Travel

J. D. Carpenter’s American Odyssey

DAY 24 — NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, Part I: One of my goals for this trip was to tour a Louisiana swamp. I had it in mind to set a scene — perhaps the climax — of Campbell Young #5 in such a locale. So two mornings ago we travelled deep into Cajun country, through the towns of Lottie, Blanks, Livonia, Maringuoin (which translates as ‘mosquito’), Grosse Tete, and Plaquemine until we reached Bayou Sorrel, where a man named Dean Wilson was waiting for us. Dean, who is the Basinkeeper of the Atchafalaya (pronounced heh-CHEF-a-lie-ah) Swamp, is a passionate protector of the wilderness, a wilderness whose survival depends upon the health of its cypress forests, forests which are being depleted for the mulch they produce. Dean and his confreres have so far convinced Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Lowe’s to boycott cypress mulch, but his fight is far from over.

Karen and I loaded our folding chairs into Dean’s fishing boat (powered by a 60-horse Yamaha outboard) and off to the swamp we headed. At first we travelled along a wide brown river frequented by tugboats and barges, but then a sharp right turn took us into a narrow channel and before we knew it we had entered a primordial world abundantly populated by giant tupelo and cypress trees, sycamore and persimmon trees, by trumpetvine and button woodbush, by egrets and ibises and barred owls and yellow-crowned night herons, by beaver and coon and otter and mink and alligator (we saw one — a big one — swimming away from us; we followed its trail through the algae), by catfish and mullet, by banana spiders and fishing spiders.

We also saw signs of man: hundred-year old pull-boat roads, wire mesh crawfish traps, beer cans jammed on branches. As we roamed through what seemed to be an endless maze of channels (sometimes we had to kneel on the floor of the boat in order to pass under low branches), Dean collected garbage from the water: plastic pop bottles, a child’s pink inflatable raft. At one point he commented that Louisiana is not only the most naturally rich of the United States, but also the most politically corrupt, which makes his work all the more difficult. “Whoever thinks he can prosper in Louisiana without selling his soul to the devil,” he said, quoting an author whose name he couldn’t recall, “either doesn’t know Louisiana, or doesn’t know the devil.”

Tags: American, American Odyssey, language arts

About the author

J.D. Carpenter's Campbell Young novels have been nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award, appeared on national bestseller lists (The Globe & Mail), and received critical acclaim (The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, Maclean's, Quill & Quire).