Blown to a halt

Louisiana's state welcome center understands the concerns of its visitors very well. The staff are reassuring about the opportunities for bed, breakfast, dinner, and entertainment in the Big Easy, and noncommittal about rumoured problem spots: "use the same good sense you'd apply in any other big city" (that has had half its residents' homes flattened). The city maps show, with red arrows, the places where the levees were breached and the direction the water flowed in over the homes and streets. After hearing of my interest, one staffer photocopied a page from the Times-Picayune that showed the depths of the flooding in neat isolines.

It was all kindly and hospitable enough to distract one from the 'No Swimming' sign posted helpfuly at the edge of the lake behind the picnic tables. Three excited children ran back and forth on the bank, throwing stones at a couple of suspicious-looking logs while their parents laughed and took photos. What everyone would have done if the logs had actually turned out to be alligators, I can't imagine. Bet they would have blamed the signs for not being explicit enough, viz showing the open-mouthed 'gator chewing on a child...

Past Lake Charles's city limits and back up to 70mph, I was ruminating on this failure to warn, the pleasant diminishment of heavy trucking, and the increased number of billboards for casinos. That's when I also noticed that the road noise inside the car had increased to a gale-force roar. Ten seconds later, the Volvo, one of the heaviest and most sedate vehicles on the road, began to swerve and buck; a minute later, I had it off on the roadside. And when I stopped shaking and could brave the sudden resurgence of immense tractor-trailers enough to climb out of the car, I was ruminating on a completely shredded left rear tire.