Well, just returned from a "Personal and Professional Development" retreat for all the AmeriCorps peeps in Louisiana. It was held at Lake Fausse Point State Park, which is an hour west of Baton Rouge in the Atchafalaya Delta. This is true swamp / Cajun country, the type I've been wanting to see since I got here. You get off I-10 and you follow "Levee Rd" by trailers, shacks, cottages and houses all set on the shady banks of bayous (small rivers through the swamp). Every yard has a couple olive green, flat-bottom boats parked on the lawn and a home-made sign with names like "Camp Wonder" or "Gator Cove". We stayed in these great cabins on the bayou with screened in porches and at night, when our lectures and team building excercises were over, we built bond fires and went on "Gator Hunts" through the swamp.
My friends Kate and Heidi and I all got more of a taste of the bayou than we'd bargained for today. At the conclusion of our retreat, we stayed at the park for the afternoon and rented kayaks to do some exploring. After paddling for about five minutes we saw our first gator sunning himself on an old log. We kept going, passing a couple shacks on the river and watching the knarled root systems along the banks for wildlife. The swamp teems with life; it seems like every square inch is squirming. We saw an enormous striped tan watersnake laying on a tree that had fallen into the bayou. A flat-bottom boat with three old Cajun men with camoflauge hats, tan skin and bright white beards came around a corner and slowed. "They'se gators bigger than those boats y'all are in. They'll eat the whole thing," one of them said. I wondered if this was a routine they pulled with tourists and perhaps it is, but shortly after we did see a gator about as big as our kayak, laying on the banks. Kate paddled close to take a picture and it slipped into the water towards us and disappeared under the murky water. Laughing out of pure terror, we paddled away.
We sat in a small cove for awhile. Kate and Heidi relaxed and I tried to fish. Fish were literally jumping out of the water all around and I didn't get a single bite. It didn't make me feel like the world's most capable outdoorsman. Eventually, we decided to head back. Consulting the fuzzy, xeroxed map we'd picked up at the Ranger station, Heidi suggested that if we went to the right, it would be a loop back to the boathouse. We paddled...and paddled...and paddled. Loops generally involve turns and the bayou we were on was in a straight line in the wrong direction. With no turn offs. The kayaks seemed to have been designed to withstand gator attacks rather than to glide through the water so progress was slow and our arms began hurting and the prospect of turning around was demoralizing that we kept going, hoping that a left turn would appear soon. The farther we got from the boat house, the more wildlife there was and there became more and more semi-jokes about a gator attack, which wasn't good for anyone's nerves. I pictured those three old Cajun guys hiding in the bushes, in absolute hysterics.
Finally the bayou split and we took a left. Soon after, Heidi, checking the map, burst into laughter. And she couldn't stop. Such hysterics from our navigator wasn't particularly reassuring and Kate and I, laughing along nervously, threw in some, "So...Heidi (chuckle, chuckle), where are we?" But she just kept laughing. I was in utter misery.
Eventually, we got hold of the map and saw that we were right at the edge of it and that we were at the farthest possible point. Heading back was probably the shortest, safest option but paddling back all that way didn't seem doable. It looked like there was a shortcut – a very narrow waterway - that cut the loop in half and seemed to me the only way we’d possibly get back to the boathouse while there was still daylight. So, when the shortcut appeared on the left, we took it.
By now it was late afternoon and the weakening light injected some adrenaline into the whole thing. The shortcut immediately became narrower so that low hanging branches were close on both sides. There were constant splashes of some creature or another entering or exiting the water. A bend in the river revealed an old barge with a crane and a trailer parked on top of it. The only signs of life were hundreds of crushed Keystone Light cans. An old skiff with a pilot house with a dusty windshield was moored alongside, resting in the calm water.
All of a sudden, there was a splash very close by and Heidi screamed. I heard a thumping and she screamed, “Jesus Christ! Phil!” I looked back and Heidi was frantically hitting something in her kayak. I turned around and paddled back. A big silver fish flopped up and out of her boat swam off.
The little waterway continued to narrow and we soon had to weave around and under felled trees. Tall, thick marsh grass encroached on both sides further narrowing the channel and we could hear weeds scraping along the bottom of the kayaks. Up ahead the marsh grass closed to the width of a single kayak. We stopped.
“Gators wouldn’t have their nests in this type of area would they?” I asked, hoping for confirmation. There was none. I paddled up to the narrow opening of the marsh grass then imagined a mama gator sitting on her eggs in between the next cluster of the marsh grass and me stumbling across her and promptly being eaten. I backed up.
“Let’s turn around,” Kate said. But at that point I thought I’d rather be eaten by a gator than paddle for another two hours and plus, I was tired of doing the comfortable, smart thing and thought some bad choices might do me good.
So I backed up a bit then built up a head of steam and slid on through the narrow channel. Marsh grass brushed against me on both sides and all types of things - mostly birds – fluttered away through the grass. Every part of me was shakin’. I hummed really loudly, hoping to scare off gators and snakes with my offkey noise. There was this surge of adrenaline that made me ready to beat a gator silly with my paddle. I felt like I was in true nature.
The channel widened a bit and split and both paths were hopelessly shallow. “Well, screw it” I thought, looking down at the muddy bed now visible through the water. There was a fallen tree on the dried up part of the river bed and I thought if I climbed to the top of it, it might afford a view of how close we were to the bigger bayou. “It’s just mud,” I told myself and got out. My leg sank to the knee in mud as I trudged toward the tree. It was freeing to just let go and jump in and realize that nature wasn’t quite as scary or gross as it seems from civilization.
I made it to the tree and, eyeing the branches very closely for snakes, climbed up to the tallest point. There, about a hundred yards away, was the beautiful sight of silver water. It was a larger bayou that we could take back to the boat house.
Heidi and Kate got out of the boats too and we all trudged through the mud, dragging our big ol’ kayaks behind us, watching for snakes and laughing out of terror but also of the satisfaction of overcoming fear. I tell you, when we made it to the bayou and got back into our now muddy boats, it was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, I felt like Lewis and Clark. It’s very easy to be surrounded by nature and still not really be in nature, to still be somewhat insulated from it. But the proximity to it that comes from getting off the path and putting yourself in slight danger is incredibly refreshing.
We stopped at a seafood shack on the way back that was right on a bayou and ate broiled catfish and oysters from the porch and watched fishermen and hunters glide by in flatboats as the sun set. It was a magical end to the day.
Anyways, progress on the house is going well – we are now doing bamboo flooring (the walls are all painted and doors are installed). We have AmeriCorps NCCC’s with us for three weeks. NCCC’s are the national branch of AmeriCorps and they travel around the country doing short-term service projects. We get to be their boss so that’s nice.
Also, the weather down here has been incredible. Last weekend we played beach volleyball on Sunday then my friend Duncan and I just sat out on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain fishing and talking for a good two or three hours as the sun set. We had a bite but my dinky fishing line snapped immediately so that was a bit disappointing but it gave us an excuse to just sit and talk and watch the sky. This week, we did karaoke on Wednesday – one of the AmeriCorps volunteers is a semi-professional singer and she did a duet with a woman she met at the bar who was also an incredible singer and boy, it was like being at a concert - and then 80s night on Thursday at a club called One Eyed Jacks in the Quarter. Friday was not the most productive day at work.
