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Notes from Below Sea Level
“An Uneasy Detente”
Warmer than usual temperatures on the Gulf Coast these days—but I’m afraid that will be a repeating theme this summer. I just finished up dog sitting for my sister and reunited the happy souls yesterday evening and ended a very long day spent south in the lowest parts of the Louisiana coast. On Thursday nights, I usually try to get the music together for this post (my son often helps) and the basic shape of things. Instead, last night I picked up some barbeque brisket on the way home, ate dinner from a Styrofoam clam shell, and headed to bed with a book. With plans to read a while, I didn’t make it much past the this first stanza of I Am, so here we are stuck with this morning’s beginning from yesterday’s leftovers. My mind still stuck back in the bayous and marshes and gentle wakes of the shrimp boats headed out in the early evening.
I Am
I know not whence I came,
I know not whither I go;
But the fact stands clear that I am here
In this world of pleasure and woe.
And out of the mist and the murk
Another truth shines plain –
It is my power each day and hour
To add to its joy or its pain.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
One thing that strikes me when I spend time in the lowlands of Terrebonne Parish is the quality of the silence. That the silences are so different than in the small town where I live. I’ve spent enough time on the bayous to appreciate this difference—to feel the flowing water rather than hear it, to sense the lapping tide on the wooden-hulled trawlers anchored for the night, to put to music the smells of decay and rebirth. There is a routine in life that comforts me: not in the Nietzschean sense of eternal recurrence but in simplicity of familiarity and knowing. In these communities that populate the winding bayous plodding south to the marshes, life is hard and unforgiving. And while things aren’t as hardscrabble and inhospitable as when I was a kid, most days can still be physical and mental challenges and show a tendency to corner one into judging themselves in small but significant ways.
As a child I spent much more time on those floating lands. Death came more easily and more frequently back then. Life was harder and, between the endless watershed and the scratch farms, the dangers more prevalent—not in a nostalgic walk-uphill-in-the-snow-a-mile-to-school sort of way but in a visceral way involving venomous snakes in every corner of the barn in the mornings, alligators stalking your fishing lines, spiders, wild boar and cats to be wary of, not to mention the real fear of tetanus or pneumonia and other conditions that were considered more deadly than not.
We’ve gentrified this place over the last four decades or so, or at least wrestled it to the point that its strength is slightly spent and its unease with our presence tempered to a mutual respect; or at least we have finally reached an uneasy detente. Barely 40 miles from my home (which is not far from the coast as it is) and the place is almost foreign. Even the language is different here. The accent is heavier and the French more prevalent, the references and touchstones tend more toward the inevitability of rising waters and the danger of a startled copperhead than allusions to Icarus’s pride or Dante’s humility. Verbal caesuras are frequent and less intimidating here—silence, even in conversation, appreciated.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to escape this place, trying to burnish my rough edges and polish the timbre of my speech. But these efforts are only as deep as the silences they fill. Perhaps it takes a long, hard day to make me appreciate the richness of these tough places. Even longer, I suspect, to realize that escaping a place that is part of you is a fool’s errand and that there is as much wisdom and knowing in a sonnet as an evening prayer for bountiful catches and safe returns for souls working waters far beyond the horizon. This morning reminds me that it was in places just like these nearly-forsaken stretches of flat lands that I learned that the coteau—the high ground—offers both an expansive vantage point and the resting place of water moccasins seeking the sun’s warmth.
(May 2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?