An Essay by Korina Roberts
Korina Cole Roberts is a writer, mother, and community advocate. She earned an MA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where she was awarded the John J. McKenna Graduate Fellowship in 2024. Holding deep Southern roots and now enjoying life in the Midwest, she explores themes of belonging and identity through the lens of place and family. She has published in Fine Lines, The Linden Review, and Omaha Magazine.
As Home Fades
I drive wearily faster as I cross the Louisiana state line and faster still when I see the red and white lights of the radio towers, beacons of my return to visit my ailing Grandpa – the last anchor to the place I’ve called home most of my life. The sun is just now setting its orange glow in the sky and the frogs pick up their chant in the bayou as I pass the bridge entering the east side of Mooringsport, a small town on the outskirts of Shreveport with an ever-dwindling population, now just over 700.
It was named for brothers John and Timothy Mooring, who operated a ferry on Caddo Lake. The homestead soon developed into a port town, shipping cotton and other goods to Texas until Captain Henry Miller Shreve dredged the nearby Red River. The Caddo Indians sold a parcel of land to the Shreve Land Company to operate a new river port, which moved a great deal of traffic away from this once promising community of commerce. What is left of this little hamlet in Northwest Louisiana was the haven of my awkward adolescence and my wayward antics.
The brown marker on the side of Highway 169 signals the way to the Caddo Lake Dam skirting the northeast border of the town. I had discovered the dam during the summer before high school with my cousin playing expedition leader. We snuck out in the middle of the night and stole a John boat from some poor sucker. Then we had to steal gas off a houseboat because the tank ran out in the middle of the lake, and we’d had to use one oar to paddle to our fuel heist. We rode all over in that man’s boat, all the way to the dam, passing stagnant oil wells and through the Louisiana edges of a lake that meanders across the Texas border showcasing the world’s largest cypress forest, the lake that Eagles’ drummer and vocalist, Don Henley, consecrates as his spiritual home in the fight to preserve its untamable beauty. I can still remember the blistered sunrise warning us to make our way home.
It couldn’t have been much past six when we returned. I thought we were safe from discovery, but my nocturnal aunt had witnessed our jaunt through her back woods. We had been confident in our reconnaissance skills as we crouched and scampered past the horse tack shed behind their house under the cover of trees. However, later the next afternoon, the phone rang, and one look from my mother sent my throat into my stomach. My aunt had let us enjoy that one burst of freedom, but she wanted to make sure it didn’t become a bad habit. She ratted me out. I was on restriction forever, I think. My cousin went to juvie, not for that one time, but because he went back and stole that poor sucker’s boat for good. Someone ratted him out. I felt bad for him and guilty and glad that no one told the story of that first night. It wasn’t long after that our paths diverged, too much history maybe. I didn’t want to keep repeating it.
My destination this first night home is not the dam, but hypnotized by memories, it’s where I turn anyway. I park momentarily under that old oak tree, the one I had considered etching lovers’ initials into so that something might last, but I never did. The one that once hid the old Buick with steamy windows as a boy opened his heart for my lips to taste while Depeche Mode sang an ode to innocence through a cassette deck and crappy speakers. After five years of silence, the boy returned – a man eager for a rendezvous. I remember my hands gripping the steering wheel, unsure as I drove away and left him disappointed at his hotel door, the last time I would say goodbye. My hands look older now, with their age spots and wedding rings, and I turn away from the echo of another life.
I’ve moved eight times in the last few decades with my husband and children. We’ve recently relocated to Nebraska for my husband’s job, and it feels like starting all over again. A new home and, in some ways, a new life as most of my children are grown and the two youngest are fairly independent. Sometimes, I worry that they don’t have deep roots like I do, roots that cling like the bald cypress holding fast to its native waters, belonging as much to the currents as to the land. I consider where it is my children call home, where it is they belong. I’m not sure what home is for me anymore either. The abstractions of memory will not release me, and I sometimes linger too long in the depths. I am not sure I belong where I once felt most free. I am now unmoored, caught in the currents between one life and another.
I wonder about my Grandpa and how many lives he’s lived. He was never a talker. He was the quiet calm of summer breezes. But now if we are quiet beside him and let him remember all he has been, he’ll share the stories we’ve longed to hear. His history, his remembered landscapes.
Just a half a mile up the road from the Caddo Lake dam, I drive past the trailers and country homes with rusty old cars parked next to shiny pickups and yards decorated with gnomes and bird feeders. A new build faces the lake. Where it sits in its opulence once stood our favorite place to eat, Miller’s Bluff, a large cabin prided for its fried catfish, frog legs, hushpuppies, and sweet tea along with views from panoramic windows overlooking the shore. It burned down over 20 years ago. I think maybe that’s why so many have moved away; you need a place like Miller’s to anchor a town.
The west side of town is over Highway 1 and across the railroad tracks where the recently demolished Landmark Grocery greeted locals and visiting fishermen alike for decades. It transitioned over time from a gas station and local market to a convenience store serving coffee and hamburgers, to (oddly enough) a make-shift home with the glass front door painted black. The clapboard mural of steamboats chugging along the lake had been replaced with Coca-Cola pop art during the first transition. History replaced by advertising. Now nothing remains but a dusty plot and memories of the ICEE treats and orange push pops that we relished during those stifling Louisiana summers. My own children recall their grandma stopping to spoil them with cherry red and cola flavors drank so fast they caught a brain freeze. Maybe these roots of home are inherited, a place to come back to.
I stole candy on a dare from the Landmark when I was in middle school. We had snuck out the door and run around the corner to hide behind the Community Center & Library duplex, then devoured the evidence of our crime. The simple white duplex was a multitasking dynamo - hosting youth dances and bingo nights, standing as the honorable polling site, and lending out Harlequin Romances to young girls with an appetite for love. The library now offers a wider selection of reading materials and an increased focus on children’s literacy. The polling site has since been moved to the school gym, and the Community Center services mostly revolve around bingo and knitting these days. It’s probably for the best. I remember those youth dances chaperoned by the barely graduated resulting in some questionable hook-ups in dimly lit bathrooms and a dance floor flooded with hazy marijuana-laced fumes. Perhaps young girls can find something more intellectually stimulating than a Harlequin paperback and a sloppy dancer leaving hickies on her neck.
The library sits across the street from the two-story, red brick Mooringsport Elementary, built around 1911 during the early oil boom to replace the one-room schoolhouse. Later additions included the cafeteria and detached gymnasium. Eventually, older students were bussed to Northwood High School, and shortly after I escaped this historic institution, grades 6 through 8 were ushered into the newly erected Donnie Bickham Middle School in nearby Blanchard.
My one-year initiation into the rural tribe of Mooringsport teenagers began in 1986 after having recently moved from suburbia. My prior academic performance had been lackluster due to a lazy disposition regarding homework. I joke saying that I treated school like a 9-5 job, only it was more like 8-3. I clocked in and I clocked out. Done. I didn’t like to take my work home with me. My eighth-grade year was different, a fresh start, I’d hoped. As the new kid among less than 40 students in my class, most having known each other from diaper days, I didn’t have many friends with whom I could ride bikes and plan sleepovers. I guess that gave me more time to study, nothing better to do.
I didn’t even live in the “town” part of the community. We had built a house two miles outside of its limits, past Haphazard Rd. - aptly named as it became the scene of multiple drug stings - to a dead-end named after a cow, “Hereford Rd.” So, there wasn’t much of a chance of walking down the block to hang out with a friend.
Also, apparently being the new girl comes with a price. I wasn’t sure what I did, but I began dreading the end of volleyball practice wondering who might punch me in the chest or threaten to kick my ass on any given day. I tired of it after a while and figured I might as well get my ass kicked and throw a couple of punches of my own. Any other thinking was just delaying the inevitable. Chicken-shit and Just you wait, taunted me. Fine then, let’s go. I don’t even care anymore, I stormed out of the gym. Right by the flagpole, on top of the hill by the school steps, I was jumped by a classmate’s high school cousin. And that was the end of it. I guess in some twisted way, I passed a test or just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. I made a few more friends and finished with the best grades in class that year. My success was short-lived, academically and socially.
As I roll up to the stop sign on the hill by the school, I’m careful to come to a complete stop. Sure enough, a new police car with a younger recruit is lying in wait. Old Sheriff Bo Dean made his living perched on this post every night catching teenagers who thought they must have gotten lost on the way to pick up a date. “No one lives this far out. I must have missed a turn,” they’d think. Then they rolled through that stop sign searching for their turn, and Bo Dean boosted the local economy by issuing a ticket and dooming the date before it even started. I check my speed. 25 mph means 25, not 30, unless you’re wanting to make a local donation by way of a fine. Mooringsport will slow you down.
If my dates thought they were lost at the stop sign, they were in for a surprise. Drive past the neighborhood, down Caddo Lease Rd about a mile, turn left in pure darkness (there are no streetlights out here), drive another mile and finally, they had arrived. A gravel drive leads to the front porch of a light blue modular home set on a cleared lot that is surrounded by pines and oaks on three sides, mimosa trees growing wild along the fence. We used to have horses on the west side in a pasture, but the horses are gone now and the trees have raised a new generation. My sister and I have moved away, have grown our own families. Dad died from Covid.
“Mom, this is just too much for you to take care of,” I mentioned on one visit. “I know,” she said. “It’s just so hard to let go and hard to stay too. It’s the quiet, I think, and I miss him so much.” There was a sag in the couch where Dad used to sit. Things like that just made the house feel empty. It sold pretty quick. Seven acres, starlit nights, and simple country livin’ dancin’ in someone’s dreams.
My aunt and cousins, as well as Grandma and Grandpa, all lived just down the road when we were young. My husband once joked that it was the family compound. Grandpa’s pasture still stretches across nearly 40 acres of lazy catfish ponds, leaning barns and empty chicken houses, one remaining horse, an old cow, an overgrown garden patch, and a wooded hunting ground with a smooth, dirt path for ATV’s we no longer ride.
I was kicked by a pony in that pasture. I busted myself and Dad’s three-wheeler on the downhill of one of the ponds. The cousins all played hide-and-seek in the dark woods pretending not to be scared of the howling coyotes. We played baseball near the old rusted out cars, being careful to sidestep the bases, which were usually cow patties deposited in adequate distances to form a diamond by our disinterested bovine audience. I caught my only black eye in one of those games, knocked out by a ball I lost in the sun. We had picnics of fried squirrel and Coca-cola on the front lawn with the scent of wisteria blooms casting their charm on family Sundays. The wisteria remains.
Grandma died long ago, and since then, Grandpa’s two sons from his first marriage and their sons have been granted a part of this acreage. Most of us aren’t close, though one cousin and his wife are kind enough to give me updates on Grandpa. My aunt died years ago; her eldest son, my accomplice in boat thievery, lives in her house now. We used to be like siblings. These days, we don’t talk. Grandpa is the last, close witness of my mother’s history before children, the last connection to the person she once was and maybe lost along the way. Everything is fading. Home isn’t what it used to be.
I don’t take the left-hand turn onto Hereford this evening. I keep driving and meander down Camp Rd., deep through the woods that will grant sanctuary before my visit. Grandpa’s two bedrooms in his brown and white trailer are occupied by him and my mother at present, and I didn’t want to sleep on the wood frame, 1970’s couch with its plywood reinforced cushions, so I made a call to my friend and former neighbor, Dee, to see if I could borrow her family’s lake cabin. It is actually her in-law’s cabin, but the whole family helped build it, so they all enjoy it from time to time. I knew her mother-in-law before I ever met my friend. That is a curious story.
Nan had been my bus driver in high school. She is the kind of woman that became a mentor before mentors were a social trend. The kind of person we would stop to visit on our way home from college if we saw her or her husband, Murray, working in the yard of the pale yellow “Big House” closer to the city. She also hosted exchange students, two of whom I knew from my classes, Bo from Germany, and Joao from Brazil. It was at Bo’s birthday party at the “Big House” when I thought I fell in love at first sight while standing in the corner of Nan’s family room. Seven months after our first date, my Swedish boyfriend returned home and left me with nothing but a prom picture and memories under the old oak.
I lost touch with Nan after moving away and starting a family. Twelve years later, my husband’s career brought us back to the Shreveport-Bossier area, and we became friends with our neighbors across the street, who – as it turned out – were Nan’s son and daughter-in-law, Dee. We were reunited and, having learned that my parents still lived in Mooringsport, Nan invited me to visit her for coffee at the family cabin by the lake. When we moved once again, she generously allowed me to borrow their cabin during my visits if it was unoccupied. Tonight, this cabin is a respite from my long drive home and from the troubles of tomorrow.
After giving up on sleeping late, I sit on the floral couch in the sunroom sipping my coffee, hungover from remembering and fitful dreaming. Caddo Lake is deceptively shimmering blue through the back windows, but I know up close the waters churn murky browns and greens, hiding secrets and mysteries in its depths. The whispers of the past float on the sultry air, a call to remember all that’s been before. Like specters of forgotten peoples whose home this was before it was ours, the bald cypress trees spread their knobby roots deep in the muck. Their tendrils of olive gray Spanish moss flutter in the breeze becoming an abstraction reflected on the gentle ripples just past the shore. Alligators nest in hidden places while the Great White Heron taunts gracefully along the marsh, alert and ready to take flight.
This is the lake where I first dared to skinny dip, though it didn’t seem taboo at the time. Nakedness belongs to these waters that blur the consciousness of freedom and vulnerability. My feet had sunk into the mud, warmth oozing between my toes. The tepid water held me as its own and then released me just the same. Its affections are unpredictable.
We spied an eagle nesting from the cabin’s sitting room windows once, Nan, Murray and I. Murray handed me the binoculars that were resting on the old singer sewing machine by the back door so I could have a better look. “I was wondering if she was going to return this year,” he said. Last spring, he had spied her perched near the top of a cypress, but since then, there had been a flood. The waters had engulfed, swallowed, and spit out the pier that once led through the trees. But I suppose the eagle wasn’t bothered by what was lost. Her tree was still standing, her home intact.
After finishing my coffee, I drive along the curving road to visit Grandpa. Mom answers the door looking tired and smaller. The loss of my father and the thought of losing her own is casting a shadow on her face. I try to ask from time to time, “Are there things you want to do, Mom? Something new you want to try?” But for now, all her thoughts are entangled in grief and in holding tight to the life she has known.
“Oh, it’s so good to see you,” Grandpa BJ wraps his skinny, wrinkled arms around me. He’s past 90 now. I don’t remember him talking much at all growing up. He never told any stories until a couple of years ago. He was raised in nearby Naples, Texas, the eldest son of a Mexican, immigrant farm laborer. Last time I visited, he told a story of earning a nickle for a whole day pulling cabbage from the fields as a child. He said, “I was so excited with that shiny coin in my hand. I shoulda kept it, but me and Willie run and took it to get some candy.”
I sit on the brown velvet, floral couch, “How ya been feelin’, Grandpa?”
“Well, ya know, not so good. Last time I was in the hospital, I thought I was gonna die. It scared me. But then, I saw – I know I was dreamin’- but God told me I had too much to do at home. He didn’t want me yet.”
“Sounds like he knows ya real well. I bet you’re already plannin’ what ya need to do in the yard as soon as you feel better,” I laughed. (Even though I’ve lived in the Midwest for 10 years now, my accent comes back thick and quick around my Southern family.) If activity is the key to longevity, Grandpa earned his years. I hardly knew him to sit still except for dominoes or a Dallas Cowboys game on TV. He was always hunting or fishing, feeding his cows or repairing fence lines, planting azaleas and wisteria and canna lillies. That’s when he wasn’t working in painting, roofing, mowing, or welding jobs.
Time has slowed him down. He doesn’t hunt or fish anymore, and he can’t manage the hard labor. He still tinkers in his yard and grumbles at the new NFL rules. “Can’t hardly understand a dang thing about what’s goin’ on anymore. And the games last too long. I fall asleep,” he says. His downtime has given him a chance to share pieces of his life before he can’t do that either.
Today, he tells me the story of how he and his brother, Willie, would grab a snake by its tail and whip it around in the air, then snap it so hard the head would pop off. “Good God, Grandpa! That’s so mean. Don’t you know snakes are good for the environment.” His eyes grow wide and his brow furrows at me. I’ve hardly ever seen him upset, so I know I said something wrong. “Yeah, well tell me what you’d think ‘bout them snakes if you seen one an inch from your hand in the cotton fields. They weren’t good for my dog neither. We saw one hit our dog when I was about 10. Wasn’t a choice but to take him out to the woods and shoot him. We whipped them snakes before they got us.” I sit back down corrected, and he goes on about growing up in a manner I can’t imagine. Yet he still calls Naples home, his first home.
After visiting Grandpa and Mom, I spend my last night in these quiet woods with the fireflies and the frogs to keep me company. In the morning, I decide to take the back road out of town. I drive through the dark canopy of trees that lead me out from the cabin, wishing I could rest a while longer in the haunting, wild serenity of the lake, sensing a finality to my farewell. I lower the windows, open the moon roof of my Subaru and breathe in the air that is thick with memories. I pass the point at the edge of town where the Kansas City Railroad trestle, whose wooden beams have been demolished and replaced by concrete, conjures visions of teenagers testing our courage while we leapt from the crossties, daring higher each time until the dark waters released us breathless and exhilarated from the lunacy of youth. Where the one-way drawbridge still stands but only as a fishermen’s pier and a testament to history. All bridges out of Mooringsport have been replaced by feats of modern engineering assumed to offer some structural longevity.
On the road back to Nebraska, I think of Grandpa. He has survived his health dilemma but is languishing still. Mom languishes too, in a different sort of way. She is lost yet clinging to the vestiges of her life. Her days are racing before her and she seems to be unable to decide whether to run ahead to meet them or to lay down and be dragged along, resigned. She has time, I think. She isn’t quite 70 and that is not too late. It’s not too late to live another life, to make a new history and leave an inheritance of memories. Somehow, I need to know she can do it, to know it can be done. I want her to keep etching out a story for us to pass along.
I read a little book once, Little French Bistro, by Nina George, about a woman in her late 60’s seeking a new life after a failed marriage. There was a man in the story whose wife was suffering dementia. “He knew every woman she’d ever been,” the protagonist explained of her friend’s love for his wife. I imagine my father knew my mother this way, but I could always see there is more to her than she may have shared with him. Perhaps she will choose to share those parts with a new love or a friend, a contemporary. This is the hard beauty of life, allowing one another to grow into someone new, learning to love all over again with fresh eyes and an eager heart, anticipating the discoveries to be found with the young lover in older bones. It is courage to strip off the outer layers, leave behind the extraneous weight of the past and tread a new path like a virgin explorer - naked, vulnerable, and yearning to take flight.
I drive across 720 miles, 12 hours and four states to make it home, my new home, and wonder where I belong. T.S. Eliot said, “Home is where one starts from.” So maybe home isn’t always just one place. It resides where memories carve an abode in my soul, a place of becoming. I reminisce and the miles drift away and I lose time and return to where I’ve been. The memories drag me down and reel me back in. I drive with one hand on the steering wheel, my hair dancing out of the window as I sing to Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Mak’er,” driving faster on Highway 75 as I cross into Nebraska and imagine what life will become in this new home where I start again.
Sources
Draper, Robert “Texas Twenty: Don Henley”, September 1995; www.texasmonthly.com/beingtexas/texas-twenty-don-henley/
Fox, Courtney “Explore the World’s Largest Cypress Forest in East Texas”, 9/13/20; www.wideopencountry.com/explore-the-worlds-largest-cypress-forest-in-east-texas/
George, Nina. Little French Bistro. New York, Broadway Books, imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017
Jackson, Michael. "FOURTEEN. Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. -T. S. Eliot". At Home in the World, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 147-155. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822396123-015
Martinez, Ryan “Adrift on Caddo Lake”; www.traveltexas.com/articles/post/adrift-on-caddo-lake/ visited 10/9/2022
Simek, Peter “Don Henley’s Rock-Star Efforts to Save Caddo Lake” May 21, 2018; www.txfb-ins.com/blog/texas-travel/caddo-lake
www.caddolakedrawbridge.com; “The Historic Caddo Lake Drawbridge”, 2014
www.caddovoter.org/polling-locations
www.city-data.com/city/Mooringsport-Louisiana.html
www.librarytechnology.org/library/7737; A Directory of Libraries throughout the World: Mooringsport Branch Library; visited 10/10/22
www.worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/mooringsport-la-population ; Mooringsport, LA 2022
www.caddolakedrawbridge.com/Frames/School.htm , “Mooringsport School Building”
13. Jimmy Blaine, local Mooringsport amateur historian