Comments on Writing The Blue Vase

This was shortly before hurricane Katrina, and (unfortunately) some of what I describe must now be part of history.

We pitched camp in a small hotel on the west side of  Hammond, Louisiana, and prepared for an extended stay. We decided to take pictures of everything that we wanted to use in the "Blue Vase." At that point, I discovered that the memory chips for my ancient Olympus digital camera were all bad, so we spent some time before I found an Office Depot that sold the old style chip.

Armed with a new chip that was ready to record over twelve hundred pictures before plugging into my laptop computer, we went in search of the locations we had imagined in Morgan and Holly's world. Pictorial overkill?

But first things first. We set out to locate all of the best places to eat. After that, we ate our way through every conceivable variety of seafood and unknown animal parts...research is important and appetite building.

The bayou where the Morgan's rescue team launched came easily. After a lot of smooth talk from Lydia and a few drinks on the house, a man in the bar at the marina furnished her with an excellent map locating every tavern on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. He says he got it from the back of his truck, but no one was able to tell her if the truck was actually his.

 The location of the fishing camp hidden deep in the swamps was harder to find, but we discovered the ideal location after nearly getting stuck in the muck at the end of a long, twisting, narrow lane. There was an abandoned car and a sunken boat that added just the right touch.

The location of Morgan's house and Malincorn's hangout was more difficult. We wanted a place between Hammond and Ponchatoula, but everything had been built up so much that the basic poverty pocket we were looking for no longer existed. Finally, we found an abandoned junk yard behind which two cypress houses leaned drunkenly against a couple of abandoned trucks. I think they had just the right ambiance.

We found a wonderfully cluttered welding shop and piles of metal parts that would work for the  evil father's (Percy's) work place. The railroad siding where he loaded purloined parts into gondola cars was on the wrong side of the road, but what is imagination for? There was even a Cajun restaurant not far away that served for the local Diner where Percy plotted with his henchmen. The fried shrimp were good, the catfish was a bit muddy for my taste...even after an application of white hot red sauce.

The bookstore and other locations are taken right out of shops and coffee houses in downtown Hammond. I'd like to think we got the look and feel of the place forty years ago, when the rail station and old highway were much more important than in these days.

A quick trip down to New Orleans and we had Noel Webster's house nailed down near the lakefront as well as a place that looked and felt just like the kind of estate that Morgan's cousin, Sam Friendly, would have owned-overlooking the levee and the south shores of the lake. There had to be a line of cover near the house from the back side where Percy could infiltrate the house in his final attempt at revenge on Morgan. The Lakeview Shopping Center was available nearby and looked just like I remembered it back in the sixties. We spent a long time in the cemetery looking for a suitable tomb and found a lot of additional material to use in the funeral scene. This area is right near the seventeenth street canal which is where the levee's failed. I haven't seen how much damage the area sustained after the hurricane, but I assume everything has changed.

On the way back to Texas, we took time in Baton Rouge to locate the gardens that Agent Walter's room looked out to, as well as finding another site where Sam, Walter, Harry, and a striking if dangerous female agent named Gobi met to plot the ultimate rescue.

All in all, a fruitful adventure that added seven pounds to my nutritional reserves.

Chandler Thornton