Christmas In Rice Country

by Jim on 2018/12/25

Good evening, and Merry Christmas.  Yesterday, I showed you a few scenes of the sugarcane harvest on Christmas Eve, and, today, here are a few pictures that I took today while on holiday travel in rice country.

This first picture and the fact it is the only picture in this essay of this subject demonstrates that I erred in not bringing my telephoto lens along for the ride!

This is a northnortheastward view shows a flooded rice field, in Vermilion Parish near the northeastern corner of Cameron Parish, with plenty of waterfowl – the reason that I stopped for the picture – scrounging for what they can out of it.

Next, we stopped in Lake Arthur.  Here is City Hall.

I guess that if we understand Christmas to be a civic-cultural-social holiday and not a religious holiday we can justify putting a Nativity scene on government property.

That’s a side view of city hall.  I like the fishnet Christmas Tree!

Here are a couple more scenes of town before we roll out.

It seems interesting.

The Southern Pacific railway had a branch from Lake Charles to here that was abandoned in (I think) the early 1980s, the Lake Arthur Branch; I am not sure what, if anything, it ever did in town, but it served a big rice dryer on the northern edge of town and some other rice facilities along the line.

If you have benefitted from your readership of this publication, if you think that you will continue to benefit from your readership here, and if you have as little as $1 per month to spare, I would like you to consider becoming a patron of this publication.

Later in the afternoon, we are back in Kaplan, where I stopped to photograph a couple of the old rice mill or dryer or whatever they are.

The railroads with which I am obsessed served these facilities, some of them as late as 1990.  Mike Palmieri got some pictures of this service.

I wish that trains still operated here.

And I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Joyeux Noël.

Merci,

Jim

 

 

 

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