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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 10, 2005 - Swamptour through a Bayou near New Orleans, Louisiana

Lloyd and Sandy decided they should head home, so we spent some time draining and flushing their tanks and water heater to prepare their unit for winter storage when they got back to Illinois. They hit the road about 11:30, after which we had a leisurely lunch. We had decided to stay another day and take a swamp tour, hoping that the fog would lift by our scheduled departure at 2:30 that afternoon. Part of the reason we stayed the extra night for this "Honey Island Swamp Tour" was that they picked us up right from the campground for no extra charge, and I was a bit tired of driving.

Just as we had hoped, the fog finally burned off and the sky turned blue by 2 o'clock. The bus for the tour showed up right on time and transferred us about 15 miles down the road to where an old steel lift bridge on US 90 crossed the West Pearl River. The bridge was a framework of rusty steel girders with big concrete counterweights at each end that help lift the center section when the taller ships come through, which our tour guide said only happened twice a month or so.

We started our boat trip with a quick U-turn underneath the bridge where we peeked at the riverside houses that line the banks at that point and the boats along the shoreline. The houses are called "camps" by the locals. Some of the buildings were on stilts along the canal and others were floating on barrels on the river shore, and they ranged from mansions to shacks in size and appurtenances.

Tied up in front of one camp we saw a pretty white "Lafitte" fishing boat with a raised fantail and bow, apparently used by a professional fisherman. Several of the houses had flat-bottomed aluminum John boats, used for all kinds of fishing. But the boat most associated with the bayou was a pirogue, a narrow, high-sided wooden canoe with a flat bottom. Apparently the pirogues are used for traveling in the swamp and often poled along in the shallow water.

Our boat was about 20 foot long with a central bench on which about 15 of us had perched. It had a big Honda outboard that was remarkably quiet and a shallow draft that later proved to be quite necessary. First we roared down the river for a ½ mile or so at about 20 miles per hour, and then we turned left into an old oxbow, an old bend of the river that had been cut off when it changed course. The oxbow was in the very gradual process of filling in and becoming land rather than swamp, so our path became much narrower and we occasionally bumped into clumps of grasses or trees.

Our tour guide warned us about the 5 kinds of poisonous snakes in Louisiana, but although we saw a couple of tiny ones curled up in the sun trying to get warm, nothing poisonous or large slithered our way. We also saw a couple of Great Blue Herons and a couple of Ibises in the tall grasses off to the side. The watery grasslands, by the way, were technically supposed to be called marshes while the watery forests should be called swamps, at least according to our guide.

We branched off the oxbow into a small preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy. The swamp was second growth cypress about 70 years old, and I thought the tapering tree trunks and cypress knees mirrored in the water looked very graceful.

We came across a group of nutria, large fur-covered rodents introduced from South America, and I thought they were rather cute. Most of the nutria were basking in the sun, but we watched one cutting the stems of an aquatic plant and gnawing on it while floating on the surface. I also saw them grooming their fur, which can be used to make a fur coat, and it turned out that they were mighty tasty, too. The basic problem is that the nutria have no major predators aside from alligators and are over populating parts of the bayou, so I hope they do turn them into a food source; our guide said that they tasted like rabbit, so maybe they will become "the next white meat".

At the far end of the preserve we found a single, small alligator. But it was nice enough to pose for us, and I appreciated that. The gators go dormant during the winter months when the water temperature drops below 70 degrees, and just don't eat. Hence the nutria I saw were happily grazing away without any apparent fear of gators or of us, for that matter. I was surprised to hear that gators could not eat for periods of up to 2 years, but that does help explain how they could survive the mass extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred about 65 million years ago, as I recall.

We turned around at the alligator site and worked our way back to the oxbow and then back to the West Pearl River. The swamp was beautifully quiet, calm, and almost entirely mosquito-free, a truly wonderful and peaceful experience. Our guide was Cajun and also gave us a lot of insights into Cajun history and culture, and I enjoyed getting those insights. He discussed Cajun French, the Cajun version of French from the 1600s that has evolved over the centuries in Louisiana, but is currently dying out. The language is not officially suppressed anymore, but with only a little over 20,000 speakers at the last census and most of them of the older generation, the prospects for a long-term survival would seem dim.

After the tour the bus took us back home just in time to take a picture of the sun setting from the back section of our campground that fronted on some kind of canal.

We had a simple dinner of sandwiches and then worked on the computers a while before we read a bit to end the evening. At least, that was the plan, but I was so tired after dinner that we turned in by 7 p.m. and slept the clock around. For those Gentle Readers who were expecting a report on the famous New Orleans nightlife, I am sorry to disappoint you, but obviously a pair of reporters who poop out and go to bed before many of the citizens are even sitting down to dinner would not be a good choice to report on nightlife. Beyond that, I'm not sure how motivated we would be as nightlife reporters because I have some biased expectations about what would happen, and these would color my reporting. First off, it would be dark and the garish lights on the honky-tonk bars on Bourbon Street would be that much more garish. I expect the music would, if anything, be louder, and the streets much more crowded than when we walked by on Sunday morning. The percentage of inebriated/intoxicated folks would predictably rise as the evening wore on and the percentage of families or women pushing baby carriages would just as predictably fall. To have my eyes assaulted by flashing neon, my ears assaulted by loud music, and my body assaulted by crowds of people is not my cup of tea, although I can understand why that appeals to some younger folks. It is, I suppose, exciting for the young people, particularly if one is inebriated/intoxicated oneself. Not having that option, I will defer the objective reporting on New Orleans nightlife to those better suited by reason of their biorhythms, deafness, and alcohol/drug use and return to our long, restful night of slumber.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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