Once--Louisiana

Once, I woke up on a picnic table in the grassy area of a rest stop somewhere between Houston and New Orleans.

The rest stop was on a highway that ran through a seemingly endless series of swamps and had an evil sounding nickname of some sort that I can’t remember.

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It was early, maybe five o’clock, and the sun, which was already hot and bright, woke me up.

At first, I didn’t know where I was. I squinted up into the clear blue sky, groggy and dazed, and as I did so, I realized that I heard voices, a group of deep, rough voices. They were nearby.

I panicked a little and sat bolt upright.

Not more than ten feet away from me, my friend, Scott, was sleeping on top of another picnic table. Beyond him, the old, angular, blue Chevy station wagon we had been driving around the country in for the past two months sat parked by itself in a big, open lot. Suddenly, I remembered where I was. We had pulled off the road the night before to rest, somewhere in Louisiana, and had decided to sleep outside because it was warm.

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The voices continued unabated behind me.

They seemed to be in conversation. I turned and looked over my right shoulder. Four men were sitting at a table playing cards. Their flannel shirts were pulled over their rounded bellies and tucked into their blue jeans. Their eyes peered out from under the brims of their mesh hats, down at the cards in front of them and beyond, to the upturned cards on the table. They were playing poker.

As they sun came up over an interstate rest stop in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, they were playing poker. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Something about this scene made me feel like I was in a new kind of place, one that was unlike any I had ever been before.

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Once is a series of micro memoirs inspired by a book of the same title in which Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker, uses a combination of photographs and text to reveal what he considers to be the beginnings of untold stories, which he encourages his readers/viewers to complete.

Similarly, I offer these moments of my life to you as if they were not my own, as if they were in no way connected to me, which in many cases they no longer seem to be. I encourage you to consider these moments as beginnings, beginnings of stories or travels that you are free to write, live, or complete as you see fit.

Previous Once Post: A house that hadn’t changed

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If you enjoyed this post, please also consider reading my This Is Japan series to learn about everyday life in Japan as seen, discovered, and experienced through the eyes of a foreigner. You can read my latest post here, Barbecuing in Japan.

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Image Credits: All images are original.