This is advertising like a Robert Johnson song where the Devil and God both show up and give you a little seminar inside of an hour. A week between the Atchafalaya and Red River in Louisiana in August and you’ll know why the Blues settled in here.

The temperature is stuck at 100 and stays there for a week. The heat index pushes above 120 in places, depending on clouds and dirt and metal and concrete and asphalt. No white Mondrian sheets or SoHo bistros here. I’ve been on stressful shoots for 25 years but this is where truckers and linemen earn a hard living up against a hot aluminum wall and a creosote pole between a weekly paycheck and a cold beer and church on Sunday. You can call it a lot of things but fun is not one of them.

By noon, the meat on your neck is cooking and your ears are turning to jerky. You can lose 10 pounds between breakfast and dinner. Spend 15 hours a day 1,000 miles away from trendy, and advertising starts looking like an episode of “Dirty Jobs.”

Saturday, 11 pm: Delta looses my luggage for the umpteenth-hundred time and with the new flight rules, I am left without even toothpaste or clean underwear. That was the easy part. We check into the seldom-working-elevatored Holiday Inn with a box of hours-old Popeyes chicken at midnight. This is known as a good day.

Sunday: Still no luggage or toothpaste. Record radio all day on a portable DAT, no actors, all real people, and a hope that we can make four minutes of good radio from 5 hours on DAT. Delta finally finds my suitcase Sunday night. I have a toothbrush and underwear. I’m happy like Christmas.

Monday: 94 degrees at 9 a.m. By 3 p.m., the weather imitates hell. By 4 p.m., the heat index is so far above 100 we don’t ask about it anymore. We scout TV locations in temps that bring back August memories of smothering humidity from my youth on South Alabama football fields. My youth, however, is noticeably absent as the flat land and the oven of sky pinch us hard in a dirt field ringed by power lines next to a substation and a water treatment site, behind a wall of earth built to keep the river out of living rooms. It’s the best this patch of land will look all week.

Tuesday: Hot again. More scouting, and then shooting starts at 4 p.m. in a soybean field south of Alexandria, La. The massive sky peels off a stunning copper-stained sunset and we feel like we are being crushed under steaming towels as fire ants introduce themselves to several people on the crew who’ve never experienced why the word “fire” comes before “ant.” Itching is followed by red welts. Darkness drops, but the humidity wraps us in wet blankets of steamed air. We are simmering beside the highway as night comes like the train that drags coal past us going south beside the road to Baton Rouge.

Wednesday: 11 a.m. Hottest day yet. After assembling the crew at the hotel, a 16-hour, 102-degree (heat index of 126) shoot day starts in the dusty rut behind the Red River levee, and soon boils into a purple sunset of thunderheads and 40 mph winds that sandpaper our eyes and lather our sweat in layers of mud on skin and clothes. Lightning pounds the ground in garish, vertical bolts and rain blows sideways, cooling the air down to the low 90s. Compared to two hours ago, it feels like winter.

We shoot through it all. Equipment and shelter is damaged. We shoot shot after shot, set-up after set-up. Gallons of water and Gatorade are consumed along with miles of film. The people toward whom we aim the 35mm Arriflex work through it all like it’s an everyday event for them. They are linemen in a tough place on a good day. We’re the ones suffering. To them, it’s business as usual. To us, it’s like having our heads shoved 6 feet down a Peterbuilt’s smokestack.

Wednesday: 11 p.m. We notice that no one has peed all day. Apparently, we are being liquidated through our pores. In a few minutes, heat exhaustion, dehydration and low blood sugar all descend on me in a sickening whirl as my vision blurs, my thoughts jumble and my jaws and shoulders ache like the result of a good beating by somebody who knows how to administer one. We keep shooting. Never felt this sensation before, like things are ripping up inside me. More shooting. It

literally hurts to think. Blinking hurts, my teeth hurt. I finally sit on a truck tailgate and drink a Coke, then Gatorade, and it goes away. Or I am dead. Hard to tell at this point.

We are soiled and filthy and the “set” is a tepid bog, causing us to finally abandon the deteriorating quagmire at midnight under a swarm of aggressive mosquitos, and move to finish the shots we still need at another location because the fire truck can’t traverse the unbearable, ankle-deep slop we’re standing in. The filming of “Apocalypse Now” comes to mind as we load up and drive away, spinning big, knobby tires in rooster tails of brown ooze. I hope to never see this particular patch of earth again. We finish off the next three hours of shooting under a manufactured deluge in the streets from the fire truck, under a sky fractured by forking tendrils of heat lightning. The fire truck hoses wash off our equipment.

Thursday: 3 a.m. I walk in the icy hotel room, and extract the contents of my drenched pockets. The story boards I’d folded are soaked with sweat and rain and mud and look like a smeared Rorschach test. I stand in the shower, fully clothed, shoes and all, as the mud dislodges from my entire being and encircles the drain like blood from the “Psycho” shower scene. Five hours’ sleep and we go again.

This is how it goes. The rest of the week is more of the same, with endless bottles of water bleeding out of us in rivulets, staining our clothes in salty rings. We shoot in heat and storm and whatever happens. Day and night, moving over there, sweating, setting up over here, sweating, shooting that, sweating, moving, sweating, setting up, sweating, shooting, sweating, moving, sweating, sweating, sweating. This is where they train people to go to Iraq. Now I know why.

The people we work with and the ones we capture on film are used to extreme weather and endure it like a necessary evil. Many lost everything last year in two hurricanes and yet, while their possessions were gone, drowned or blown away and their families uprooted, they somehow managed to work months of 15-hour days in heat and storm and pain and things I can never imagine. They tolerate our film crew like they do the weather, with graciousness and a weary eye. My week in the heat pales compared to what they have gone through. Sweat and lost luggage is nothing. In the superficial world of advertising, this LA is a long way from the other LA. A very long way.

After an all day meeting and three presentations, we were still dressed for business and not for the messy task of chomping the third cousin of a cockroach, aka: the deep south crawdaddy, aka: mudbug, aka: “where’s the meat and what’s that yellow goo squirting out of it’s head when decapitated?” You better be ready for some manual labor when you order a load of these little red aliens. We thought we were.

I am no fashion plate by anyone’s definition and for those who know my jeans and Hawaiian shirt wardrobe, this is basic information. As we parked amid the Corvettes and pickups, Will looked at me in my rare tie and dress pants and said, “I never thought I’d ever be saying this to you, but I’d lose the tie.” I did. Good advice.

We sat outside on the deck and ordered the special and instantly the waitress arrived with a forklift filled with things that had been bottom feeding earlier in the day. I have never seen so many dead crustaceans as the woman came, bench-pressing what looked like hundreds of pounds of boiled shrimp and crawfish mounded up in an Antietam-ish array of tasty victims. In the kitchen, there had clearly been a massacre and we were about to eat the losers.

Dozens of shrimp with the heads on smiled at me through eight-inch whiskers as I ripped legs and peeled shells and pinched heads. Body parts of crawfish piled up like cordwood as Fred and Will looked like extras in Braveheart devouring the enemy in an ocean of culinary corpses. We ate and ate and ate.

Boats pulled up to the dock as the sun dropped on the other side of the building, leaving us in the cool, reflective, blue shade of a late afternoon scene from a Dave Robicheaux novel. Water birds arched on the ripples across the slew in the warm cattails. People arrived and ate right on their boats and turtles bobbed, waiting in the water for scraps, and a few skinny cats patrolled the docks for dropped treats. A boat tied up, manned by four Australian Shepherds wearing red bandanas – dogs rescued from Katrina. The band started inside the ice-cold-air-conditioned darkness where cigarette smoke and dancing juxtaposed with families out on the deck. It was a perfect sunset.

I wondered if the rural people who drove to this place to eat in their boats had any idea how beautiful the experience was or if they took it for granted. I wished that Richmond had a place like this. I thought about Angela and all of the Broussard’s we had seen and met in our travels down here and I thought how much Dee and Sunny and Tim and Scott would have enjoyed this evening in a place that makes you know that taking the back roads is always the best way to travel.

“I saw some ducks in the median back there under a tree,” Ben says. “It’s bad out when it’s too wet for ducks.”

Freshly loaded with garlic breath, we head into Covington, do our focus group and spend the night at another Holiday Inn. In the morning, we head out toward Baton Rouge and take the back roads because that’s the right thing to do – you can see the country up close and not from the faceless interstate. We’d had our share of the interstate yesterday in the rain with the flat.

We take Highway 190 west and the daiquiri signs increase in frequency beside the ever flat sugar cane fields. The sky is hot and scorched almost white in the building heat. We pass Joe’s Dreyfuss Store restaurant, which Robin says is a good place to eat. We laugh because every place down here is a good place to eat. Even places where they don’t sell food are good places to eat.

People in southern Louisiana talk about Katrina and Rita like bad relatives who visited and left a mess on the floor. They tell their stories knowing wearily that more relatives will be coming soon.

Almost a year later, the damage is still clear in the land and in the people. Talk to anyone more than 10 minutes and they will mention it.

“I lost my house, everything, All my underwear, socks, bras, all of it. Didn’t miss a day of work, though. Just kept going. When you work for the power company, that goes with the territory. Folks need you. You get your family to a safe place and then you go to work.”

Copper-skinned men with thick muscles, tired faces and Cajun names warmed up as they talked about the experience of working the storms.

“Us linemen slept on the floor here when we got any sleep. We worked in some pretty dangerous weather. It’s like we have a responsibility to people out there. They depend on us. Katrina hit us hard. Rita just insulted us.”

“I had a broken leg and just wrapped the cast in a garbage bag and kept working. Everybody here takes a lot of pride in what we do. And our pride was on the line. Our neighbors and families were on the line. That’s why we’re called linemen. When it’s all on the line, we’re right there.”

Several women talk more easily about the brutality of Mother Nature.

“People at work showed up at my house and just started cutting the trees off of it. I had pines slicing all through my living room and bedroom. They just drove up and started working. My husband is a quiet man but that got to him. He said he’d never seen people who didn’t even know folks help people like that.”

“Those hurricanes ripped everything up down here. But they also glued us all together. Funny how that works, ain’t it?”

People at a small store talked about the future storms.

“Nobody will ride one of those out again. I will just get my family and get out of here. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.”

“It’s really odd how we all acted. We lost so much, but I feel like we gained something big. When Mother Nature turned mean, even some mean people turned sweet. Folks helped each other.”

“It’s hurricane season again. I used to say I’m ready. Now I know that you can’t be ready enough.”

“I know who my friends are now. Maybe I thought they were my friends before. But now I know who they are. They are heroes to my family.”

“You hit that piece of wood too?” Ben asks.

“Yep. I called the police,” he says. “Said they’d send Motorist Assistance.” We all look around helplessly.

“First time I’ve let my wife drive in 15 years, and this happens,” he says half laughing. “Was on my way to get a colonoscopy, too.”

Will says, “What’s worse, this or the colonoscopy?”

“Guess your day won’t be getting any better, huh?” says Fred.

Alyssa and Robin look in the glove box for the manual. Ben is on the phone as the man walks back to his crippled car.

Ben calls AAA. They say it will be about 75 minutes. So he unloads the back of the van and we discover that the spare is directly under the middle of the vehicle. He roots around inside looking for a handle as Alyssa reads the manual. Ben gets the jack and the lug nut wrench out and, after much searching and much advice from us standing around, he finds the hidden square of carpet that must be peeled back to reveal the screw for the tool that we don’t have. Thank you, Enterprise.

Ben and Fred and Will all confer about a plan. I start looking around beside the road. Debris is all over the place. I look at the hole in the floor where the missing tool should fit. Motorist Assistance arrives and everyone gets excited. Until we see the guys in the Motorist Assistance van. One look says they are not going to assist.

Ben talks to them and explains what happened. They say the police called them and told them to come help us. They clearly have no intention of getting out of their van, much less helping us.

“Be careful and watch out for that traffic,” they say and drive away.

Robin, Will, Alyssa and Fred watch this in disbelief. Ben seems amazingly calm as he says, “What part of ‘Motorist Assistance’ am I missing here?”

“The part where they assist you?” laughs Robin.

Meanwhile, I have located a piece of scrap metal beside the interstate and am attempting to fashion it into a crude tool to release the incredibly inconvenient captive tire lurking under the middle of the Mazda.

When the others see my odd, metal-working efforts involving bending and shaping a shard of roadside aluminum, probably blown to this exact spot by hurricane winds last year, they start to laugh. Fred takes some pictures of my obviously insane activity.

“If he somehow manages to get that tire out from under there with a bent chunk of a trailer, we’ll never hear the end of it,” says Robin.

“What are the odds of that?” says Will, looking at the bubbling rumble of thunderheads to the west. “The odds of that storm getting here, however, are much better.”

I have fashioned my homemade tool and it fits the release. I insert the lug nut wrench into a hole in the crude tool and turn the thing and it snaps the release and the tire begins to drop. Silence from the group.

“Unbelievable,” says Alyssa.

“Like a caveman, he created a tool. What are the odds, indeed,” says Robin.

Will says, “I think if we all run, we can get in the cars before that gets here” — “That” being a wall of rain.

He points to the gray, liquid curtain being pulled down the interstate, closing on us fast. We toss the equipment back in, toss in the spare and jump in our cars just as the bottom falls out of the sky and it rains harder than a cow peeing on a flat rock. It blows sideways and lightning strikes all around us. This goes on for an hour, long enough to flood the area around the car.

I look out as a piece of plastic floats by. The very piece of discarded plastic I had kicked away from the bottom of the van as I was looking for metal. Then I see Ben running through the rain to retrieve it in the deluge. It was part of the van that had covered the tire. I thought it was junk like everything else lying around and drop-kicked it into a gutter.

About that time the AAA guy shows up, risking life and limb to change the flat in the frog-strangler as traffic buzzes a foot behind his back, soaking him in road-ooze.

He actually performed Motorist Assistance. Maybe somewhere, Motorist Assistance is having a nice bowl of gumbo.

A flatbed truck passes on this flat road. It is loaded with blue pipes that sing in the wind like a 70 mph pipe organ. This is hurricane country. Katrina was here, Rita was here, and no one has forgotten their mannerless visits.

Almost every gas station is a restaurant and a casino as well. Drive-in daiquiri shacks dot the highways. We pass Houma and her cattails clumped in the marsh. Brackish bayous lace the lush terrain. Docks and rusted barns with roofs scarred and twisted by the wind sit near Grand Isle. Water is green with algae under wooden walkways. Low houses hug the earth and mobile homes bake in the sun amongst the tangled vegetation that squeezes the road into a thin, curveless, concrete drive.

Handpainted signs prop against trees in front of nets and crawfish traps and airboats and johnboats. “Seafood.” “Crawfish.” “Live Crabs.” “World Famous Bloody Marys.” “Daiquiris.” Pictures of alligators are everywhere amongst the metal buildings.

We cross a tall bridge over big working boats, barges and grain elevators into Kenner, Louisiana. I-10 widens and New Orleans is to our right. We see the damage of the worst hurricane in American history still being cleared. And then it happens.

Ben is behind us in the rented Mazda van with all of our equipment. Robin sees it first. A piece of wood is in the road. The 4×4 is under Ben’s van before we know it and rips the back passenger tire. Boom, we hear the tire explode. He hobbles to the side of the busy interstate. We pull over. A flat tire on the flattest road in the flattest place in America. What are the odds?

Continued on next blog

New Iberia is James Lee Burke’s hometown. His famous detective, Dave Robicheaux, lives here. I have read about this place for years through several novels about crime and poboys and sweaty, mysterious acts of violence. His descriptions of the place give me deja vu all over again.

Main Street is hugged on each side by big, old, columned, 100 year-old homes that look almost birthday cake-ish in their ornate architecture and detailed embellishments. Porches, so deep you could wander around them until supper, reach out as you drive by. Mossy trees bend and crook above thick St.Augustine grass and seem to hold the history of the place in their gnarled branches. The road follows the Teche River.

In the little bookstore, I discover Mr.Burke has a new book coming out. The lady in the store knows the famous writer and this makes me feel a bit closer to his words as well. As any reader of my blogs here knows, I need all the proximity to great writing I can get.

The following is a series of blogs from a recent trip to southern Louisiana.

Southern Louisiana. We’ve just finished a lunch that would knock Emeril off the air for a week. Eddies BBQ, at a Texaco. The best barbeque I have had in a long time. In the South, it’s not exactly news that gas stations are purveyors of fine cuisine, but here in Louisiana, that theory is a plain fact.

We are driving through a small town when Fred mentions it’s his wife’s birthday next week and he should get her something down here. At that exact moment, we pass the perfect store: Iron, Leather and Lace. Before we can even suggest it as the perfect BD gift store, we pass another place called Limbs and Braces. I point out these establishments to Fred, who waves them off like a bad pitch. He is waiting for Boudin.

Boudin and Cracklin Next Exit!

We’re in Southern Louisiana. We’d seen the signs up and down the roads for several days.

“BOUDIN AND CRACKLIN’S. NEXT EXIT!”

When you are in southern Louisiana, you see a lot of unfamiliar words. “Boudin” and “cracklin” warranted special attention, and we asked a few questions. I know gumbo and etouffee and jambalaya and crawfish, and we’ve eaten our share of that on this trip. Boudin, however, is a mystery.

Eventually, we end up at Prejean’s in North Lafayette. It is packed. A live alligator greets you at the door and a fried one will greet you on the menu if you so order. Above you as you are dining, a 14-footer is forever frozen in mid-growl through the talents of a reptilian taxidermist. A postcard shows a child straddling a gator under the headline, “We ride ‘em before we cook ‘em.”

On the menu, alligator has its own heading, like Poultry, Fish and Pork. Alligator Grand Chenier: Tender, white tail meat seasoned Cajun style. Of course, there’s Grilled or Fried Alligator: Prime white meat fillets – served with alligator sausage. I can honestly say I have never heard of alligator sausage. Growing up with more than a few gators myself, the gators had a better chance of eating people sausage.

We pass on those choices and go for the crawfish and gumbo, which is described as a “Three-Time World Champion.” Later, the waiter says, “You know they’re lying.” You have to respect such honesty. And then we see it: Boudin. Will can’t take it anymore; his curiosity compels him to step out and he has to have some. Robin says, “This is top-of-the-line boudin here. I’ll show you some real boudin down the road at a real hole in the wall. It won’t look like this.”

About this time we see a news camera in the restaurant. Needless to say, where I grew up, there is a distinct possibility that when a TV camera shows up in a restaurant, it is not good news. No bad news today, though. Later that evening, Fred is watching the news in the hotel and sees us on TV cramming boudin in our hot-sauced little mouths. He is pretty excited about it. We like this restaurant. World Championship Gumbo, truthful waiters and you get on TV, all in one meal. How do you beat that? With boudin.

Our honest waiter brings the anticipated boudin appetizer. We collect our inch-thick balls of deep-fried boudin. Looks like a cornbread muffin, brown and round. It’s spicy and good. We’re still not sure exactly what is in this ball of Cajun cuisine but we all like it. We eat our award-winning gumbo. We eat crawfish etouffee. We down a lot of sweet iced tea. It’s all good and we go down the road. “Real” boudin awaits us at the Texaco.

It’s hard to imagine that food by the same name can look so different. But there, next to a watery trough, a woman is tonging over logs of ashen gray sausage into a milky juice. No nice, crispy brown balls here. This thing looks like a nasty chitlinish, culinary mistake. “That is what boudin looks like to most folks down here,” says Robin. “Driving food. People eat that and cracklins for breakfast. Bite the end off that casing and suck down the boudin and drive on down the road.”

Nobody says a word except Will. “Wow.” That’s all he can say as he stares at the leathery shank of Cajun hose. We all stand numbed and try to comprehend this duality of boudin. Cracklin’s, on the other hand, looks familiar. Deep-fried pork fat. Now that sounds like something I know about. Deep-fried pork fat has put almost every relative of mine six feet under carved granite markers for 100 years. Pork fat is a subject I understand.

The following is a series of blogs from a recent trip to southern Louisiana.

 She gets on the small plane headed for Alexandria, Louisiana. As I deposit my carry-on in the overhead, I notice her in the seat next to mine, straight posture, fresh face, camo uniform. She is a soldier coming home from Iraq.

Her blond hair is pulled tight and she smiles easily but wearily, tired in a way that only people who have traveled a long distance and are near home can look. She stares out the window as the engines start and the plane began to move. She is no stranger to this routine.

“Sorry if I stink,” she says bluntly with a hint of a Southern accent polished off by years of being in places other than the South. “I have sweated and dried more times than I can remember in the last three days.” I assure her she does not stink but I would never convince her of that.

“How long are you home?” I ask.

“Two weeks. Been gone since Katrina hit. Seven months. I have four more. I just want to get a shower and sleep. My husband asked what I wanted to do and I said I wanted to do nothing for a while. Just be home.”

She tries to stretch her legs, and rubs her neck and pinches her temples. She is muscled like a swimmer, broad shoulders and no fat. She never takes off her sunglasses. We climb into the azure sky and the green hills of Georgia spread out beneath us in rolling patches like a lush Southern quilt of every shade of green. We fly southwest toward the bayous.

“It was 136 degrees when I left Iraq,” she says. She looks down at the earth. “I miss green trees and grass and rain. All I’ve seen since I got there is brown sand and dirt and camo and dust. It’s good to be home.”

“Your family is in Louisiana?” I ask.

“My husband and daughter. She’s twelve.”

“Must be hard for her with you gone.”

“Hard for me, too. Today is a surprise. She doesn’t know I’m coming.”

There are at least seven soldiers on the plane. She is the only woman, the only mom. She gets up for the second time to use the restroom.

“We have to overhydrate in the desert because we sweat so much,” she laughs. “Guess I shouldn’t have drank so much water.”

She goes and returns and talks about the heat over there, “Like a hair dryer constantly blowing in your face.” She mentions the heavy armor they have to wear during attacks and how the terrorists chuck mortars into their camp for $100 in pay. She sleeps for a few minutes but can’t stay down. Her legs are hurting and she is anxious.

“I want to sleep in a real bed on a mattress thick enough where you don’t feel the springs digging into your back. I want it to rain the whole time I’m here. I may get out and just walk in the grass barefooted. I just want to be a mom again.”

We land and she makes no excess movements in her determined attempt to get into the small airport. She knows who will be waiting. The last time I see her, she is bear-hugging a 12-year-old girl and her husband is grinning with pride and joy and the mom/soldier has finally taken her sunglasses off. Her eyes are beautiful and filled with tears. She embraces her husband and her little girl and I think about how many moms are fighting a war that takes three days to get to. I pass her husband, shake his hand and say thank you.

It is not enough.