Cajuns Are a Rare Breed
A Louisiana Bayou Story
Part 1
The swamp is dark and thick and swarming with birds ruffling in moss-covered cypress trees. Insects are drawn by the light of my storm lantern, moths and mosquitoes buzzing on the back wall.
I put a pot full of rice on my propane stove and make sure it is cooking evenly as I lay the squirrel on the cutting board.
The dead rodent seems to be looking at me with his black eyes and I can’t help but grimace when I feel the animal’s feet, tail and head snapping under my shears. I take a breath and pull away the skin until nothing is left. “It ain’t no rabbit, you got to pull as hard as you can,” I remember my neighbor saying. I squint and look away as I remove the guts. When it’s nice and clean, I break down the legs, the ribs and the backstrap to make four pieces of meat that I season with Tony Chachere’s spices and Tabasco sauce before putting in a cast iron pot.
I add cooking oil and stir the meat until it’s golden brown. Then, I cut an onion, yellow bell peppers and garlic that I add into the pot with flour and water to make a roux. I let the whole thing cook on the lowest stove setting to save the propane for my next meals.
The houseboat is creaking as it sways with the water. I make sure it is well anchored to the nearby tree. I lean over the rope and pull on it to see if there is enough play.
It’s already too late when I feel my foot slipping on the wet floor. I heavily fall into the water with a big splash.
Everything is suddenly cold around me and the taste of silt in my mouth replaces the one of the bad Zinfandel I was drinking earlier. I swim to the surface and hold onto the tree, cussing a dozen expletives and trying to get a hold on my moored skiff.
It’s only then that I notice the dark shape of the alligator cutting through the water in my direction.
“Fuck,” I mutter, hoisting myself into the small boat and gripping the floating house’s awning posts to keep some kind of balance as the alligator comes closer with his jaws half-open, slowing its pace until he decides to give up the chase, turning round and lingering nearby, immobile in the hissing of the wind and the cackling of the ducks.
My heart is pounding in my ears. I carefully step away from the skiff to get back on the house. “Holy fucking fuck,” I repeat, removing my soaked clothes in the chilly air.
I sit a few minutes on the floor to catch my breath. I dry my hair and change my jeans. I try not to look outside, avoiding the sight of the reptile luring in his next prey. Monsters aren’t real, are they? Monsters aren’t real.
There is a burnt smell in the kitchen. I stop the stove and put the overcooked rice in a platter on which I add the squirrel gumbo. The food is scalding hot. I go back to the porch and sit on my foldable chair, the smoking plate on my knees.
The alligator is still there in the middle of the swamp. I raise a glass to him and start eating my meal.
Later, when the stars have disappeared behind low rolling clouds, I wish him a good night and go to sleep. I dream of murky wetlands and vengeful beasts hiding in the shade.
The bayou is covered in mist when I wake up. The place is gloomy and eerily quiet — banks of fog breaching through the blue-gray foliage of the cypresses, the sun low under the forest, all pale and lifeless, the silence only broken by the sound of fishes jumping in and out of the water.
I eat a cereal bar, drink a cup of instant coffee, pee overboard and climb on the houseboat’s roof to plug my phone in its solar charger.
Ray Guidry sees me from afar and waves his hand, cutting the engine of his boat and gliding towards me.
“Bon matin!” he says cheerfully. “How was your night?”
I smile at him and get on his skiff, crouching between fishing nets, crab traps and empty coolers.
“I fell in the water and almost got bit by a gator,” I reply.
Ray stares at me in disbelief and we both burst out laughing.
“C’est quelque chose,” he adds with his Cajun accent before handing me a pair of worn out gloves.
“Where are we headed today?”
“To the bay. Then to Pierre Part to sell our catch and make the groceries. Big day ahead of us. I hope you had a good breakfast.”
He launches the Honda motor and we leave our cove for the labyrinth of waterways streaking through the swamps.
“We should be in Morgan City by six if there’s not too much fog. I don’t like to go fast when there’s fog.”
A flight of brown pelicans flies over us. The skiff bounces on the water, the engine’s growl echoing against the dark trees. Dead oaks and fallen cypresses line the muddy banks, their branches bending under the weight of the foliage.
We follow the meanders of the river until we reach the nearby oil and gas drilling station. We both watch the structure and its steel reservoirs nested in a creek where a NO TRESPASSING sign has been posted.
“This is Bayou Postillion. Exxon and Chevron came here about twenty years ago. They’re all around, now.”
“In the middle of nothing?”
“The bayou had to be dredged to restore the original flow and allow barges to pass through. Of course bass fish went scarce. People tried to petition against the field but you know how it goes. Big companies like that, they get incentives from the government, it’s already played out. We’re only a dozen people living here, so we had to adapt. We went fishing and hunting up Big Bayou Mallet instead. That’s how we do.”
“You adapt.”
“It’s difficult. And we’re luckier than some. See what happened in Bayou Corne because of the fracking.”
“Are you talking about the sinkhole?”
“Yeah. The water had been boiling for months, with earthquakes and houses shifting and all. For months, people told the officials something was wrong. Next thing you know — my buddy Frank, he’s at a town meeting, you see. It all started in June, right? Then in late July, my buddy Frank goes at this meeting to discuss the situation with them gas company agents. He tells them he’s concerned about the diesel smell by his house. Don’t worry, they say. It’s a leaky pipeline, they say. No risk at all. Next thing you know, there’s a 3-acre sinkhole where the bayou was and 350 people have to be evacuated.”
“What did the operating company do?”
“Texas Brine? They offered settlements but most of the people refused and started a class-action suit. The trial keeps being pushed back. And the sinkhole keeps expanding, you see. It’s now 27-acres large and it’s killing everything in the area, what with the debris and the oil and the mud spilling around. But nobody’s talking about it.”
Ray keeps silent as he navigates out of the swamps.
“It’s not important if nobody sees it,” he says.
The water becomes clearer when we veer right on the spillway, speeding up the pace along the road.
The skiff’s motor is running full bore in our ears. Alligators are floating near the banks, swimming in our wake.
We soon meet the Atchafalaya River in Berwick Bay and cruise across the port of Morgan City.
“Watch this good,” Ray tells me. “It may not exist anymore next time you come here.”
“The floods.”
“If the Morganza spillway is opened, everything will be submerged with water like in 2011. Maybe worse. The smallest cities are basically saving New Orleans and Baton Rouge’s asses by getting flooded every time there is a risk the river overflows.”
“It’s been like that for a while.”
“Pas de même. You see, the Army had to divert the Mississippi before, in ’73, but most of the bayous were still isolated from each other back then, because of the mud and the vegetation. Astheur, c’est plus pareil. When oil companies dredged their pipeline canals, it opened new channels for the water to go through. And so when the spillway got opened in 2011, the overflow went straight into the bayous through them channels. It just spread without us having control on nothing.”
A barge goes under the city’s old rusted bridges, horn blazing to signal its arrival to the dock.
“On the bright side, you found crawfish everywhere the tar hadn’t leaked in. I remember going to the levee and getting thousands of them in a few hours. They kept coming and coming and coming. Là c’était vraiment toute une journée.”
Traffic seems sparse on the roads as the sun finally rises, casting a yellow hue over the bays and islands that spread around us.
Half an hour later, the skiff exits the river and enters the bay. The Gulf of Mexico opens ahead, past the sandbars and the shores and the driftwood, the horizon lining with the morning clouds and the flocking birds mirrored by the muddy sea.
“This delta is the only place in Louisiana that’s gaining ground for now, but you never know how long it’s going to last,” Ray says. “It’s great for crabbing, though,” he adds, lighting up a cigarette.
He gives the motor 1,500 rpm and corrects the skiff’s trajectory while taking long puffs on his Marlboro.
“Would you hand me these two pans?” He asks, showing me a bunch of white plastic crates piled together at the front of the boat.
He places the pans at the two ends of an L-shaped aluminum gutter and hands me a wire crab cage.
“This is the trap you’ll be using today. Make sure the door is locked good before putting it into the water, all right? There’s the bait box with the flap top. That’s where you put this,” he says, opening two coolers filled with fish heads.
“I thought you would be using chicken bits,” I say, tying a rubber apron behind my back.
“For redfish and bass, yeah. But catfish heads are better for crabs, à cause il y a plus de viande dedans.”
He puts three heads into the bait box.
“Usually we would use a floater to see where the trap is. That’s if we were crabbing from bridges, say. But today, we ain’t going to do that. We’ll tie the traps to this pulley string instead.”
He drops the cage in the water.
“I won’t stop the rig. You’ll just throw the trap down and let the crabs get in it while we’re moving. You’ll pull on the string every ten to fifteen seconds to lift the cage out of the water.”
He yanks on the rope and the cage comes up with five blue crabs squirming in it, all tossed together on the spill gutter as Ray opens the wire box to take a look at them.
“See, this one’s a good one. It’s a male, lots of males this season in the bay. This one is meaty. It’s a 7 inch, a #1. Goes for about $2 a pound. The other ones not so much, but this one’s a good one.”
“The minimum allowed is 5 inches, right?”
“That’s right. I’ll show you.”
He gives me the trap and goes to the other side of the skiff. I put two catfish heads in the bait compartment, make sure everything is closed and send the cage back into the water, the boat still running forward as Ray makes slight corrections at the wheel.
I pick the pulley and lift the trap, now filled with four crabs that I dump in the gutter with a great deal of shaking, a large smile on my face.
“Is it always that easy?” I ask.
“Not always. This one,” the fisherman says, motioning to a small crab clenching his claws on another crab. “I like this one. He’s a fighter. Let’s give him another chance,” he says, throwing the crustacean overboard.
He then prepares a second trap that he drops on his side of the rig, nodding at me without a word.
I put down the cage and lift it again. I release the crabs again, making sure they’re all of good size before cramming them in my pan where they all crawl and swarm until I close the lid. I replace the pan with another one and put my cage down again, then pull it again, tossing away the females with eggs and the smaller factory crabs, the skiff going in large circles, water in my eyes, claws clawing and legs twitching, again, and again, and again.
I lose the count after sixty traps.
The sun is high in the sky when Ray cuts the motor. The pans are all full, stacked on top of each other.
“No more baits,” Ray announces. “We done good today. You did good. Got the hang of it fast. Un vrai pêcheur!”
“Combien de cages?”
“Alentour deux cent cinquante. Two fifty at least.”
“That’s a lot.”
“C’est pas pire. On comptera quand on sera back sur la rivière. Now c’est le temps de diner.”
We eat roast beef po-boys and drink Abita Lights, sat on our wooden chairs in the middle of the Atchafalaya Bay, Lenny Kravitz on the radio.
The po-boys are dripping with gravy and mustard. I wipe my fingers on the pages of a yellowed Times-Picayune newspaper.
“I learned to fish here with my daddy. Mon papa il m’emmenait sur son bateau from Bayou Chene jusqu’à icitte. Puis quand on avait fini de pêcher, là, on vadait à Lafayette pour vendre ça les oeufs des poules qu’on avait dans le clos. We went up to Lafayette to sell them eggs, by walking because we didn’t have no car back then. And my mama, she made cornbread sometimes and sold it too.”
“Were you already living in a houseboat?”
“Yeah, but we also had a field. Un jardin, ils appelaient. My sister was in charge of the potato plants. I was in charge of the chickens and the corn. Et dans l’été on faisait la crème à la sabotière.”
“Were you speaking French?”
“Mes parents, ils parlaient français tous les deux both. Mais les maîtresses à l’école, elles voulaient pas que nous autres on parle français. So we spoke French between us, you know.”
“What about today?”
“I still speak French with my friends, and my family too. Avec le monde alentour de icitte. Ayoù est-ce que le monde il parle français je parle français. Whenever I can.”
“Have you always been fishing?”
“Back when I was young, I worked with my daddy. We did crawfish, Sac-à-Lait and bass fish, mainly. And muskrats. Then when my daddy died I got his boat and I kept fishing. C’est de quoi que je faisais pour ma vie. Mais quand je suitais jeune ça l’était plus facile, because the saltwater hadn’t crept in them bayous, so the game was easier to catch. Now it’s almost all gone.”
He raises his beer and cheers to me. His smile wrinkles his face and softens his rugged traits.
“We can’t do what we used to, like selling fur and skins. It’s all regulated. So I bought this newer rig for crabbing. A 24 feet Carolina, not too big, not too small, perfect for shallow waters.”
“It seems to be working good,” I say.
“Pretty good. I like being alone. My wife, she doesn’t like it much when I’m not home. She makes a couple pies and she gets bored. But I’ve always enjoyed it, being on a boat.”
There is another small ship near the shore, with a single man aboard, untangling a net and listening to bluegrass music. Further away inside the marshes, roseate spoonbills are picking insects and frogs from the high weeds.
“Cajuns are a rare breed,” Ray says. “We’re the last ones. After us, it won’t be the same. When the swamps will be gone, we will be gone.”
“It’s sad.”
“We’re not meant to survive this century. We try to adapt, but we’re not meant to survive in the long run. We’re a memory. There will be no room for memories in the future.”
I think of all the generations of men having said that.
“We will vanish. That’s how things go.”
We keep silent and finish our beers, looking at the waves carrying tree trunks along the sand banks.
