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Notes from Below Sea Level
Returns
I can tell from this earliest taste of the morning that this will be one of those days. The temperature was at that perfect equipoise of cool and inviting when you want nothing more than to stay wrapped in your quilt and sleep the morning away. That sort of morning when the neighborhood cats patiently wait for a bit of food, the mosquitos are sleeping in, and even the humidity is catching a few extra minutes of rest. And it’s Friday, which is always a bonus. Today my love returns from a 10-day or so visit to Paris and in about two weeks I’ll be heading north to see her for the week—that and some fall colors, I hope. Which reminds me to write my representatives to make sure the weather is going to be perfect while I’m there.
This week at work has been steady and productive—my favorite kind—though I will appreciate the down time this weekend just the same. My son and I may be taking a trip down to the island just for a change of scenery and a break from town. This weekend is also the Cajun Fair in a small bayou community named Dularge, so we’ll have to come to some compromise on that.
When I was a kid, I spent some quality time in Dularge. Two of my best friends (Guy and David) lived there and the hunting and trapping opportunities were prime, not to mention the fishing. Back then there were a few hundred houses along the bayou with boat launches every couple miles and out-of-towners had yet to discover its abundant resources. Today the population has more than doubled, the best hunting grounds now sport weekend camps, and trapping is near extinct. The place is on the verge of being overfished (or at least less enjoyable as idiots in boats with thousands of dollars in gear are everywhere). Still, the fair is a local thing and has been held annually for decades.
My friend Guy lived in a small brick house on the edge of umpteen arpents of cypress swamp and languid marsh lands. David lived in a double wide with his parents, younger sister, maternal grandparents, and one cousin. The trailer was white with bright red trim, sat smack in the middle of a couple acres of cleared ground, and was the most fascinating home I’d been in up to that time. Sleek and efficient and always impeccably clean, I marveled at the very idea that his home could (if one so desired) be dismantled and moved to another location. It never moved, of course, but it could.
Beasts of the Southern Wild was filmed on that bayou back in 2011-12, though in the movie the place is called The Bathtub. You now can book fishing charters there and, while Guy’s brick home is still standing (more cramped and surrounded by larger, cheaply-built spec homes), David’s ancestral doublewide is long gone and the land reclaimed by the encroaching waters. For me, it can be a bit of a jolt and a slight disappointment to return to places of my childhood when those places represented open spaces with an undercurrent of danger. Black moccasins and coral snakes are less prevalent, of course, and being broken down and stuck on the water for the night probably couldn’t happen today. Life is a bit less challenging on that bayou, which isn’t a bad thing, just hard to return to when in our adult brains we still search for that crucible of youth. “Progress,” I think, is what they call it.
Cheers everyone and here’s to a lovely Friday and a relaxing weekend.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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