From Feudal Times

I pedaled up hills today in central Louisiana and coasted down slopes that originally bristled with wild forest.  That was before people came from Europe with an uncomplicated ambition.  They would leave the world a little better for their passage, and their notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use by cutting all the trees.  It is odd to imagine a future that is already long past.  I was passing through logged land once stripped of every marketable tree, and saw where most of it is being managed for wood production with sustained-yield forestry.  Here at the paper mill in Bogalusa is where most of the logs that passed me on the road are converted into the paper I write about them on.  

Bicycling today was a quiet soulful endurance, past simple houses, old collapsing houses, trailers—dwellings of simple people as I was in Tennessee those many years ago. 

Louisiana Castle

As in feudal times, a few people in Louisiana live better than the ninety-nine percent.

I rode into Franklinton and had to stop to find out about all these cars parked in lines with people milling about.  A traffic director told me that the first Wednesday of every month is “food bank” day.  About two hundred cars were waiting for free food, some of them had waited seven hours.  “Do they work in the forest industry?” I asked, having pedaled through miles of tree farms and logging operations.  “No,” he said, “There is virtually no industry in Franklinton.”