James Fox-Smith
A Londoner in Louisiana, getting in touch with his inner redneck
One Friday in late August we woke to a message from an old friend named Polly—a Londoner with whom we had various adventures while she did a Masters at LSU in the late ‘nineties. Polly, whose love for Louisiana food and music has not been dimmed by the passage of time, announced that a family of London friends were planning a road trip from Washington, D.C. through the South, and that she had insisted they include Louisiana on their itinerary. Could they come and visit? “Sure!,” we responded, and, “when are they thinking of coming? October?”
As sociable people who for some reason choose to live in the middle of nowhere, we love having visitors. And anyway, what recovering former backpackers would pass up an opportunity to host folks who have a large house in the leafy London borough of Hamstead Heath? “Come on,” we answered. “Our door is always open!”
Imagine our surprise when our new friends responded that they were, in fact, presently at Dollywood, and that they’d be on the road from Pigeon Forge just as soon as they could find a place to charge up their electric rental car. So, they should arrive in, oh, about twelve hours?
Right … so, August. Being sun-starved English folk, they apparently hadn’t processed that there was any such state as “too hot to move.” Research revealed that the dad was in fact a climate reporter for the BBC, and that the opportunity to report on America’s energy transition by driving an electric car into the heart of the Gulf South’s petrochemical patch had proven too good to turn down. As anyone who has tried driving an electric car around the South won’t be surprised to hear, they didn’t make it to our place until three days later. Turns out that the further south you come, the fewer, and slower, electric vehicle chargers become. By the time our new friends got to St. Francisville, they’d visited almost every single one between Pigeon Forge and Natchez.
To take their minds off the question of where to charge their car, I took the visitors fishing. Meanwhile, Louisiana did its best to freak them out with every trick in the summer book. Thunder rumbled, no-see-ums attacked, snakes slithered, fire ants charged, poison ivy was everywhere, and our dogs played tug-of-war with a hapless armadillo they’d flushed from the undergrowth as the Londoners cowered against the pond bank. But then their fifteen-year-old son, Will—a smiling, intelligent boy keen on literature and video games who had possibly never seen grass before, let alone held a fishing pole, landed a five-pound bass which almost pulled him into the pond. He was, quite literally, hooked. As darkness fell and his parents and I headed back to the house for dinner, Will remained on the pier, transfixed.
But Louisiana wasn’t done. It soon became clear that while fooling about in the pond, one of our dogs, Poppy, had gotten bitten by a snake, probably a moccasin, because her head swelled up to the size and shape of a football. On a Monday night, way out in the country with a houseful of traumatized visitors and a couple of gin and tonics on board, we did the only thing we could: call Aunt Frances, who is the kind of no-nonsense country dog owner who shows up with a bottle of Benadryl at five minutes’ notice. Anyone who tells you country life is boring has never tried to force open the frothing jaws of a pain-crazed, fifty-pound Catahoula mix while an octogenarian lady in a floral dressing gown pokes Benadryl tablets down its gullet. Our visitors, whose prior interactions with dogs were limited to stepping daintily around deposits left by passing poodles on the manicured avenues of Hamstead Heath, flattened themselves against the walls with eyes like saucers while local friends of our college-aged children shouted encouragement.
In the morning, both dog and Londoners had survived. By first light Poppy’s face had returned to normal, Will was fishing again; and our visitors, far from fleeing in search of the next electric charger, had decided to stay all week. Because there’s that thing a Louisiana summertime does: where at first a visitor can see only the heat and humidity, the bad roads and the snakes and bugs and looming hurricanes, by the time they leave, all that’s been replaced by the golden dawns, the teeming birdlife, the live oaks and Spanish moss and afternoon thunderstorms and the sweet-olive scented, frog-singing night air. They’ve caught fish and swum in creeks, ridden 4-wheelers, chased snakes out of the chicken yard, and drunk beer with people who are practical and generous and exuberant and terrifically weird. Then Louisiana has their hearts. When they got home to London, we got a message of thanks from the mom that finished with the words, “Life’s so dull without snakes!” Perhaps by sending them in summer, Polly knew what she was doing after all.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
