and asked, "Which one are you?"
As the comedienne handed me my food, I said, "My dad's the crawfisherman out in Glynn, and my brother's the farmer who has a fruit and vegetable stand on False River in Oscar. ...And I'm an accountant in Baton Rouge."
"Good for you," she said dismissively, in that great rural South Louisiana tone of, if I'm being optimistic "Look at this city boy," but if I'm being pragmatic, "Eat shit and die, city boy," and walked back to the kitchen. The comedienne, however, sensed a punchline, and I said to her, quite honestly, "I feel jealous of them every day."
I got back on the road with the "What am I doing with my life?" question roaring ever loudly in my mind, thanks a lot, straight-shooting rural South Louisiana woman, turned up the death metal in my car, and drove swiftly West.
At some point in Ville Platte, I remembered an e-mail I was supposed to respond to the day before, and worriedly pulled over into a derelict grocery store parking lot and answered it. Answering work e-mails on your day off is a lot like taking a sandwich you've been waiting all day to eat, and handing it to Jeff Bezos as he's walking out of the Golden Corral.
I felt my mind starting to go to those bad places it likes, the red-light district of my brain, which isn't full of prostitution, drugs, and that one really good Kebob place, but nihilism, depression, self-doubt, and that one really bad Kebob place. Thankfully, the terrain started to zen out, I came across jì lú's superb chinese flute and guitar chill album, Mountain, Traveler, Listener, and I zen'd out, too, right in time to pull into Chicot State Park.
The Arboretum Trail, like your mom, starts off with a visitor's center. It includes many informative exhibits about the formation and substance of the kinds of forests and soils you'll find inside Chicot State Park, just like the one for your mom. You are initially greeted by a polite and eager man, who hands you a map, just like with your mom. Unlike your mom, the arboretum trail doesn't give you much of a prelude to the wet stuff, as the trail essentially begins right at Lake Chicot's edge. What the hell did I just write? Can we pretend that this paragraph never happened?
Anyway, the arboretum trail is actually a series of mostly interconnected trails, and I started off by hooking around the short "Bald Cypress Trail," which takes you along one of the lake's many swamp inlets, and I promise instead of making more disgusting, ill-advised, and tasteless jokes about your mom's strange sexual practices and vaginal temperament, I'll just show some pictures of said inlet...
I immediately realized that perhaps this particular trail wasn't the wisest of choices, as this essentially just looks like one of the crawfish sloughs I grew up in, and is touted as the trail's highlight. That's kind of like escaping to school after a rough morning at home, only to find that the substitute teacher is...your mom. Still, I had 90 minutes to kill, as I planned on catching a viewing of Glass at Lafayette's Grand Theater on my way home...after abusing a king cake, of course.
I started down the trail.
Indeed, most of the trail simply looked like Glynn, Louisiana, only with several slight hills, which is another great chance for me to mock your mom even more. However, I feel like all these "your mom" jokes are simply masking the fact that I felt negatively, having not relaxed the majority of the drive to Chicot due to work stress to the point that I literally pulled over to work, only to reach a destination that didn't look much different from one I am already quite familiar with. Also, that lady was mean to me. At one point near the start of the hike, I even sat on a bench for a second, and tried to work again, but thankfully, my phone couldn't connect to the Internet.
I thought about playing the rest of that Mountain, Traveler, Listener album on my phone, but remembered I wanted to save that for the drive out. A few minutes later, my Internet came back, and I checked my work e-mail again, then leaned against a tree to watch videos.
What am I doing with my life?
Going out in nature to lean against it and watch phone videos has got to be the least me thing I can think of. That's like our Christian President praying for peace and then publicly forgiving his enemies. So like our President quickly backspacing out a tweet that says, "I love you all, and I'm sorry if I hurt you," I suddenly realized what I was doing, and made the decision to hardcore Nicsperiment my way out of the negative situation, blending my inner-essence with the lessons of "be less rigid" I've learned from years of therapy.
I immediately turned off the videos, dialed up that lovely Chinese flute and guitar music, put my phone in my back pocket, started walking again, and zen'd out. I mean, I'm walking on platforms over still water filled with sleeping vegetation, amongst forests of fallen leaves. What's more zen than that? That's zen as hell. Actually, that expression doesn't work, as hell, a place of eternal torment, also known as what my brain wants to do to me at any given moment, is the opposite of zen. I think even the expression my old California buddy tried to get me in on, "hella," as in, "that's hella zen," wouldn't work, either. Instead, as my situation, free of my mind's punishing thoughts, was as absolutely zen as possible, the expression would simply be, "That's as zen as walking on platforms over still water filled with sleeping vegetation, amongst forests of fallen leaves, while listening to meditative Chinese flute and guitar." Even the 78 degree early February heat couldn't steal my hard-earned zen. I also get the feeling I don't completely understand what zen is, but you get my intent, so just go with it, like my Christian relatives, who are supposedly the same religion as me, do when they say God has sent the President to free America from the bonds of Egypt like Moses did the Israelites.
I eventually reached the central point of the loop, a high place in the middle of the woods, featuring these creepy cabins from a horror movie. Unfortunately, they were locked, but I didn't need a key to get to these black mass benches, or this overlook where the ghosts sit at night.
Time had passed by so fast from all the zen'ing that I realized I'd need to lightly jog the second leg of the hike to get to my car in time to go to both Poupart's and Glass. Thankfully, the last half of the loop (if you start off by going right) was mostly dirt-based, as running on slippery, moldy wood is about as wise as putting your faith in a political party.
I made it to my car, timed out my route to Poupart's, and realized, barring incident, and boy do I hate incidents, especially ones that happen when I'm in my car, as let's face it, cars are nothing but flying death missiles we strap ourselves to, and 500 years from now, when the fragments of the remaining human race warp themselves from the smoking plains of North America, to the smoking plains of Eastern Asia in a couple of seconds, they'll laugh at how we used to put our lives in peril just to drive down to Costco to get the big bucket of Oreos, until one of them says, "Yeah, but that's not as funny as when they completely depleted the Earth's resources, while simultaneously poisoning the oceans, dirt, and air, leaving us on a ravaged, dying planet with no hope of a future," I'd get to Poupart's Bakery at precisely 1 pm.
And I did!
Poupart's Bakery is an absolute wonderland for people who like to eat food that will drastically lower their life expectancy. The have a honey biscuit that I think has at least four sticks of butter in it, but it also has honey on it, and bees make honey, and "busy as a bee" is an expression containing a positive comparison to a bee's constant physical activity, meaning a honey biscuit is basically health food whose ingestion will likely lead to you losing weight. Am I doing magical thinking right, Baby Boomers? Was that sentence organic enough, millennials? Is my sense of humor cynical enough Generation X? Do I fit in anywhere?
I was in and out in four minutes (NOTE FROM YOUR MOM: Yeah, that sounds like him), as I knew exactly what I wanted: a Poupart's cream cheese king cake.
As I sat back in my car, I discretely locked the door, and cautiously looked around.
No one could see.
I pulled out a plastic knife I'd been saving, and carefully cut through the box's seal. I cautiously opened it, looked around again. No one.
Out peeked the cake.
"Oh, hi," said the king cake nervously, tensing up, looking around. "I'm just waiting for a friend. I'm sure they'll be here any minute."
"Shut up!" I said, raising the knife.
"He has a weapon!" screamed the king cake in abject terror. "Help!"
"No one can hear you!" I brought down the knife.
"Oh! He's killing me! He's killing me!" I brought down the knife again and again, sugar flecks spraying into the air, until I cut off a large chunk, and sloppily grabbed it up with my bare hand.
"Stop" the king cake screamed, "I've got a baby inside me!"
When I came to, the king cake was gone, and the box entirely destroyed. I nervously looked out my windows. No one. I have to stop doing this. I will stop. This was the last time. I mean it. Never again. It's okay because this was the last time.
I looked at my watch: 1:10 pm. I drove to the movie theater as fast as traffic would allow.
I reviewed Glass last week. I liked it a lot more than most of the critics who get to have their stuff posted to Rotten Tomatoes. No use going into that again, except to say I needed some salt to balance out all of the sugar I just...inhaled...so I got a bucket of popcorn. After the movie, I refilled it, so I could surprise my kid with it when I picked him up from school--
Oh, no, my kid! I was all the way out in Lafayette, and he was going to be done with after-care in Baton Rouge in less than an hour. I sped home at outrageous speeds, taking cold comfort in the fact that at least this wasn't the most morally reprehensible thing I'd done that day. What am I doing with my life?
Here's what I am doing: Surprising my kid with a tub of movie popcorn after a day of hiking, assaulting a king cake, and watching an underrated M Night Shyamalan film that I reviewed that very night. I am the Nicsperiment. Goodnight.
I knew I wanted to brutally assault some Poupart's king cake, and as that fine baking establishment is based in Lafayette, Louisiana, I decided to try to find a hiking path as close to there as possible. I settled upon the Arboretum Trail in Chicot State Park, which sounds disturbingly close to Chico State Penitentiary, though the only bars in Chicot are cypress trees, and the only wardens are the alligators, and Marjorie, an angry early-retiree who restlessly wanders Chicot's swamps with an ever-sharpened trash pole. Rumors say she's murdered five squatters with that thing.Watch out for Marjorie.
After I dropped my son off at school, got on the highway, and crossed the Mississippi, I decided to eat a healthy breakfast, since I knew what I'd be doing to king cake later that day. Unfortunately, Taco Bell was closed, so I went to Bergeron's Boudin & Cajun Meats in Port Allen and got a barbecued beef sandwich and a Monster energy drink.
The employees at Bergeron's did a great job of giving me actual real-life interaction-driven Nicsperiment Travelogue material, as I usually just have to make all these things up.
Upon entering Bergeron's, I immediately noticed they were playing the swamp-pop/zydeco classic "Tee Na Na."
"Man," I said to the two women behind the counter. "It's been too long since I've heard this song. Nice to be back on my side of the river."
"Oh, yeah, baby," one of them said. "We only play the good stuff here. We get people dancing in here to our music all the time. We had a man in here the other day. We were playing 'Let's Get It On,' and he got up on the table and started dancing."
"Wow!"
"That's right. He's was up on the table, and I said, 'Preacher, I ain't never thought I'd see you dancing like that.' He looked at me and said, "Baby, I'm human, too!'"
As I laughed with approval at the burgeoning comedienne, the straight-shooting other woman took my card for payment, and read my name. I somehow have one of the most South Louisiana sounding names possible, and yet, one of the rarest names, so rare in fact that only one other person on Earth (according to Google) shares my first and last name combination, and he's chief executive officer for some British company based in Hong Kong, and needs to share the wealth. C'mon British ex-pat The Nicsperiment!
This entire Bergeron's section of the Travelogue has to be the longest streak of me not just making crap up in Nicsperiment history.
Anyway, as she knew not only the rarity of the name, but surely every single person on the West side of the Mississippi for a fifty-mile radius, the straight-shooting woman read my last name out loud and asked, "Which one are you?"
As the comedienne handed me my food, I said, "My dad's the crawfisherman out in Glynn, and my brother's the farmer who has a fruit and vegetable stand on False River in Oscar. ...And I'm an accountant in Baton Rouge."
"Good for you," she said dismissively, in that great rural South Louisiana tone of, if I'm being optimistic "Look at this city boy," but if I'm being pragmatic, "Eat shit and die, city boy," and walked back to the kitchen. The comedienne, however, sensed a punchline, and I said to her, quite honestly, "I feel jealous of them every day."
I got back on the road with the "What am I doing with my life?" question roaring ever loudly in my mind, thanks a lot, straight-shooting rural South Louisiana woman, turned up the death metal in my car, and drove swiftly West.
At some point in Ville Platte, I remembered an e-mail I was supposed to respond to the day before, and worriedly pulled over into a derelict grocery store parking lot and answered it. Answering work e-mails on your day off is a lot like taking a sandwich you've been waiting all day to eat, and handing it to Jeff Bezos as he's walking out of the Golden Corral.
I felt my mind starting to go to those bad places it likes, the red-light district of my brain, which isn't full of prostitution, drugs, and that one really good Kebob place, but nihilism, depression, self-doubt, and that one really bad Kebob place. Thankfully, the terrain started to zen out, I came across jì lú's superb chinese flute and guitar chill album, Mountain, Traveler, Listener, and I zen'd out, too, right in time to pull into Chicot State Park.
The Arboretum Trail, like your mom, starts off with a visitor's center. It includes many informative exhibits about the formation and substance of the kinds of forests and soils you'll find inside Chicot State Park, just like the one for your mom. You are initially greeted by a polite and eager man, who hands you a map, just like with your mom. Unlike your mom, the arboretum trail doesn't give you much of a prelude to the wet stuff, as the trail essentially begins right at Lake Chicot's edge. What the hell did I just write? Can we pretend that this paragraph never happened?
Anyway, the arboretum trail is actually a series of mostly interconnected trails, and I started off by hooking around the short "Bald Cypress Trail," which takes you along one of the lake's many swamp inlets, and I promise instead of making more disgusting, ill-advised, and tasteless jokes about your mom's strange sexual practices and vaginal temperament, I'll just show some pictures of said inlet...
I immediately realized that perhaps this particular trail wasn't the wisest of choices, as this essentially just looks like one of the crawfish sloughs I grew up in, and is touted as the trail's highlight. That's kind of like escaping to school after a rough morning at home, only to find that the substitute teacher is...your mom. Still, I had 90 minutes to kill, as I planned on catching a viewing of Glass at Lafayette's Grand Theater on my way home...after abusing a king cake, of course.
I started down the trail.
Indeed, most of the trail simply looked like Glynn, Louisiana, only with several slight hills, which is another great chance for me to mock your mom even more. However, I feel like all these "your mom" jokes are simply masking the fact that I felt negatively, having not relaxed the majority of the drive to Chicot due to work stress to the point that I literally pulled over to work, only to reach a destination that didn't look much different from one I am already quite familiar with. Also, that lady was mean to me. At one point near the start of the hike, I even sat on a bench for a second, and tried to work again, but thankfully, my phone couldn't connect to the Internet.
I thought about playing the rest of that Mountain, Traveler, Listener album on my phone, but remembered I wanted to save that for the drive out. A few minutes later, my Internet came back, and I checked my work e-mail again, then leaned against a tree to watch videos.
What am I doing with my life?
Going out in nature to lean against it and watch phone videos has got to be the least me thing I can think of. That's like our Christian President praying for peace and then publicly forgiving his enemies. So like our President quickly backspacing out a tweet that says, "I love you all, and I'm sorry if I hurt you," I suddenly realized what I was doing, and made the decision to hardcore Nicsperiment my way out of the negative situation, blending my inner-essence with the lessons of "be less rigid" I've learned from years of therapy.
I immediately turned off the videos, dialed up that lovely Chinese flute and guitar music, put my phone in my back pocket, started walking again, and zen'd out. I mean, I'm walking on platforms over still water filled with sleeping vegetation, amongst forests of fallen leaves. What's more zen than that? That's zen as hell. Actually, that expression doesn't work, as hell, a place of eternal torment, also known as what my brain wants to do to me at any given moment, is the opposite of zen. I think even the expression my old California buddy tried to get me in on, "hella," as in, "that's hella zen," wouldn't work, either. Instead, as my situation, free of my mind's punishing thoughts, was as absolutely zen as possible, the expression would simply be, "That's as zen as walking on platforms over still water filled with sleeping vegetation, amongst forests of fallen leaves, while listening to meditative Chinese flute and guitar." Even the 78 degree early February heat couldn't steal my hard-earned zen. I also get the feeling I don't completely understand what zen is, but you get my intent, so just go with it, like my Christian relatives, who are supposedly the same religion as me, do when they say God has sent the President to free America from the bonds of Egypt like Moses did the Israelites.
I eventually reached the central point of the loop, a high place in the middle of the woods, featuring these creepy cabins from a horror movie. Unfortunately, they were locked, but I didn't need a key to get to these black mass benches, or this overlook where the ghosts sit at night.
Time had passed by so fast from all the zen'ing that I realized I'd need to lightly jog the second leg of the hike to get to my car in time to go to both Poupart's and Glass. Thankfully, the last half of the loop (if you start off by going right) was mostly dirt-based, as running on slippery, moldy wood is about as wise as putting your faith in a political party.
I made it to my car, timed out my route to Poupart's, and realized, barring incident, and boy do I hate incidents, especially ones that happen when I'm in my car, as let's face it, cars are nothing but flying death missiles we strap ourselves to, and 500 years from now, when the fragments of the remaining human race warp themselves from the smoking plains of North America, to the smoking plains of Eastern Asia in a couple of seconds, they'll laugh at how we used to put our lives in peril just to drive down to Costco to get the big bucket of Oreos, until one of them says, "Yeah, but that's not as funny as when they completely depleted the Earth's resources, while simultaneously poisoning the oceans, dirt, and air, leaving us on a ravaged, dying planet with no hope of a future," I'd get to Poupart's Bakery at precisely 1 pm.
And I did!
Poupart's Bakery is an absolute wonderland for people who like to eat food that will drastically lower their life expectancy. The have a honey biscuit that I think has at least four sticks of butter in it, but it also has honey on it, and bees make honey, and "busy as a bee" is an expression containing a positive comparison to a bee's constant physical activity, meaning a honey biscuit is basically health food whose ingestion will likely lead to you losing weight. Am I doing magical thinking right, Baby Boomers? Was that sentence organic enough, millennials? Is my sense of humor cynical enough Generation X? Do I fit in anywhere?
I was in and out in four minutes (NOTE FROM YOUR MOM: Yeah, that sounds like him), as I knew exactly what I wanted: a Poupart's cream cheese king cake.
As I sat back in my car, I discretely locked the door, and cautiously looked around.
No one could see.
I pulled out a plastic knife I'd been saving, and carefully cut through the box's seal. I cautiously opened it, looked around again. No one.
Out peeked the cake.
"Oh, hi," said the king cake nervously, tensing up, looking around. "I'm just waiting for a friend. I'm sure they'll be here any minute."
"Shut up!" I said, raising the knife.
"He has a weapon!" screamed the king cake in abject terror. "Help!"
"No one can hear you!" I brought down the knife.
"Oh! He's killing me! He's killing me!" I brought down the knife again and again, sugar flecks spraying into the air, until I cut off a large chunk, and sloppily grabbed it up with my bare hand.
"Stop" the king cake screamed, "I've got a baby inside me!"
When I came to, the king cake was gone, and the box entirely destroyed. I nervously looked out my windows. No one. I have to stop doing this. I will stop. This was the last time. I mean it. Never again. It's okay because this was the last time.
I looked at my watch: 1:10 pm. I drove to the movie theater as fast as traffic would allow.
I reviewed Glass last week. I liked it a lot more than most of the critics who get to have their stuff posted to Rotten Tomatoes. No use going into that again, except to say I needed some salt to balance out all of the sugar I just...inhaled...so I got a bucket of popcorn. After the movie, I refilled it, so I could surprise my kid with it when I picked him up from school--
Oh, no, my kid! I was all the way out in Lafayette, and he was going to be done with after-care in Baton Rouge in less than an hour. I sped home at outrageous speeds, taking cold comfort in the fact that at least this wasn't the most morally reprehensible thing I'd done that day. What am I doing with my life?
Here's what I am doing: Surprising my kid with a tub of movie popcorn after a day of hiking, assaulting a king cake, and watching an underrated M Night Shyamalan film that I reviewed that very night. I am the Nicsperiment. Goodnight.
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