EL SEGUNDO HERALD December 2, 2021 Page 15
Travel from page 2
To their shock and delight, over twenty
vendors came forward that first year, excited
to rent a space and sell their goods to El
Segundo shoppers. This year, Johnson says
they will host many repeat vendors and
several new ones as well. Outside the goal
of fundraising for the club (ergo, student
scholarships and local charities), Johnson
expresses joy at providing a platform for
small businesses.
“It was a tough couple of years there for
small businesses,” she says. She hopes to
get these vendors more attention and more
business through the Holiday Boutique,
which will be hosted in the Woman’s Club
and immediately outside it.
As Johnson describes the event, she mentions
spa products, Christmas decorations, and
even baked goods, as well as a raffle with a
prize donated by participating vendors. The
boutique will be held on Saturday, December
4th, from 10 am to 4 pm, and information
can be found on the Woman’s Club website
and the El Segundo Chamber of Commerce.
Johnson is hopeful that the boutique will
generate money to “get back to their roots”
of fundraising and serving the community
and so that local businesses get more interest.
“The other thing that we’re hopeful for
is that people learn about us,” she says. As
Johnson and the rest of the club prep the
historic El Segundo schoolhouse (which is
also available to rent per the Woman’s Club)
to welcome residents, she hopes that locals
get the opportunity to meet some of the
community behind the organization enriching
the lives of El Segundo citizens for the
last century. •
they are still serving.” A lifelong El Segundo
resident, Johnson says the club is always
looking for new members. Johnson herself
serves as a Director on the board for the
Woman’s Club is currently maintaining and
handling changes to the website and their
online presence.
Commitment to the Woman’s Club typically
looks like a once-a-month meeting over
lunch and as many volunteer opportunities
as members choose to take. As for their
activities, Johnson describes the club as
being a community for itself and being for
the community. “Our whole purpose is to
serve the community,” says Johnson. The
Woman’s Club hosts fundraisers and events
to provide scholarships for high school students
in El Segundo and donate to a whole
host of organizations they support, largely
surrounding education, environment, military,
and of course, local El Segundo enrichment.
Often, they partner with the National Charity
League (NCL), a volunteer program for
mothers and daughters. Johnson cites many
events in which the two groups collaborated
to a very successful end.
Though many of their usual volunteer
events have been altered per Covid restrictions,
such as building gift boxes for troops
for Project Gratitude, the group has kept up
with fundraising during the pandemic in other
ways and has been focusing on donations to
women’s centers.
“They come in, and they help us set up
and break down,” she says, noting that she
often leaves creative projects up to the teens
to make the experience a little more fun.
This year, the club plans to host a Holiday
Boutique featuring vendors selling a wide range
of products that run the gamut, from jewelry to
succulents to self-defense items. The boutique
was started two years ago with the intent of
becoming an annual tradition, though, like
everything else, this was put on hold when
Covid took over. Though they hosted a virtual
version last year, members are excited to get
the boutique up and running again.
“We just put it out there, and we said,
‘who wants to join us?’
Harnessing the power of social media, the
club advertised on Facebook and Instagram,
spreading through current members posting
to their pages and directing traffic to the
Woman’s Club website and social accounts.
with the thousands of hidden places in the
world where human “things”—things we so
easily take for granted—first got started. And
one could argue that modern America (and
certainly modern Texas) got started on January
10, 1901, when the Lucas Gusher spewed
a filthy, black geyser of oil 150 feet into the
air above an earthen dome called Spindletop.
Down the road in Port Arthur, the first modern
American oil refinery still chugs along, minting
pennies with its tangle of rusting pipes and
sclerotic cracking columns. It isn’t pretty, and
it’s certainly not romantic, but remove these
two antiques from history, and 120 years on,
we Americans are not who we are.
Deuxième— De Beaumont à Cameron
Parish:
As we crossed the bridge over the Sabine
River from Port Arthur, sickly-sweet brown
clouds arose to the north from the cane being
burned off in the legendary Louisiana sugar
fields. Just inside Cameron Parish, a pair of
good ol’ jerky salesmen operating out of their
pickup turned us onto dried elk (hmmm…) and
offered sound touring advice—”Keep goin’, cos
there ain’t nothin’ left ahead a y’all.”
And they had a point. This was two years
after the four Category 5 monsters of the worst
hurricane season in history had laid waste to
the states and countries around the Gulf. Emily,
Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, along with their
24 lesser siblings, had killed 3,912 people and
wreaked havoc to the tune of $172 billion.
In Cameron itself, entire blocks of houses
had been swept away by a 17-foot storm surge
that left behind a wasteland of weeds and grass.
Massive chunks of concrete seawall lay shattered
and strewn about. But if the population had
shrunk, the remaining survivors were already
well along in the rebuild—the same rebuild
they’d unfortunately have to repeat after four
more catastrophic storms in the decade ahead.
Troisième— De Cameron à Avery Island:
Heading East, the devastation eventually
gave way to the forests, swamps, creeks, and
roads-to-nowhere of our imaginings. Abandoned
shacks, rusting tractors and combines,
volunteer corn and cane in a tangle of willows
and wildflowers—all the classic flotsam of
rural decay and regeneration. So picture our
surprise, when we came to an intersection
deep in the labyrinth and found a sparkling
metal sign pointing off to the McIlhenny Co.
Tabasco Sauce is one of those very rare
brands that has spread all over the planet without
diluting its superb quality or offending anyone
by morphing into a symbol of commercial
colonialism. And the peppery brew originates
entirely—secret ingredients and all—from the
massive, forested salt dome here called Avery
Island. The family and its pristine factory (and
park) embody an affable throwback to the best
of 19th century American capitalism.
Quatrième— D’Avery Island à New Iberia
à Houma:
Eventually, you realize that you’re never
going to truly experience the Bayou by exploring
on land. Everywhere you look, lazy
fingers of water wander off into the mysterious
shadows of the mangrove. So in Houma, we
asked around for someone to ferry us about.
There were a few commercial tours (today,
there are a gazillion), but all were closed
for the winter. Until we wandered into the
Bayou Delight Café, where the owner gave
us Jimmy’s number.
Jimmy’s mom, Alligator Annie Miller,
invented commercial swamp touring as an
elderly woman in the 1970s. Jimmy himself
was a big-city attorney, but was born on the
Bayou and knew every inch of it. Finally,
he agreed that he had nothing better to do
after church on a warm Sunday. So we spent
the day puttering around the deepest reaches
of the swamp, getting a quick education in
Louisiana marine life, and meeting Jimmy’s
favorite alligators.
Cinquième—D’Houma à Dulac à Boothville
Venice:
If you’ve ever eaten wild-caught Gulf shrimp
in America and hail from anywhere but the
Texas or Louisiana coasts, those shrimp were
frozen. Kinda defeats the purpose of the extravagance,
don’t you think? So we finished
our jaunt by wandering down the Great River
Road in Plaquemines Parish all the way to the
very tippy-tip (another travel obsession) of
Louisiana in the quiet shrimping settlement
of Boothville-Venice.
Landscape photographers prize the Magic
Hours just after sunrise and just before sunset,
when the diagonal flood of the sun’s rays can
turn the drabbest view into a French Impressionist
masterpiece. But they can’t begin to
describe a Louisiana sunrise over the Gulf of
Mexico, with the estuarial shrimpers heading
out for the day.
En Fin:
For all of its wonderful quirks and eccentricities,
Louisiana is not a foreign country.
Its children have endured some of the worst
hardships of the New World, both man-made
and natural, and have produced some of our
most precious cultural treasures. They just
do it with a style that proves that grace and
dignity can still matter in the headlong rush
of the modern age. And nowhere is this more
genuine than deep in the Bayou, where life
eddies along at its stateliest, most naturally
elegant pace. A sure-fire cure for high blood
pressure and a welcome respite before heading
out to the craziness of the Big Easy and beyond.
Next up: We’ll Always Have Casablanca—
American Travelers in an Arab World.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Plaquemines Parish: Cormorants settle in for a sunset snooze along the Great River Road.
Terrebonne Parish: Where’s the sauce? Lost up a dirt road on
Avery Island.
Plaquemines Parish: Miracle at morning. Shrimper heads out of
the mighty Mississippi into the Gulf sunrise.
Woman’s Club from front page
Members of the El Segundo Woman’s Club judge pumpkin carvings at the annual Halloween Frolic.
A vendor from the 2019 Holiday Boutique sells festive succulent
arrangements.