If only it were that easy.

In life, a lot of us have guilty pleasures—things we’re not supposed to like, but actually do. My guilty pleasures, roughly in ascending order of importance, are the taste of cough syrup, the smell of gasoline and the sound of fingernails running down a chalkboard. These things are just as disgusting, nauseating and repulsive to normal folks as they are appealing, alluring and entrancing to me.

Then some of us also have the opposite—things we’re supposed to love, but don’t. My roommate Tommy feels this way about Elvis, Monet and Lipton Iced Tea; no matter how much the modern world insists that he worship them, no matter how universally they are adored, he just can’t stand them.

For me, there’s really only one thing I’m supposed to love that I just can’t. It’s called Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana.

In my years on the roads and the rails, the paths and the trails, before I accidentally moved to France, there was a recurring conversation I had in each station, as I first set foot in each town.

In my years on the roads and the rails, the paths and the trails, before I accidentally moved to France, there was a recurring conversation I had in each station, as I first set foot in each town. Quotation

If the next guy sitting in wait was a fellow drifter, not much explanation was ever required. But as it usually went, he’d wonder aloud, “why can’t you just settle down?”

Most people expect that the end of the road they’re on wraps back around to the beginning. Whether they start out in Tuscaloosa or Tempe, you find them somewhere in between, but that somewhere is just a temporary condition. When they’ve sold enough ball bearings, they’ll be back on the road, headed back from whence they came, to wherever it is they call home. For me that’d be Pointe à la Hache, a dot on the map in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

But let’s back up.

I didn’t grow up with a family, in any traditional sense of the word. I spent most of my childhood in the company of traveling circus performers, with a vague idea of who I was related to, including most likely some of the animals. So when I think of Pointe à la Hache, that place that I always seemed to end up stuck in when we weren’t on the road, it’s not so much about family I would be returning to. But I will freely admit that, by any objective standard, the place itself is, well, worth writing home about. Even after Katrina came to town.

Pointe à la Hache is the most southerly point for crossing the Mississippi River by ferry. The crossing takes a few minutes, during which you pass over one of the most heavily populated estuaries in North America; the fish leap up and beg to be fished. Crossing from east to west, you arrive near Woodland Plantation, which any and every hobo will recognize as the plantation house on the label of a bottle of Southern Comfort. No matter how long I’m gone, Pointe à la Hache is a part of me and I like to think that I’m a part of her, too.

And yet I can’t stand her for more than a day.

At a time that now seems like a lifetime ago, I saw these same themes play out with my Floridian friend Eugene. He had found the woman who was supposed to be the love of his life. She was all that Eugene could have ever hoped for—beautiful, intelligent, caring and, most of all, she adored Eugene to no end, and to every onlooker’s stupefaction. The rest of us stood by helplessly, drooling over ourselves in jealousy.

Eugene did what he had to do. He dated her, for six months. But he gradually came to realize that as much as he should, by all objective measures, be madly in love with her, he just didn’t feel it. His friends were astounded when he left her, not the other way around.

That’s exactly how I feel about Pointe à la Hache. As much as I should, by all objective measures, be madly in love with the place, I just don’t feel it. So I have, over the years, gone back from time to time out of a sense of obligation to give it another try, try to make it work. But the love’s just not there.

I wish I could fake it. I wish I could just fix it, internally adjust whatever my personal defect is that makes me unable to fall in love and stay in love with the place that should be the center of my universe. Then I would go back there, settle down and stay put right there, until it’s time for them to dig me a hole, so I can stay there even longer.

If only it were that easy.