South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  Or at least that was the case until the early 1990s, when I moved into a place in the French Quarter and presided over a magical garden spread out over two courtyards. Snails are no longer my friends. And the thought of actually eating one is—pardon the (sort of) pun—completely off the table.

  The tide began to turn early in my Bourbon Street tenure when I was awakened—at three in the morning—by the repeated sound of metal hitting brick. Terrified, I crept out onto the balcony and saw my landlady crouched over a bunch of slugs and snails she’d swept into a pile, wielding a huge machete. I thought she’d gone mad, but then I began to invest—heavily—in the garden and was driven to a similar point. The space was the perfect brown snail breeding ground. Walled on all sides, it was essentially a giant terrarium, full of the moisture the snails crave and possessed of endless spots for them to hide from the relentless daytime sun. It turned out that my landlady was not at all nuts (at least on this one subject); nighttime is the best time to catch them, and hacking them to bits is pretty much the only effective way to get rid of them.

  The snails glided all over the place (and not all that damn slowly from the looks of things) on a muscular foot, leaving disgusting trails of slime and lacy holes in almost every herbaceous plant and all of my citrus. I tried bowls of beer and sprinkled the recommended coffee grounds and eggshells in the dirt to no avail. I bought hundreds of pounds of snail bait only to find their mucus all over the pellets, which never once impeded their targets. According to the website veggiegardener.com, “Crushing is the most common method of destruction.” Yep. But instead of a machete, I resorted to bricks, old shoes, a rusty shovel. And that’s the thing: Once you see a nasty pile of crushed snails in all their viscous glory, you figure out that the sauce you once enjoyed on similar mollusks would taste better on anything but. Then I read that the first step in preparing them as food is to purge them of “the likely undesirable contents of their digestive systems.” Case closed.

  Even without the snails, gardening in New Orleans is not for the faint of heart. On Bourbon Street I had a monumental stand of banana trees that came with their own set of problems (such is the stickiness of their sap, you need a virtual hazmat suit to trim them). When I moved to First Street, I planted a large live oak instead. It was beautiful, it grew like mad, its lovely curvy limbs shaded an equally lovely dining pergola. Which became a problem when I learned that buck moth caterpillars love oak trees as much as snails loved my courtyards. Covered in hollow spines attached to a poisonous sac, the caterpillars fell off the tree by the hundreds, creating a carpet of furry black land mines. This is not conducive to pleasant dining, nor is it conducive to a happy dog. Henry the beagle stepped on so many that in a single (mercifully short) season, he’d have to get as many as a half dozen cortisone shots.

  There is a remedy for them, of course. And like most things in my former First Street garden, it required a hefty check to my trusty tree man, John Benton. I first interviewed Benton, the proprietor of Bayou Tree, for a story I wrote after a swarm of flying Formosan termites ate an entire beam of the Bourbon Street house in a single evening. When we put in the garden of the new house, he was my first call. Little did I know that he and his guys would also be the property’s most frequent visitors.

  For one thing, even without the walls on all sides, the terrarium effect remained in full force. During the eight years we lived on First, I think there may have been one semi-hard freeze. The long “wall” of hollies I put in to screen my irritating neighbor’s house grew at such a rate we trimmed at least ten feet off the top every year. I spent whole weekends hacking ginger and trimming the seemingly endless tendrils of Confederate jasmine and fig vine. The upside was that the brand-new garden, designed by the brilliant Ben Page and divided into five “rooms,” looked as though it had been there forever. And Benton and I, by necessity, became fast friends. I advised him on affairs of the heart, recommended books, raged when he put the wrong grass in, adored him when he rid us of the caterpillars. Still, no matter how lush it looked as a whole, individual plants, like people, have minds of their own. On a field trip across Lake Pontchartrain, I bought a stunning variety of gardenias that made a fragrant hedge beneath the double parlor windows. Loaded with blossoms, the bushes grew so fast that Benton asked, “What have you been feeding those things? Chickens?” We laughed and marveled and laughed again. And then, not long afterward, they died. Every single one of them, for no apparent reason. We replaced them with cloudlike drifts of pittosporum, which ended up looking even more beautiful. Still, I was hurt. If gardens require courage, they also demand a thick skin.

  Which leads me to the squirrels. Now, my mother has been in the gardening business a lot longer than I. Our former Mississippi Delta yard was not much more than a field when we moved in more than fifty years ago, and now it most closely resembles a wildlife preserve. The last time I visited before the house was sold, Baltimore orioles were stealing the nectar from dozens of hummingbird feeders. Two families of foxes made homes beneath various stands of magnolias. But the one form of wildlife my mother cannot abide is squirrels: They ate the feed of her beloved birds and chewed on the eaves of our house. She once persuaded Harvey Tackett, the late sheriff of Washington County, to send a half dozen deputies from his department to shoot them from our trees. I was aghast. My childhood copy of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is still stashed in my nightgown drawer, and I have always adored Dürer’s Two Squirrels, One Eating a Hazelnut, a print of which adorned my first cousin’s bedroom. When I was a young visitor at the aforementioned Hay-Adams, the angelic Filipino barman gave me bowls of peanuts to feed to the mostly gray squirrels in Lafayette Park. (This was a far kinder, gentler era, when it was safe for ten-year-olds to visit the park under the distant supervision of a hotel doorman and well before threats from the Libyans led to barricades along Pennsylvania Avenue.) Anyway, the squirrels would eat straight out of my hand and I remained their staunch defenders. Until now.

  Having ditched the vast responsibilities of First Street, I figured my narrow apartment balcony, anchored by four large pots of citrus; a smattering of herbs, violets, and succulents; and the prolific night-blooming cereus that’s been with me since Bourbon Street, would be mostly maintenance free. And then the squirrels came. Leaping from electrical wires and the magnolia next door, they run brazenly along the wrought-iron railing, dive onto my satsuma and kumquat trees, and render them fruitless. Given my history with the peanuts, this is an almost literal case of biting the hand that feeds you. Though this is not the first time a fellow sentient being has betrayed my boundless love and trust, I’d rather come to expect such behavior from humans. From my furrier friends, it’s somehow a whole lot more upsetting. Squirrel Nutkin, indeed.

  Livestock of the Rich and Famous

  When I was growing up, I spent a whole lot of my time down the street at the house of our neighbors, the Yarbroughs. Mrs. Yarbrough was an artist and an extraordinarily generous and funny woman who was also a psychic of sorts. She knew exactly when my grandmother (who had been in a coma for eleven years) was going to die, and everything she told me the first time she read my palm has happened pretty much the way she said it would. She and her husband had three girls whom I adored, and three boys who turned me on to the Allman Brothers and the Yardbirds and taught me such invaluable life skills as how to play poker and the best way to make a proper Yucca Flats (in a garbage can, with lots of gin and fresh citrus).

  They also had a whole lot of animals. Inside, there was a box turtle who roamed around at his leisure, several boxes of guinea pigs (housed according to personality), and a parakeet who mostly flew free. Outside, there were cats too numerous to count and about a half dozen dogs, but what really set the Yarbroughs’ place apart was their impressive collection of livestock. In those days on our road there were plenty of horses and cattle—our next-door neighbor owned hundreds of acres of pastureland behind our house, for example, but he was raising cattle to sell, not to keep as pets. The Yarbroughs
, on the other hand, had no pasture or even any fences, just a regular yard of roughly three acres and a donkey tethered to the basketball hoop. I think the donkey might have been the first acquisition, but he was soon joined by a Brahman bull, a longhorn steer (when she bought it, Mrs. Y said simply that Dr. Yarbrough had always wanted one), a horse, and two Shetland ponies rescued from a rendering plant trailer.

  None of them did much other than hang around near the driveway, but I think they gave Dr. and Mrs. Yarbrough a lot of pleasure, and after about three or four Yucca Flats, they became pretty entertaining to the rest of us as well. Mrs Y’s motives were entirely altruistic and not just a little out there—and the animals certainly cost her a bit of money to maintain—but it turns out that if she had lived in Texas rather than Mississippi, her menagerie could have earned her money by giving her a break on her property taxes.

  Now, on my frequent trips to Houston and Dallas, I have long noticed animals in unexpected places (the backyards of showy houses, in front of corporate offices), but I always thought that had more to do with Texas bravado or a special affection for longhorns, much like that of Dr. Yarbrough. But a few years ago, my friend the screenwriter Robert Harling was in Dallas filming a TV pilot based on the novel Good Christian Bitches, which is set in one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, and he became extremely well versed in the ways of the Texas rich. It turns out that an “agricultural exemption” that dates back to 1966 enables home owners and corporations to save huge amounts in property taxes in exchange for activities as diverse as allowing a handful of pygmy goats to roam free or shooting a few deer so as to “prevent overuse of desirable plant species.”

  In the Fort Worth suburb of Westlake, for example, Boston-based Fidelity Investments has a 340-acre “corporate campus” that is home to its 401(k) customer service operations—as well as to twenty-four Texas longhorns. Four years ago, the Wall Street Journal uncovered the fact that the picturesque cattle earned an agricultural exemption for more than half of Fidelity’s acreage, reducing the tax bill on that part of the property from $319,417 to a paltry $714.57. Likewise, Korean electronics maker Samsung cut taxes on 54 acres outside its Austin semiconductor plant from $21,080 to $135.68 by implementing a “wildlife plan” that included spraying for fire ants and installing ten birdhouses. Then there’s John Benda, owner of Fuel City No. 2, a beloved truck stop in downtown Dallas where Interstate 30 and Interstate 35E meet. Benda’s place sells tacos that have been named the best in the state by Texas Monthly, but now it’s better known for the six longhorns and two donkeys out back. Not only does he get to dole out bumper stickers reading “Fuel City: The RANCH in Downtown Dallas,” he reckons he saves about $30,000 a year.

  As evidenced by Benda’s eight animals, it doesn’t take much to qualify for the tax break. All you have to do is prove that your property is being used “wholly or in part” for raising livestock, growing crops, or protecting wildlife—but the translations on all three items are pretty flexible. “Livestock” can include everything from the aforementioned pygmy goats to ostriches and emus; vegetation that allows indigenous birds to “cover from enemies” also qualifies. But a lot depends on the appraiser. One family in North Texas got turned down, not surprisingly, after trying to qualify with fireflies; another in Washington County applied for the exemption on the basis of some miniature donkeys, a species that gave the county’s chief appraiser, Willy Dilworth, some qualms for not seeming farmlike enough. They “come up to you like a dog,” he said, but he compromised by counting two or three of the little donkeys as a single horse.

  For home buyers, the good news is that the exemptions are transferable. In a gated community in Flower Mound, a town just a few minutes from downtown Dallas, a 20,000-square-foot mansion is being offered for sale by the ex-wife of the oil tycoon who built it. It has six bedrooms and eight baths (including one with a musical flushing toilet), a “Moroccan” media room, two infinity pools, and a “secret” office behind a bookcase in the study. While I’m sure there must be some people to whom those lavish features are selling points, its biggest selling point may well be the fact that 9.4 of the property’s 10.4 acres are covered under the agricultural exemption. Longhorns, horses, three mules, and a donkey roam around the place and are housed in a barn that includes a full bar.

  Of course, no tax break is without risks—and I don’t just mean in the form of trouble from the county appraiser or the state tax man. Our next-door neighbor who kept the cattle was notoriously lax about his fences, and his animals were forever getting loose. Once, a particularly ornery bull wandered into our backyard during the winter and fell right through our canvas pool cover. It took two days and all kinds of ropes and pulleys, not to mention a considerable amount of sweet-talking, to finally get him up the steps in the shallow end. And then our neighbor wanted us to pay him for the supposed trauma to the bull. If the Flower Mound manse is still on the market, prospective buyers should keep that in mind. Nothing spoils a lovely view of one of those infinity pools like an angry longhorn thrashing around.

  Life Among the Serpents

  When I got married in my Mississippi hometown, I wanted to ensure that the guests, many of whom were not from the South—or even America—understood where exactly it was that they were visiting. To that end, there was a dinner at Doe’s Eat Place and another in an abandoned cotton gin. There were blues bands and soul bands and a festive pre-wedding lunch featuring pimento cheese sandwiches, ham biscuits, and fried chicken. Everybody went home with warm memories of my home state in particular and the South in general, and it wasn’t until I got the pictures back that I realized I had given them even more local color than I’d thought.

  It was a group shot from the lunch. People were gathered near the bar on the terrace, sipping Bloody Marys and laughing away, while beyond them a bank of French doors led inside to the feast. Maybe it was because the cypress doors were stained a dull brown; maybe it was the booze and the bonhomie. Either way, not a single guest noticed the six-foot-plus-long chicken snake coiled against one of the open doors.

  I grew up in the middle of what is most often called simply “the Delta,” the region in the northwest corner of the state which is in actuality the seven-thousand-square-mile diamond-shaped floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Described by one early traveler as a “seething lush hell,” it was, until well into the nineteenth century, the almost exclusive domain of panthers and bears, wild hogs and deer, alligators and, of course, snakes. Lured by the agricultural possibilities of some of the richest alluvial soil in the world, a handful of white settlers finally turned up in the 1820s and began hacking out fields and plantations from what Faulkner called “one jungle one brake one impassable density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash.”

  Faulkner and his alter ego Ike McCaslin did not much approve of this process, but they may well get the last laugh. Like the bad child you can’t turn your back on, “not even for one minute,” all that vanquished wilderness keeps finding ways to fill up its old space, aided by a subtropical climate and an average of sixty inches of rainfall a year. The Delta’s oak-hickory forest is, after all, at least sixteen thousand years old, and snakes are a whole lot older.

  Depending on the source, Mississippi has up to fifty-five species of snakes, including nine venomous ones. (By comparison, Maine has one venomous snake, and it’s found only in the southern part of the state.) I saw my first rattlesnake at four, when I almost stepped on it, running from our swimming pool to our house. At roughly the same age, my little brothers thought it adorable to bring home the baby water moccasins they found in the aptly named Rattlesnake Bayou, the nearby muddy stream that gave its name to the country road we lived on and that used to drain the whole town. Just last year, my best friend, Jessica Brent, was taking a bath when what she hopes was a harmless king snake (she never found it) took a peek at her from a stack of towels in the open linen closet.

  Not t
hat Louisiana, which I also call home, is much different. Roughly 450 venomous snakebites are reported annually, and after each one of the state’s many floods, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries finds it necessary to remind residents to “seal gaps in windows and doors” and protect their “feet, ankles, and lower legs” against displaced snakes in general, and cottonmouths, copperheads, and canebrake rattlers in particular. Here too, there’s a bayou named after a snake, the lordly Teche, derived from a Chitimacha word. According to Chitimacha legend, a giant snake attacked their villages, required a bunch of warriors to kill it, and left its carcass behind to decompose and fill with water. In commemoration, the city fathers of Breaux Bridge commissioned a twenty-foot granite snake sculpture that resides in its downtown park.

  Morgan City, where the Teche empties into the Atchafalaya River, also pays tribute to the snake, but in the form of an unlikely event called the Snake Bite Triathlon, a swim, bike, and run through what the organizers refer to as the area’s “beautiful swamp.” Unbelievably, they also tout the “cypress trees, cool lake, and lots of snakes” that mark the location, but when I drove through Morgan City this past summer, none of that got my attention. An alligator had eased up onto Highway 90 and lost his head to the wheel of an oncoming car—a common sight down here in what we should only laughingly call civilization.