Ducks were flying, and ibises and terns and pelicans. We pushed up a flock of roseate spoonbills and watched them ignited by the new sun. The sky was a speckless blue dome, and under it we worked and caught about a dozen fish, having the pure fun that even impure men can have at fishing. Then at eleven-thirty we ran back in for Thanksgiving dinner.
Danny’s wife was there, and Anna, as well as Sonny and Rosabelle Arcenaux’s other two daughters and one son and all the children and spouses, all crammed into Sonny and Rosabelle’s little house across the highway from the Menge’s. Sonny and Rosabelle’s kids live within ten miles of that house, and they and their children and spouses were so intimate with each other, so welded together by daily familiarity, that, like my Nova Scotia neighbors the DeCostes, they seemed to be connected parts of the same organism rather than separate individuals.
The twenty-plus relatives and one poodle welcomed Tom and me in among them as if we were old friends suddenly returned home, with something different, richer and more comforting than hospitality—something more like passing the big platter of their intimacy and pleasure in each other around for us to share as we did their food.
As for the food, there was gumbo, turkey, a roast from a deer that Vincent had killed, pork, turnip greens, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, fried French bread, pies, and cakes. There was also cold beer and football on the tube, and the young cousins playing games in the front yard, and everyone laughing at Sonny’s jokes. He and Rosabelle had lived in this two-bedroom house since they were married. The four daughters had grown up sharing the extra bedroom. The son had slept in the washroom.
“Do you know what the Cajun motto is?” one of the daughters asked me when she brought me a piece of pecan pie. She was smiling. She had wonderfully calm and affectionate eyes.
“ ‘Laissez les bon temps rouler,’ and you Arcenaux really know how to do it.”
“There’s another one,” she said, “for other kinds of times. ‘Lâchez pas la patate’—‘don’t let go of the potato,’ it means. Hold on; keep going. We know how to do that, too.”
The next day we drove back to New Orleans to pick up Jody Bright at the airport, then headed west again after tying his two big coolers on the top of the Pathfinder. Jody was planning to fish with us for a few days and then go on to south Texas, where he grew up, for some deer and bird hunting with family and friends. He had packed his clothes and a duffel bag in the coolers. As all the ducks and deer and redfish and quail and what-all that he had promised to folks back home in Kona, Hawaii, went into the coolers, the clothes would come out and go into the duffel. The plan left us looking like a bunch of Okies with a beer habit, but that (and most everything else you can think of) would never bother Bright.
Abbeville is a charming town where you could easily eat yourself to death. Before soldiering on to more fishing, Tom, Jody, and I took a couple of lay days there staying a few miles outside of town at a camp on the Vermilion River graciously provided to us by Jody’s mother’s old friend Becky Stokes. The spunky Miss Becky fairly fizzes with optimistic energy. The oil-related company that she owns and runs with her sons was turning a wonderful profit. She had a good-looking boyfriend named John who once managed the king of Malaysia’s holding company, and a brand-new purple Jag with a license plate that read EZ2ENJOY. She looked as though she had never been bored a day in her life; as though she would chew up and spit out boredom.
Her camp on the river had a bass pond and a bonfire pit, tame geese and ducks, and a comfortable old house with a tin roof built on the site of a pre-Civil War sugar cane plantation. Using it as a base, we drove around the live-oak, lime-green ricefield country of cattle and egrets, crawfish ponds, sugar cane, and bayous. We visited an alligator farm with Becky and John, we caught some bass in the pond at the camp, and we ate. Abbeville may be more serious about good food than any other town its size in the United States. Even the local Texaco station advertises shrimp stew on a sign underneath its gas prices. At Shuck’s, Dupuis, the Riverfront, and Black’s, we ate shrimp, oysters, gumbo, frog legs, crawfish, catfish, and alligator. Then Becky suggested we get serious about our Cajun chow and go up to Lafayette with her and John for a meal and a fais-do-do at Randol’s.
A fais-do-do is a Cajun dance; they have them every weekend at Randol’s, and, believe me, you have not done that until you’ve done it.
We met Becky’s Cajun friends Virginia and Dayton there, and all of us sat at a table on the edge of the big dance floor drinking pitchers of beer and eating fried crawfish tails, alligator bits, and boiled crawfish from a platter stacked a foot high with the delectable little mud bugs.
Out on the dance floor were thirty or forty couples doing the Cajun two-step, the Cajun waltz, and the Cajun jig to the impossibly lively music of a band called Filé, and having so much pure, stark, unfettered fun at it that the thought crossed my mind when we first sat down that maybe there was something not quite right about them. Moving counterclockwise as they danced, with expressions on their faces as if they had all just learned they were getting huge raises for working fewer hours, were old folks and kids, snappy young hotshots with bandannas on their heads, fall-figured guys in John Deere caps, a popular seventy-seven-year-old gent named Leopold who looked under fifty and never missed a dance, and a little dark-haired bouncing girl whose face was completely transported by the music.
“There’s everyone from gas-station attendants to doctors out there,” said Virginia. “Hairdressers, lady lawyers. Cajun dancing’s a great equalizer.” Women were asking men to dance, boys asking fine women, old men asking girls. “Aren’t you guys going to ever dance?” a woman asked Tom and me.
“We’re watching,” I told her.
“We don’t understand watching,” she said. “We would just flat wither up.”
After a while I did dance a two-step for fun with Virginia to a tune called “Matilda,” then a waltz, then a jig. And I wanted to never leave the floor! I wanted to learn how to yell Ayouuuuu! the way the Cajuns do.
The next day we put our game faces on and went back to work. We were headed for the Atchafalaya swamp, then on to more redfish flats near Slidell, but first our job demanded that we have lunch at a place in Lafayette called Prejean’s with Becky and John, Becky’s son and secretary, and some guy from the Coastal Conservation Association named Rebel Kelley.
Rebel met us at the Butte La Rose landing on the Atchafalaya River with her fly rod and a rainsuit. The sky was bruised and stormy, but she looked up for anything, as bracing and blond as a bank of daffodils in the fog.
“You travel light,” I said. “Most women would have at least two suitcases for a night in the swamp.”
“What do you mean, ‘a night in the swamp’?”
“We’re spending the night. Didn’t I tell you that? In a cabin.”
“Get out” said Rebel. “I don’t even have a toothbrush.”
“You can use mine,” Jody said, with south Texas charm.
“Are you guys kidding? Coerte, are they kidding?” she asked Coerte Voorhies. He shook his no-nonsense, military head. Rebel shrugged. “Well, what the hell—we’ll see how it shakes out. I just hope somebody brought some red wine.”
“We gotcha covered there,” Jody told her.
Coerte had driven Jody, Tom, and me out from Lafayette after our lunch at Prejean’s to the landing, where his son, Kim, was waiting with a boat. Coerte and his wife operate a bed-and-breakfast in an 1820 plantation house in Lafayette, and Coerte and Kim run a swamp tour business called The Atchafalaya Experience. Coerte is sixty-seven, a burly, energetic, well-spoken ex-military man and small-arms instructor who still wears a camo uniform every day and carries a 9-mm automatic on his hip. His family has been in this part of Louisiana for two hundred years. His grandfather lived to hunt and fish, he told me; so did his father; so do his son and grandson. And him? “Are you kidding?” he said. “What else is there? And we live in the best place in the world for it. This is a sportsman’s paradise.”
Kim Voorhies, who looked to be in his early thirties, had a bon temps face. Retired from the military with a bad back, he also wore a camo uniform, causing Tom to wonder if there might be some kind of survivalist action going on back there in the swamp. I don’t think so. I think the Voorhies’ outfits are part of the way they represent their product—a way of announcing that when you leave the landing at Butte La Rose with them and head downriver, you are heading into serious Tarzan country.
Between its defining levees, the Atchafalaya Basin is seventeen miles wide and sixty miles long—860,000 acres of swamps, lakes, bayous, and water prairies. It is the largest and the last of the great river-basin swamps in North America—a stuffed mastodon representing a particular vanished form of American wildness. Over three hundred species of birds—including more than fifty thousand egrets, ibises, and herons, and the largest nesting population of bald eagles in the south central United States—are found in the basin. Sixty-six species of reptiles and amphibians live there, along with red wolves, black bears, cougars, bobcats, deer, possums, otters, nutrias, minks, and coons. And over ninety species of fish and shellfish make it one of the richest fisheries in North America, one in which the fish take alone can average one thousand pounds an acre—two and a half times more than the Everglades; more than in any other natural water system in the United States.
For almost two centuries Cajuns lived in the basin in cabins and on houseboats, using floating grocery stores for what little provender they couldn’t take from hunting and fishing and trapping, from crabbing and trotlining and crawfishing and hoop-netting. Now, by law, they live outside the levees, but they can keep cabins in the basin, and boats. Some still make a living there; and many more, like Rennie and Barry Serrette, who live and work in towns, would tell you they still do their real living there.
As soon as she walked into their camp and introduced herself, Rennie and Barry recognized Rebel from her appearance a few months before on the cover of Louisiana Sportsman. It was a cover they remembered well, as it pictured a couple of their major enthusiasms at once: Rebel had been wearing a bikini and holding a fish. Rennie and Barry were very happy, if a bit surprised, to see her dropped mysteriously—like that Coca-Cola bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy—into their camp in the swamp, and were happy, too, with Kim and Tom and Jody and me for providing her. Rennie mentioned that they had had very few beautiful young sportswomen stop in on them lately.
The Serrettes’ camp was just upriver from the Voorhies’ camp; it was bigger, with a few more amenities, so Coerte and Kim had arranged for us to take our meals there. After a rained-out fishing and birdwatching trip across the river to Cow Island Lake, we went back there for dinner bearing good red wine, a bottle of George Dickel, and a few Upmann cigars, all of which were almost as well received by the brothers as Rebel had been.
Barry was a carpenter and Rennie—an engaging and soulful man—a pharmacist in Baton Rouge. They were the first generation in their old Cajun family not to live in the basin and make a living there. But they both spent every day they could at their family camp, and their times there—living as simply as their ancestors had—were their best times. They fed us alligator sauce picante and Cajun navy beans with jalapeños, cooked on a woodstove, and nothing we ate in New Orleans was any better. Afterwards we drank Dickel and smoked, and talked about being Cajun.
“It’s not ancestry, it’s an attitude,” said Rennie. “A Cajun gives you everything he has. He never holds back. Drink hard, sleep hard, cook hard, hurt hard.”
And apropos of how central cooking is to Cajun culture, Barry, who had cooked our meal, made the following gnomic comment: “You know, really, the only difference between hot and cold Cajun food is the temperature.”
Back in the little Voorhies cabin, Tom went to sleep, Kim cut up some venison for breakfast in the morning, and Jody and Rebel and I lay in our bunk beds considering conservation. Rebel had borrowed not only Jody’s toothbrush but his sweatpants to sleep in, and he promised her, with more south Texas charm, that he would never wash them. The great swamp was soughing outside in the black night; Pink Floyd was playing on the boom box; and the music mixing with the moist swamp air felt weirdly liberating and expanding.
Rebel said that though the Louisiana CCA had had good success in the past few years with many of its efforts, the state’s coastal marshes—which comprise a full 40 percent of the nation’s coastal marshlands—were being lost at the terrifying rate of more than 25,000 acres, or fifty square miles, a year. Those acres were being lost to the erosion that results from the dredging of more and more oil-access and shipping canals, and by the decrease in delta plain sedimentation caused by channelizing the Mississippi. Unless something was done to turn that loss around, Rebel said, it would not be too long before it was all over but the shouting for the kind of inshore fishing we had been enjoying. Then they could just change the license tag.
Lying in her lower bunk in Jody’s sweatpants, Rebel talked with heart and good sense about Louisiana conservation, and it made me happy to know she would have a hand in the future of it. Because I wanted to hear more about it from her, and not at all because of her general luster and verve, I felt disinclined to quit Rebel’s company when we left the Atchafalaya. So the next day—after we had breakfasted on venison, Cajun sausage, and eggs, and after a second boat ride among the creased cypress stumps of Cow Island Lake, during which she plied her fly rod quite nicely in a difficult wind but caught nothing—I said, “Why don’t you meet us over in Slidell tonight? We have a house this time, with a shower and a toilet and everything. You can go fishing with us and Jimbo and Paul and Gary tomorrow, and maybe one of us will hook a fish for you and let you reel it in.” That is Alabama charm.
We were back at the Butte La Rose landing, and Coerte was there with our Pathfinder.
“Get out” said Rebel.
“Why not?”
“Okay,” she said. She had to spend the evening with her boyfriend, Charlie, in New Orleans, but she would meet us in Slidell the next morning before we went out fishing. There are two things you learn about Rebel after very little time in her company: she is not an amateur at life, and she is a woman who will never be down for long.
“Good job, Chuck,” said Jody when we were headed east. “I sorta thought we needed to keep our eye on the ball a little longer, too.”
On the drive down to Slidell, Tom and Jody and I—for lack of anything better to do and inspired perhaps by the raunchy music of Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas—invented a character named Buck Boudreau, who, despite our best efforts to control him, kept gesturing rudely and shouting salacious things in a faux French accent to pretty young Cajun misses as we flew past them.
Not really.
Really what we did was talk about fishing, like the simpletons we are. When we had all thoroughly tired of the ear-exhausting Cajun music, I turned on NPR, hoping for some soothing Liszt or something. What we got was Purcell’s opera on King Arthur. I turned up the volume, hoping to upgrade my young friend Bright’s musical taste. I drove and from time to time helped Sir-somebody conduct. Sitting in the passenger seat, Jody listened disinterestedly for a while, then with growing animosity.
“That can’t be the same Purcell who played in Willie Nelson’s band,” he said witheringly at one point. “Ned Purcell?”
“Hush,” I told him, “and listen to this sublime plethora of horns.”
“Would you please turn that shit off?” he asked a little while later.
“Not right now. We’re coming up to Guinevere’s magnificent aria.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah,” Jody said after a moment, and looked out the window. “That’s always been one of my favorite parts, too.”
Just before we arrived at Gary Taylor’s house, he said, “Hey, Chuck, is a plethora something like a nutria?”
“Not really,” said Tom. “I think it’s a little bigger.”
Gary Taylor is a wiry, enduro-motorcycle-racing fishing guide. For seven years he was a tournamen
t bass fisherman. For the past nine he has owned and operated “Go For It Charters” out of Slidell, a town forty minutes northeast of New Orleans, just off of Lake Pontchartrain near the Mississippi borden His wife, Vicki, an entomologist with a sensible Louisiana specialty in mosquitoes, met Tom and Jody and me at her door and told us “the best fisherman in the South” was down in the garage.
He was checking over the sixteen-foot Hewes Bonefisher skiff and one of the twenty-two-foot cats that we’d be going out in the next day. With him was Jimbo Meador, who had driven back from Alabama to join us on this last leg of the trip.
Gary had arranged for all of us to stay at a friend’s weekend house on a bayou outside of town, and after we rigged some plans for the following morning and for dinner that night, he led us over there. Parked in the driveway—as unmistakable as Elvis’s gold Cadillac—was Paul Bruun’s van.
Bald, bearish, sensitive, and courtly—a veteran like Jimbo and Tom of my sporting and spiritual quest in Florida a year and a half before—Bruun is the sort of uniquely inspiring example to road-trippers everywhere that Jimi Hendrix was to guitarists. He is a trout guide, writer, sports fan, and raconteur extraordinaire from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and one of the best all-around anglers alive. He is also one of the most catholic and curious, tracking down new fly patterns for snook and spinnerbait techniques for bigmouths with equal alacrity.
Every year in November and December, Bruun leaves Wyoming for a nomadic and idiosyncratic month or longer of sport, country-music appreciation, and gourmandizing. He drives first to Texas for bass fishing, quail hunting, and duck and dove shooting, staying all around the state with various friends. Next he goes to Louisiana for more bass, redfish, speckled trout, and ducks; then on to Florida, his native state, for the angling smorgasbord down there; to Alabama for the smallmouth fishing in Pickwick Lake; and finally to Nashville for the Grand Old Opry. On the way back home, he stops off for a day or two at Cabela’s sporting goods store to do his Christmas shopping. All along this route, Bruun chases down food, music, and fishing leads: buying hams in an Alabama country store he read about somewhere, and tasso, andouille, and hot sauces throughout Louisiana; visiting somebody in Tennessee to learn about a “revolutionary jighead system with a straight worm”; pilgrimaging to the Meridian, Mississippi, home of Jimmy Rogers, the Singing Brakeman.
The Next Valley Over Page 17
