If you're looking for the muddy crossroads between fact and fiction, between history and legend, between this world and some other, murkier plane, Louisiana is just the place. And you won't need Hank Williams twanging Jambalaya or Creedence Clearwater Revival thumping Down on the Bayou to get you in the mood.
In a world of bland uniformity and mass-produced entertainment, there are still eccentric eddies in the stream where cultures have veered off on their own and left the rest of us behind. And, in America, no place remains more unique and unto itself than the Cajun and Bayou country of South-Coastal Louisiana.
The language fills a melodious, rhythmic space between antique French and modern English.
The food is legendary—in Hank’s words, "Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo, for tonight I'm a gonna see my ma cher ami-o."
The religion, an obscure, graceful concoction of Roman Catholicism, Southern Baptism, and Haitian Voodoo, still carries the heavy loads.
The music—from traditional Cajun to Swamp Blues to Zydeco—reverberates with a raucous energy at the crawfish feasts along the fringes of the swamp.
So some years ago, we set off on a five-day exploration of this fabulous mystery land. But first…
Première: Houston—Port Arthur—Beaumont
We didn't even make it out of East Texas the first day, because of another travel obsession, with the thousands of hidden places in the world where human things—things we so easily take for granted—first got started. And one could argue that modern America (and certainly modern Texas) started on January 10, 1901, when the Lucas Gusher spewed a filthy, black geyser of oil 150 feet into the air above a remote earthen dome called Spindletop.
Down the road in Port Arthur, the first modern American oil refinery still chugs along, minting pennies by the million with its tangle of rusting pipes and sclerotic cracking columns. It ain't pretty, and it's certainly not romantic, but remove these two antiques from history, and 120 years on, we Americans are not who we are.
Deuxième: Beaumont—Cameron
As we crossed the bridge over the Sabine River from Port Arthur, sickly-sweet brown clouds arose to the north from the cane being burned off in the legendary Louisiana sugar fields. Just inside Cameron Parish, a pair of good ol' jerky salesmen operating out of their pickup turned us onto dried elk (hmmm…) and offered sound touring advice—"Keep goin', cos there ain't nothin' left ahead a y'all."
And they had a point. This was two years after the four Category 5 monsters of the worst hurricane season in history had laid waste to the states and countries around the Gulf. Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, along with 24 lesser siblings, had killed 3,912 people and wreaked havoc to the tune of $172 billion.
In Cameron itself, entire blocks of houses were swept away by a 17-foot storm surge that left behind a wasteland of weeds and grass. Massive chunks of concrete seawall lay shattered and strewn about. But if the population had shrunk, the survivors were already well along in the rebuild—the same rebuild they'd unfortunately have to repeat after four more catastrophic storms in the decade ahead.
Troisième: Cameron—Avery Island
Heading East, the devastation eventually gave way to the forests, swamps, creeks, and roads-to-nowhere of our imaginings. Abandoned shacks, rusting tractors and combines, volunteer corn and cane in a tangle of willows and wildflowers—all the classic flotsam from the eternal cycle of rural decay and regeneration. So picture our surprise, when we came to an intersection deep in the labyrinth and found a sparkling metal sign pointing off to the McIlhenny Co.
Tabasco Sauce is one of those very rare brands that has spread all over the planet without diluting its superb quality or offending anyone by morphing into a symbol of commercial colonialism. And the peppery brew originates entirely—secret ingredients and all—from the massive, forested salt dome here called Avery Island. The family and its pristine factory (and park) embody an affable throwback to the more humane face of 19th century American capitalism.
Quatrième: Avery Island—New Iberia—Houma
Eventually, you realize that you're never going to truly experience the Bayou by exploring on land. Everywhere you look, lazy fingers of water wander off into the mysterious shadows of the mangrove. So in Houma, we asked around for someone to ferry us about. There were a few commercial tours (today, there are a gazillion), but all were closed for the winter. Until we wandered into the Bayou Delight Café, where the owner gave us Jimmy's number.
Jimmy's mom, Alligator Annie Miller, invented commercial swamp touring as an elderly woman in the 1970s. Jimmy himself was a big-city attorney, but was born on the Bayou and knew every inch of it. Finally, he agreed that he had nothing better to do after church on a warm Sunday. So we spent the afternoon puttering around the deepest reaches of the swamp, getting a quick education in Louisiana marine life, and meeting Jimmy's favorite alligators.
Cinquième: Houma—Dulac—Boothville-Venice
If you've ever eaten wild-caught Gulf shrimp in America and hail from anywhere but the Texas or Louisiana coasts, those shrimp were frozen. Kinda defeats the purpose of the extravagance, don't you think? So we finished our jaunt by wandering down the Great River Road in Plaquemines Parish all the way to the very tippy-tip (another travel obsession) of Louisiana and the quiet shrimping settlement of Boothville-Venice.
Landscape photographers prize the Magic Hours just after sunrise and before sunset, when the diagonal flood of the sun's rays can turn the drabbest view into a French Impressionist masterpiece. But they can't begin to describe a Louisiana sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico, with the estuarial shrimpers heading out for the day.
En Fin:
For all of its wonderful quirks and eccentricities, Louisiana is not a foreign country. Its children have endured some of the worst hardships of the New World, both man-made and natural, and have produced some of our most precious cultural treasures. They just do it with a style that proves that grace and dignity can still matter in the headlong rush of the modern age. And nowhere is this more genuine than deep in the Bayou, where life eddies along at its stateliest, most naturally elegant pace. A sure-fire cure for high blood pressure and a welcome respite before heading out to the craziness of the Big Easy and beyond.