Dad’s job in the Tioga area didn’t last long. I never knew why he changed jobs so often, but he found a new job with an oil company (ESSO, I think) outside of Baton Rouge. We stayed with my grandmother while he settled in and found a house.
The house was just outside of Denham Springs on a few acres. If I recall correctly, the owner kept cows on the acreage while we were there, but we had the run of the place. It had a stream running through it, and I spent a lot of time there looking for crawfish (real ones) and checking out the other wildlife. One critter I became familiar with was the water moccasin. Seen in direct sunlight, it had the same diamond pattern that rattlesnakes have — just in shades of dark gray. It did make me wonder about wading in the creek.
The creek also provided us with a meal once. It was the only time I remember dad cooking anything. He caught some bullfrogs from the creek and fixed frog legs.
Denham Springs was a pleasant, small town – bigger than Forest Hill but not a lot. One peculiarity was that the county had a lot of farms that grew strawberries. The school schedule in Denham Springs was adjusted to end in early May rather than early June so the farmers’ kids could pick strawberries. Of course that meant that it also started a month earlier.
When we moved there we didn’t have a car. That wasn’t a problem for getting into town, but dad needed transportation to get to work. For a while he had a borrowed motorcycle – a Harley, I believe. One day he went into town for gas and let me ride behind him. While we were at the gas station, I bought a comic book. I was in such a hurry to read it that I started reading on the way home. No hands, on the rear fender of a motorcycle. I trusted Dad that much; however, when he realized what I was doing, I got a safety lecture I didn’t soon forget.
I had my share of mishaps while I was there. The ones I remember weren’t particularly important, but they left their mark. While playing in the barnyard one day, I stepped with a bare foot on a piece of a broken bottle. The curvature of the bottle caused it to rotate and gash my foot just below the ankle bone. It gave me another permanent scar. And then I used my bare hands to catch a rat. That incident taught me that rats are more limber than crawfish. This one turned its head around far enough to bite the web between my thumb and forefinger.
At some point while we were there, we had a really heavy rain that filled all the local streams to overflowing, including the one through the farm. The water almost made it up to the house. It took a while to go down, and the cows were wading until it did. I don’t remember missing school for it, so it was probably the summer after we arrived.
One day when I was walking to school, I saw an Army recruiting poster in the Post Office window. A picture of a spaceship on a star covered background defined my life from then on. The ship was cigar shaped and had multiple rows of lighted portholes, suggesting it was large. That ship captured my imagination like nothing else had. I became determined to be a spaceship pilot when I grew up. Even though I haven’t achieved that, it guided me to where I am now.
We stayed in Denham Springs for about a year – long enough for school to start again. Since I knew we were moving back to Forest Hill before school started there, I showed little enthusiasm for the local school. One day I dawdled all the way to school and arrived very late. My excuse was that what I did in the local school didn’t matter. I would just have to start over when I got home. The teachers and administrators were not amused.
Next, a third installment about Louisiana, such as riding a bike on an icy road and breaking into school while it was closed.
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