Volunteering in New Orleans

It is with sadness that I must inform any of you still persistent enough to be reading these blogs that my netbook, on which most of these blogs have been recorded, is no longer functioning. It is my hope that the source of the trouble is a problem that might be easily remedied by those who know about such things, but in any case it will have to wait until we get home. In the meantime I will continue to write these blogs whenever I have access to a computer (as I do now at Viviane's), but be not surprised if I fall several days behind. It is simply a result of technical difficulties and not because we have fallen off the end of the earth.

And now onto one of our most interesting days of life on the road. One of the best things about having Elise along on this trip is that she is an inveterate reader of brochures and travel guides about upcoming places and events. At the New Orleans Welcome Center, she found a booklet about New Orleans which included 25 things one could do there for free. Item number 25 was, "Volunteering to help at a rebuilding project in New Orleans." I knew that parts of New Orleans still remained to be rehabilitated after the flooding from  hurricane Katrina  five years ago and was not surprised that there were projects helping with this, but I hadn't considered that we might actually be able to spend a day on very short notice involved with one of these projects.
The article didn't mention the name or number of any specific project, but after thinking about it for a moment, the lady at the Welcome Center did come up with the name of a project that she thought might be able to use our help. The project was located in Chalmette which is a near suburb contiguous to New Orleans where all of the homes had been either washed away or made uninhabitable by twelve feet of water and sludge from a nearby oil refinery that was also damaged by the hurricane flood waters.

This morning I asked the clerk at our hotel desk for a phone book so I could look up the project's phone number, but he didn't have a book which included Chalmette; however, when I explained who I was looking for, he said, "Oh, I know about them. We deliver ice cream to them." He then looked them up on his computer and gave me their phone number. When I called them a little after nine o'clock,  there was no answer, so we decided we would just drive out there and hope to talk to them in their office. Even if we didn't get to talk to them or weren't accepted on such a short-term basis, we would at least get to see something of New Orleans after the flood besides the French Quarter.

As we drove through Chalmette, we did not see any collapsed homes, but we did see a lot of vacant lots. When we arrived at the office of the St. Bernard Project, we were warmly greeted by the young man behind the front desk. A brief conversation revealed that he was, like myself, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania - although his graduation date was considerably more recent than my own. He thought that they might, indeed, be able to use us that day and called out the volunteer coordinator from some back office to speak to us. She said that yes, there was a house being rehabilitated that could use our help today, unskilled as were. She then took a few minutes to give us some background about the project and how it was started by two volunteers who came down from Washington, D.C.; they saw how great the need was beyond what the government was doing, went back and raised some startup money from their friends, and then came back to New Orleans and started this project.

We  punched the address of the house where we would be working into our GPS and away we went. Along the way we saw many houses that looked in pretty good condition, at least on the outside, and a lot more vacant lots.

When we arrived, it was explained to us that the flood waters in Chalmette had reached twelve feet high and that every single home was either washed away or made uninhabitable. Some of the vacant lots were sites from which houses had simply been swept away. Other houses which were beyond repair were torn down by the government and the material removed from the site.
Many houses, however, were still standing but in various states of disrepair. The outside of the homes might still appear to be in good shape, but the insides had been completed gutted. The government gave people money to compensate them for their lost homes, but it generally was not enough to rebuild the home. Some homes had been completely rehabilitated by families who had the resources to do this and families were living in them again. Others, however, had simply been gutted but not repaired. Many people chose not to return and sold their houses to the government. If the home is repairable, it will eventually be rebuilt and sold to another buyer.

 The home where we were sent, however, is one to which the original homeowner is intending to return once the work is completed. It will be one of over three hundred houses that have already been rehabilitated by this project. In addition to the forty homes on which they are currently working, they have a waiting list of another 130 homes. The project is also in the process of developing a mental health program to help those in need of psychological help as a result of Katrina and of the more recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were given a one-page summary about the homeowner of the home on which we would be working, and I am including it below in its entirety because I think it gives a better picture of what these people have gone through than anything I could describe:

         Reflecting on the progress of her home, Karen G. says, "Every time I go there and see a little
         bit more done, I cry and ask myself, 'Is this real?'"
         Far from the months following Katrina when she could only look at her home from the outside    
         because she was too paralyzed with grief to go inside, Karen's life is starting to take shape
         again.
        "It's amazing the way things just fall into place sometimes," she says.
         It took Karen six months to gather the strength to see her home after Katrina. Her home in
         Chalmette was also one of the properties affected by the Murphy Oil Spill from a neighboring
         plant, and when she walked in after all those months, the oil covered every inch. Even her
         wedding dress, 12 feet high in the attic, was stained.

        What was most difficult for Karen was the sense of losing her position in life that she had
        worked so hard to achieve. After she and her husband divorced, she bought him out of the
        mortgage, returned to college and eventually landed a job at a law firm to support her
        daughter. She worked at the law firm for 23 years before the storm. She was securely on her
        own and happy.

        After the storm, Karen says she remembers asking herself, "How do I get my life back? I
        couldn't see any way that I could get started again. It was hopeless. I thought it would never
        happen, and then it did."

       After relocating to Gonzales, La. with her parents for a few months, where they eventually
       chose to stay instead of returning to New Orleans, Karen returned to her home city. She
       rented an apartment in nearby Kenner and eventually a place closer to her home in Chalmette.
       She received some assistance from the federal Road Home Program, but like 75 percent of
       recipients, it was not enough to hire a contractor to completely rebuild her gutted home. Karen
       felt paralyzed about where to turn next, when a co-worker referred her to the St. Bernard
       Project (SBP). With SBP's efficient rebuilding model, Karen's assistance can be utilized, along  
       with  volunteer labor, to rebuild her home.

       Karen vividly remembers seeing the first busload of volunteers working in her home and
       feeling a rush of mixed emotions to see work being done on her dormant house.
       "The first time I saw anything done on my house, it was such a shock," she says. "It's still
       unbelievable because I never thought it would happen."
       The outpouring of support from volunteers still overwhelms Karen. She remarks, "I wouldn't be
       in this hopeful situation without all of you."

       Not only is Karen ready to finally be home, but her friends and neighbors have patiently been
       waiting  for her return. With two of her original neighbors home, she says, "They're just so happy
       and waiting for me to be back, too."

When we arrived at the house around 11:00, there were half a dozen people already at work sanding and plastering, a few younger people in their twenties, a couple people roughly in their forties, one black man and a couple women in their sixties. Quite a mix! The supervisor was a young woman who had been a translator for the deaf in upper New York State. She had come to work on the project for short periods of time during the last few years and finally decided to stay. Like many of the workers for SBP, she received a modest stipend from Americorps which enabled her to support herself. In the meantime, she met her fiancee and is intending to relocate here permanently and eventually return to her former profession. She was well organized and put us right to work. I did ceiling sanding first and later plastering. The plastering turned out to be a real learning experience, since it took more skill than I had anticipated. By the end of the day, we were tired and dirty, but it had been a very satisfying day!




 

 We just happened to arrive on a day when another of SBP's houses had been completed and we were invited to attend the "Welcome Home Party" for the family that was moving in. At the end of our work day, we drove over to the home where the celebration was being held. There were about twenty-five of us, mostly volunteers.

                                                                  homecoming celebration, New Orleans, LA

The director of the program made a few brief remarks along with the social work director and the case manager who had worked with the family. There was a quintet of singers from a nearby college who sang a song, and a ribbon was cut. Then everyone went into the house for cake and punch. It was all very nicely done and obviously a very exciting experience for the mother and her daughter who were moving into the house.

For us, it was time to move on. We got as far as Slidell, just outside New Orleans, and took a room in a motel. Except for the fact that the doorknob came off in my hand and we had to use the plunger to flush the toilet, it was quite a nice place except for the fact that the refrigerator could only be plugged in by first unplugging the TV, and the bulb of the lamp beside the bed lay on its side rather than in the socket. Well, we have had some very pleasant motel rooms, and as the saying goes, "You can't win them all."

Baton Rouge and Bourbon Street, New Orleans

I started the day with breakfast in the motel breakfast room and got into a conversation with a man who was working in the area as an auditor of some kind of program. He had been a marine and had served in Afganistan as a sniper shortly after nine-eleven. He seemed pretty low-key about his involvement and said being there wasn't really so bad. I couldn't help wondering (although I didn't ask) how he must have felt as a sniper the first time he killed one of his targets. I know from my own limited experience in the army that soldiers are trained mentally as well as physically to be able to kill in a combat situation, but still....

While we were talking, the manager of the motel was in the room and completed a phone call which obviously left her upset. When we wished her a good morning, she blurted out that it wasn't really a good morning because she had just heard from her daughter that they had placed their child in a residential setting because he was so difficult. When I spoke to her a little later just to say that I hoped things would work out all right, she explained that the boy was 13 and strong and even his medication didn't really enable him to maintain control. She also talked about loving the boy because he was her grandchild. I was reminded of all of the parents of autistic, retarded and emotionally disturbed children I had worked with over the years. I left feeling very sad for her and also grateful that I had been spared such an experience in my own family.

  Our first stop for the day was Baton Rouge - another lunch stop that turned out to be much more interesting and time-consuming than we had anticipated. We started off with a trip to the 27th floor of the state capitol building, the tallest state capitol in the country. From there we had a great view of all of Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River.

Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

We then went down to the basement for lunch in the cafeteria. There was an interesting mix of people. Both black men and white men wearing suits and ties, workers wearing prison uniforms, as well as well-dressed women, also both black and white, who may have been legislators or working for legislators. I was told that there is still a lot of separation between the races in Louisiana, but for a state in the heart of Dixie that was still very segregated when Elise and I did our crosscountry trip in 1967, they've obviously come a long way.

We then went across the street to see some murals at the capitol annex. There were captions explaining the murals. One of the captions explained that originally one of the former governors (I forget his name, but it wasn't Huey or Earl Long) had been painted into one of the murals, but after he was convicted on charges of corruption (or maybe murdering his wife, I can't remember which), the artist redid the mural and omitted the picture of the offending governor. On the opposite wall, however, there was a display which lauded the accomplishments of the very same exgovernor. Not very consistent, but I suppose it does very well represent the human condition. Good and evil are not necessarily easily separated.



Grounds of Louisiana State Museum, Baton Rouge, LA



 We then went across the street to the Louisiana State Museum. On  the grounds of the museum, there was an interesting piece of metalwork of a horsedrawn cart. The building itself was large and impressive  with one floor devoted to the history of Louisiana and one floor devoted to Louisiana's musical culture and heritage. The most interesting display on the history floor was a film of Huey Long when he was a senator, giving a speech in the Senate. The speech was impassioned and full of waving arms and dramatic turns of speech, while five senators sat on a platform in back of him, completely deadpan and without moving a muscle. It was quite a contrast.

On the third floor were displays as well as recorded music of all of the different styles of music that had originated or been popular in Louisiana.

We eventually reached our goal for the day - New Orleans. The first motel we tried offered us a small, windowless room that was exceedingly ugly. Although it was already 6:00, we decided to try at least one more place in hopes of something more cheerful at a reasonable price, and sure enough for an extra $15.00, we did find a motel that provided us with a small but pleasant room overlooking a courtyard with a swimming pool. Not too many people seem to go swimming in the middle of October, even in New Orleans, but it was pleasant to look at.

The motel was at the edge of the French Quarter and in the evening we made the obligatory trip to Bourbon Street. We had been there twice before, once for Mardi Gras and once when it wasn't. We were curious to see to what extent the French Quarter had recovered from Katrina, and as far as we could tell, it had recovered pretty completely. The stores were all open, the bars all had live bands, and the streets were full of tourists. Most of the music venues were simply too loud for us. My theory is that we are old enough not to have had our hearing damaged by listening to very loud music from an early age, so that music at a certain volume is actually painful. We did, however, find one restaurant that had a trio playing music that we could enjoy and later another outdoor patio where we ordered a beignet and a coke and listened to a trio with a great banjo player. The trumpet player was also a singer, and the group played jazz versions of songs we generally knew at a volume that was enjoyable. For the information of those of you who don't know what a beignet is, it is a piece of dough covered with powdered sugar. It may be a New Orleans specialty, but I would prefer a good donut any time! There was also a karaoke place which had some pretty good singers as well as a couple doing some of the sexiest dirty dancing I can remember. All in all it was an OK evening, but I think I have now had enough of Bourbon Street and don't need to go again.

Beaumont, Texas and Lafayette, Louisiana

Just a word about Vivian's dogs before moving on. She has three. One little one who follows her around the house and two large ones that often also have the run of the house but during our visit were kept in their own room which was built especially for them and is just behind the kitchen. She obviously cared a lot about the dogs and they were good company for her living alone in this big house.

I think dog owners, however, are sometimes like smokers used to be. They assume that everyone will love their dog(s) as much as they do and don't hesitate to expose guests to dogs they would prefer not to be exposed to. This was not the case with Vivian and we appreciated it, especially since Elise has had a fear and dislike of dogs ever since she got bitten once long ago, and I have dog-related allergies. The small dog was extremely well-behaved and unobtrusive. From what we saw of Vivian with the large dogs, they were also well-behaved and well trained. It added to the pleasure of our visit that we could stay with Vivian and not be concerned about the dogs.

Beaumont, Texas wasn't on our list of places to visit, but it was in our path and turned out to be a good place to stop for a tasty lunch of chicken fricassee. We also found out that there was a museum there honoring Thomas Edison which seemed interesting from the write-up we read, so we added it to our list of places to see. (This is why our trip keeps getting extended.)   I remembered that Edison had done most of his work in New Jersey, so I was surprised to find a museum honoring Edison in Texas. Evidently, however, the power company that funded this museum thought it was a good idea.
The museum wasn't very large but it was quite interesting. The number of inventions that Edison developed, patented, and marketed, including the light bulb, the movie projector, and the phonograph, was quite amazing and really transformed the world we live in.

Our final stop for the day was Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette is famous for being in the heart of Cajun/Zydeco country. Once we settled into our motel, we made a couple phone calls and found out where there would be Cajun/Zydeco dancing on a Wednesday night and off we went.
When we arrived, we both remembered that Randole's was the same bar/restaurant/dance hall that we had gone to during our last visit to Lafayette at least 20 years ago. Now as then, there were about 40 people, mostly in their sixties but a few older or younger, all white, and mostly but not all local people, all dancing to music by a live Zydeco band. We joined them and had a really good time dancing.
I didn't hear anyone with a French accent, but I did have a brief conversation with a man with a Dutch accent, who was like us, just passing through, and had stopped off to dance. To paraphrase an old subway poster, "You don't have to be Cajun to enjoy Cajun dancing."

Sign in the Beaumont restaurant: "Beware of pickpockets and loose women. N.O. PD" (New Orleans Police Dept.)

Visiting in Houston, Texas

Today we are off to Houston to visit Vivian, loosely related to us as the sister of a deceased sister-in-law, but someone whom we have known for a long time and liked. The road to Houston was straight as the proverbial arrow with only slightly rolling hills to break the monotony. It was four lane divided highway but not limited access, so the speed limit was only 70 mph instead of 80 mph like on the limited access highways. You really have to be driving fast to violate the speed laws in Texas!

                                                      heron in Houston city park

Vivian lives in a beautiful house in a a very rich neighborhood and she took us on a tour. One of the houses had its own small zoo including a monkey house with plenty of room for the monkeys to do whatever it is that monkeys do. We also went to a very large park with a lake. At lakeside we saw a family of nutria. (I had seen nutria before and knew they weren't otters or beavers but I couldn't remember the name; I asked a young woman nearby and she said that in Spanish they were called nutria - just as they are in English.) There was also a beautiful white heron standing not far away away at the edge of the lake. The park was also highly utilized. There were lots of joggers on the jogging path and several soccer games going on on the various soccer fields. Whatever happened to baseball?

We then spent a very pleasant evening together just talking family business and history.

LBJ and a day in Austin, Texas

Even though we missed the museum located at the LBJ Ranch as well as most of the ranch itself yesterday, it turns out that the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin is actually the best source of information about the life and presidency of LBJ. The museum also contains information about Ladybird Johnson and a video tour of the White House narrated by Ladybird.

 I remembered quite a bit about the Johnson presidency, the Great Society as well as the Vietnam War. Even so I was surprised at the number of programs which Johnson initiated that have made us a better and a more decent society -medicare, medicaid, environmental programs, more than 60 bills to improve education, the list goes on and on. Because Johnson knew both the people and the process by which things got done in Washington, he certainly has to be considered one of our most competent presidents. The Viet Nam War was not only a tragedy for the United States but also a personal tragedy for a man who used his position so effectively in so many ways to leave the country at the end of his presidency better than he found it, and ended up being practically driven from office because of a war that almost all of his advisers both military and civilian initially considered a worthwhile endeavor. I suppose that for all of us, myself certainly included, with the best of intentions so many things beyond our control happen to us in the course of a lifetime that we rarely end up at the age of 60 where we expected to be when we were 21.

                                                       tallest building in Austin, Texas 

After the museum we drove to downtown Austin and just walked along 6th Street enjoying the good weather and the great architecture, both old and 19th Century. Austin bills itself as "the music capital of the world," and 6th Street has a number of music venues along the three or four blocks of 6th Street. It reminded me somewhat of Nashville in that respect. We stopped in one of the restaurants for a Tex-Mex lunch of a burrito with beef, shrimp, and fish all rolled into one with a good sauce on it - pretty tasty.

At around 6:30 we drove down to the lakefront and arrived just in time to take the boat cruise around the lake, which featured watching more than half a million bats fly out from under the bridge over the lake and fly off for their evening meals of moths and other insects. Like at Carlsbad Caverns, it was quite a sight.

Afterwards we went back to downtown and wandered in and out of a few of the music bars. One was too loud, one was an open mike bar with performers generally not as good as one might hear at Open Circle in Philadelphia, and finally to another place where two guys on two pianos played requests and encouraged the audience to sing along. We were tired by then and we weren't properly dressed for the too-strong air conditioning so we didn't stay long, but it did seem like fun.

Texas roadsigns: Drive Friendly
Don't Mess with Texas - $1,000 fine for littering

Fredricksburg and on to Austin, Texas

I started my day with a brief  chat  with the motel owner, who was out with his wife sweeping up the acorns from the oak tree."How long have you had this motel?" I asked him.

"It's been two years now."
"Where were you before?"
"I was in Florida."
"What brought you here?
"The economy there got very bad."
"And things are better here?"
"Yes, and my wife and I do everything ourselves (to cut expenses)"
Just one more casualty of the bad economy but making the best of a bad situation.
I decided to make the most of a good situation and went next door to the donut shop. I was happy to find that although their selection of donuts was limited, they also had fresh croissants. I bought two and brought them back to the motel.

Our first goal for the day was Fredricksburg and the large museum there about WWII in the Pacific. Unlike most of the towns where the main street of the town was also the highway through the town, Fredricksburg was not ugly. On the contrary, the six blocks of the business district were quite attractive. Fredricksburg had evidently been settled by immigrants from Germany and many of the restaurants on this strip still featured German food. In addition to the restaurants, there were many shops selling all kinds of arts and crafts materials from inexpensive tourist items to an exhibit of beautiful blown glass items that did not even have prices attached to them, so that looking at them was more like being in a museum than in a gallery. There were also small parks and a couple small museums on this strip in addition to the large WWII museum. A few of the buildings also remained from the 19th century. The streets were crowded with tourists, so that it was a little like New Hope on a Sunday afternoon.

One might wonder why a major museum about the war in the Pacific would be built so far from the Pacific Coast, but there was a reason - Admiral Nimitz, who was the admiral in charge of the naval war in the Pacific was born in Fredricksburg. At the War in the Pacific Museum we were informed that it would take at least 3 hours to see everything - more time than we had available if we were to get to Austin that day. After hemming and hawing a bit, we decided to pay our money and see what we could in an hour or so. It was, indeed, quite a museum, with a detailed account in words, pictures, and films of the events leading up to the war with Japan and the various battles that took place. The part I found most interesting was  the story of developments in Japan prior to the war, including an attempt by some in the military to assassinate the emperor. We gave short shrift to much of the military history and did manage to see most of the museum in about 45 minutes.



longhorn cattle on LBJ ranch, Johnson City, Texas



Then it was off to Johnson City to see the place where Lyndon Johnson was raised. When we got to the museum at his ranch, the two park rangers were just leaving. We nicely informed them that all of the promotional material about the museum said that it was open until 5:00, and it was now only 4:00. They then nicely informed us that Texas was on Central Time not Mountain Time and that it was now actually 5:00. Who knew? We didn't. It was quite a surprise! In any event, we had to acknowledge that they were entitled to close the museum even if we did think it was only 4:00.

Since we were there already, we did a short walk into the ranch where they had fenced in some deer that were common in the area and also some longhorn cattle; I was also surprised to learn that these cattle were actually living wild on the prairie when settlers arrived. They were descendants of cows that had been abandoned or lost by earlier Spanish explorers.

Our last stop of the day was Austin. We arrived at our motel at about 6:00 (Central Time) and settled in for the evening.

Sonora, Texas

The original intention was to do this trip in ten weeks. Not enough time. I reached Los Angeles in seven weeks because I had to, but it meant leaving out some things that I really wanted to see - like Yosemite, for example. Coming back, it soon became obvious that our trip would last at least twelve weeks, and now it seems that thirteen weeks is a more realistic likelihood. No matter which way we go, there are things of interest to see that we didn't know about but which we don't want to miss once we find out about them.
 
  Today, our "find" was Sonora, Texas. We originally chose it because it seemed to be the town where we were most likely to be after a day of driving.



Main Street in historic Sonora, Texas  



We did indeed arrive at Sonora at 4:00 pm and pulled into a budget motel, where a nice Pakistani gentleman showed us around and assured us that we would be safe and happy at his motel. Indeed, the room was newly painted a bright green and yellow which made it quite cheerful, and outside the room was a huge tree with spreading branches. I had never seen a tree quite like it before and although the owner told me that it was an oak tree, I had my doubts since the leaves were different from any oak I had ever seen. I looked it up on my netbook and learned that it was indeed a Live Oak.

There was a large cavern not too far from Sonora, and we had intended to see it, but we were too late to do this. We had arrived early enough, however, to drive the mile or so into the center of Sonora and take a look at the town. We picked up a walking tour brochure of the town and off we went. The highway was the main street through the town and it was filled with the usual conglomeration of auto repair and sales places, gas stations,restaurants and miscellaneous commercial establishments. Nothing special.

There was a sign pointing left to the historic district. We took the turn and it was almost like something out of Twilight Zone. We had been whisked back into the nineteenth century. We were now on a wide street with small shops on both sides, many of them in refurbished 19th century buildings. The shops were all closed and we were the only ones on the street. Reading our walking tour brochure, it seemed that the town's main claim to fame was that it was the place where Will Carver, a member of Butch Cassidy's gang of bank and train robbers, was finally killed. The various buildings on the walking tour generally had some loose connection to his fatal visit to the town. There were also some other killings referred to. It seems that the town has been cleaned up quite a bit since the nineteenth century. Progress ain't all bad.

The town visitors center was closed. There was a sign up that because of the economic turndown, the center would now be closed on Saturdays. There was also a notice posted about a memorial dinner for George Wallace. GEORGE WALLACE??!! I knew we were in the South and that much of the South has still not conceded that it lost the Civil War and that the reconstruction period is over, but GEORGE WALLACE?! - whose main claim to fame as governor of Alabama was a final unsuccessful effort to block integration at the University of Alabama? If there was ever anyone in the US better off forgotten than George Wallace, it's hard to imagine who it might be. In  all fairness to Sonora, I must acknowledge that George Wallace is a fairly common name; perhaps the dinner was to honor some other George Wallace.  I certainly hope so!

The town courthouse was a beautiful nineteenth century building with a large attractive lawn in front of it. The lawn contained three historic stone markers - one honoring veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, one honoring veterans of WWII, and one honoring a citizen of the town who was killed while leading his Confederate troops in a minor battle of the Civil War. There were also some large cardboard posters touting the local high school football team. On the fence facing the sidewalk, there were small posters honoring the early settlers of the town, apparently written by their descendants. One of them referred to the harsh conditions overcome to get there, including defending themselves against "savage Indians." I suppose being overrun by foreigners and displaced from one's homeland would tend to make the Indians rather savage, but I can't help wondering how an Indian would feel reading that description. Probably less surprised than I was.

Another poster referred to two brothers, each of whom fought on a different side during the Civil War.
The town also had what seemed from the outside like a rather large library. Even small towns like Sonora all seem to have a public library well furnished with computers. We are still a literate people.
We finished our tour of Sonora by driving around the residential area.
Although it was starting to get dark, few of the houses had lights on. Where was everybody? The other noticeable thing was that almost every house seemed to have a pickup truck or two parked either in the driveway or in front of the house.