At Random for October 9, 2009

• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Oct 9, 2009 - Page: 1D

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When John James Audubon traveled from New Orleans to St. Francisville in 1821, he was struck by how quickly the landscape changed in so small a distance.

“Such entire change  in so short a time appears, often, supernatural,” Audubon wrote back then.

Audubon had traveled widely by that point, so his sense of awe at Louisiana’s geographical variety is noteworthy.

Even beyond New Orleans and St. Francisville, Louisiana reminds us that it’s not one place, but many.

That came to mind last weekend when our family took a road trip that included an overnight stay in Ville Platte, then a morning drive to  Natchitoches, where our 8-year-old son was involved in an educational program. Not many miles separated our destinations, but in many ways, they were worlds apart.

Seventeen autumns ago,  I rode to Ville Platte to meet my wife’s family for the first time. There I connected with people I love, and perhaps because of that memory, I like visiting Ville Platte in autumn best of all.

The speed traps in the little towns between Baton Rouge and Ville Platte are a nuisance. But at the very least, the zealous enforcement of speed limits forces a traveler to slow down mentally, too, so that the long stretch of Highway 190 becomes a decompression chamber between the city and Cajun country.

Heading west near dusk,  I like how the flatness of fields and pastures offers a canvas for the setting sun as it throws long shadows across the land.

I can never decide which is moving more slowly — the cows glacially grazing at their supper, or the big cumulous clouds that float above them. The cows and clouds seem connected somehow, as if earth and sky were linked in an ageless  minuet. Such scenes help pass the time until our arrival, when we’ll be greeted with gumbo and a warm bed for the night.

The next day, we see how the land rises between Ville Platte and Natchitoches, a quaint community marked by little hills to remind us we’re in yet another  new world. The dialect changes, too, from the flat vowels of Acadiana to a “Steel Magnolias” drawl.

We lunch on meat pies, the local specialty, and browse at Kaffie-Frederick, a general mercantile billed as the oldest store in Louisiana.

Not far from the cash register — the one from 1910 that’s still in use — customers are invited to log their names and e-mail addresses in an old-fashioned ledger, a sly blending of old and new.

The Internet and TV culture make the world feel smaller, which can be good, but also more and more alike, which can be a bore.