I passed the new “house/camp” going up just before the Stephensville exit on Hwy. 70 as I was going to Morgan City and it is mostly enclosed now with some sort of covering and it looks even bigger than ever. I have to admit I’m curious about what it will eventually become. Maybe an apartment?
And just a bit north of me, also on Hwy. 70, a little before the Belle River landing turnoff, the concrete slab poured a few weeks ago now has a very large, white mobile home parked on it. A mailbox is there also, which sort of suggests this is not just a camp but a home, perhaps. Again, my curiosity is on alert.
My eldest daughter is on her way home from a trip with her daughter and two step-daughters after visiting Zion National Park in Utah. I’ve enjoyed the FB photos they’re sending back. A hike up a trail to a place called Angel’s Landing appeared pretty spectacular. Of the four girls, only one, my granddaughter, actually made it up the trail all the way to the top. The others stopped at various levels for various reasons.
The next day they all hiked The Narrows, which is a canyon formed by erosion I assume, between high cliffs. The river flowing in the Narrows was shallow in places, swimming deep in others and my daughter said the water was icy cold. This particular adventure gave me a little worry since they were told that the Narrows was affected by flash flooding and from the photos I saw, it wouldn’t have been easy to get up to high ground if necessary. I guess the park people know all this.
Then my other daughter just told me one of her big dogs has a named (?) problem where one eyelid rolls in rather than out, irritating the cornea of the eye. Sounds terribly painful and the dog will have surgery soon. Apparently, the issue is not rare—somethimes genetic, sometimes caused by an injury.
I was surprised to find a medium sized tank truck parked in my yard this morning and a guy hooking a hose to the water hydrant. Of course, I asked what he was doing and he said he was filling the tank on the truck with water to mix with some herbicide which he would spray all along the highway to kill the weeds. He said he’d started at Morgan City and I’m not sure if he said he was going to Bayou Pigeon or just to the end of the parish line, but he was doing this for the state so maybe it would be all the way to Pigeon.
I thought of asking him to ask his superiors why they don’t move the electric power poles to the levee like they did along the highway between the Belle River bridge and Stephensville but then figured this wasn’t his problem. I guess I need to call myself .
I did happen to gas up at a station right next to the new man, Pierre Olivier, who is now the groundskeeper for the Belle River and Stephensville parks. He is very nice and it gave me the chance to thank him for recently removing all the letters from the BR outdoor sign so they wouldn’t get blown off in a coming storm. The storm didn’t happen, but in the past letters have been blown off and never found.
Not only did Mr. Olivier take the letters off the sign, he put them inside the building in the exact correct grammatical order. It was easy to put them back up a few days later.
Mr. Olivier said there wouldn’t be any market in the Stephensville park until September when it would hopefully be a bit cooler.
Teche News’ Lower St. Martin correspondent, Linda Cooke, can be emailed at lindacooke1939@ gmail.com.
