That some stranger offered me his pirogue would be odd almost anywhere else. That I’ve been offered food, directions, stories, handshakes, and "just pee in my backyard" at the drop of a bucket is extraordinary.
I’m on a dirt road with a pirogue borrowed from a stranger. It's tied down above the Jeep. A pirogue is a similar to a canoe, but with a flat bottom and a tiny draft.
This gravel road leads north of Stephensville, into what looked from the maps to be some of the deepest sections of the Atchafalaya. When I'm pretty far from anything, I dump the pirogue in the water and leave the Jeep behind.
I paddle next to the road for a few miles. To my left is some of the darkest swamp I have ever seen. Shades of brown and black that hang and droop into a green mush.
Three black folks are fishing off the bridge, and so I decide to see what they are catching. I dock the pirogue by the road and climb up to the bridge.
”What do you fish for here?” I ask. The water is muddy and looks inhospitable to fish. “Everything,” the lady says. “Crappies, bass, stripers, flatheads, catfish.”
They are fishing with small grass shrimp, which the lady says she finds right there in the water. I look for some in the water but find nothing.
”You want to try,” she says, offering me the line.
”No, no. Can I see what you caught?”
”Yeah, jus’ look in the pail,” she says.
"Oh, he looks dead,"
"Yeah, he in catfish heaven now."
When I ask the lady about the area, she says that she is actually from New Orleans, spending a weekend with her relatives to enjoy fishing. She is what you might call a sports fisherman.
I paddle some more until I find an oil cutaway, a slim passage through the cypress trees. I turn left, and in. Jon had warned me about these narrow corridors, because of how easily you are tricked into losing your direction. But the duckweed is thick, lending a breadcrumb path home.
I paddle for a quarter mile and then lay the paddle inside the pirogue and listen. This is when the owls swoop and the wood ducks wade and the water rats rise. But not the alligators. They are here, underneath me, but in hibernation for winter.
The alligator so fascinates Americans that bayou country actually profits immensely from this curiosity common to everyone. There may be more to this than meets the eye: Some scientists believe man instinctually fears crocodiles (alligators are crocodilian lizards).
In his infancy, before technically he was man, our small and monkeylike ancestor Australopithecus was thought to migrate from Savannah to Indian ocean seasonally. He was what primatologists might call a generalist species: utilizing different skills to find different types of food.
This act would have required him to move through the great East African swamps of this era. Some argue further that this swimming through swamps would naturally have been dangerous - Australopithecus was prey, and especially so from the crocodile. By learning to wade upright, he naturally selected himself into walking man. What this theory means is a lot of your ancestors may have been crocodile food. And that maybe the crocodiles made man stand on two feet.
Perhaps I forgot to tell you. I am trespassing. The oil companies own this water. So many travel writers are paid to write about hotels and resorts and destinations that it is only appropriate that another kind of travel writer exists – one who goes where nobody wants him, just to even things out.
