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It's in the seventies here at the beginning of January.
I am coming off the edge of a brutal head and chest cold
that persisted from Christmas Day until now, and I'm just
managing to venture outside other than when absolutely
necessary.
The mercury is flip-flopping. Cold as the dickens one week
or two weeks, then warms for a spell, then back to cold.
We've had frost this year, but no real freezes. Normally I'd
worry that without a couple of dips into the twenties, the
vegetative growth of last summer would not be killed off in
the shallows. But we've had so little rain over the last
few months water levels all over southern Louisiana are
extraordinarily low. This is killed most of the intrusive
vegetation already.
There's no sense even going out in the boat, though on
warm days when my head is cleared from the congestion and
I'm not coughing my lungs out the urge is strong. I'd likely
crash my lower unit into a log or stump with the water as
low as it is now. The dog and I walk behind my house, along
Bayou Teche, and mudflats extend three dozen yards from either
shore to where the channel suddenly deepens in the center of
the bayou. I've never seen it this low. We need rain, and
plenty of it.
The dog, a black lab female of about ten, is exuberant. During
my illness she hadn't gotten out of the fenced-in yard enough,
so I was sure to bring her for a walk soon as I felt up to it.
She finds scent after scent in the brown carpet of cypress needles,
follows one to the shoreline edge and halts at the flat of mud
beyond. She cocks her head curiously at the path the scent
continues on.
Some critter walked through the mud from the bank to a cypress
tree ten feet out. Normally the tree's trunk is in six or eight
inches of water, but it's exposed now. I can't tell what kind
of small animal it was that walked out to that tree because
the silty mud holds no definition in the tracks, but the animal
must have climbed into the tree and vanished into thin air,
because there are no return tracks and I can see nothing in
the tree.
This lot, and the house upon it, were my grandparents' abode,
but the house was built in about 1840 by Alexander Darden, a
great-great-great of mine. He was chief of the tribe at the
time. I grew up with my parents nearby, and we had perhaps ten
acres between us. This bay-ouside was my haunt as a child. Now
there are two other homes between mine and what is now my mom's,
so I don't trespass between the two. But in my youth it was my
wonderland. We kept horses here, two quarter horses named Tee
Boy and Kate, and a Tennessee Walker named, aptly enough, Walker.
Kate and I shared the exact same birthdate, and she was the
fastest horse on the Rez, bar none. My first was a pony, a
Shetland named Nancy. Even after I outgrew her, we kept Nancy
around as a beloved member of the family.
When I was eight I was given my first Daisy BB gun. At age ten,
I received my first pellet gun, an aged Benjamin that to this
day is still the straightest-shooting gun of any kind I have
ever fired. At age twelve, my first shotgun, a dog-leg .410 that
was my grandfather's. I was afraid of it at first, the recoil
and the boom, but got over it soon enough. I would stalk the
bay ouside with it, never shot anything, and except for a couple
of years hunting quail in the sugar cane fields and rabbit near
the lake before giving it up for good, I was never much into
hunting. I still love a fine shotgun, though, and keep one
handy just in case the urge ever strikes again.
But all that was a long time ago. I walk part of that land,
perhaps seventy-five yards of it, now with the sweet old lab
Daisy. She is really my girlfriend's dog, but she's nice
enough to share her with me. I'm not sure if my girlfriend's
sharing Daisy or Daisy's sharing Susan sometimes, but that's
how it goes. She's brisk and energetic for a ten-year-old,
lean and fit, with the disposition of a lamb and great
obedience but a menacing growl and roar for suspected
intruders. She would have made a great bird dog, to be
sure, but she's an even better companion walking the
bayouside in January, thinking about years gone by and
the flats left behind.
I realize most folks don't have such attachment to the
land they were born and reared on, and I know I am blessed.
Those of us who do, we take its changes and movements in
stride, but there are memories around every tree trunk,
ghosts behind each ridge, voices on every breeze. Daisy
rolls in the grass playfully and for a moment she is a
German shepherd named Lady, or a Springer named Shadow,
an old hound named Bootsie. Now and then I pass an old
water oak and the horizontal scars precisely spaced up
its trunk to about level with my chest remind me of the
barbed wire fence that used to be there to contain the
horses.
Were I still a hunter, perhaps I'd be in a duck blind
or a deer stand this weekend, and yes, it'd be good to
be in the basin, in the wild, near water however shallow
and dingy. But I count my blessings that at least I don't
live on some cramped municipal street, or in some apartment
complex or even on a sprawling acreage without nearby
neighbors yet still far from water. I'm not being judgmental
of those who live in such places, please understand. But
I know that being there would diminish my spirit like some
crippling disease, if not drive me mad.
Across the bayou from where the dog and I stand looking
around is a cypress tree from which a thick rope hangs by
one of the topmost branches. Generations of Chitimacha
children have learned to swim from this tree. It's a stout
and strong old tree and at it's base is a deep hole in Bayou
Teche suitable for jumping from the rope or diving from the
branches. The kids still come to it now and then. Sometimes
they irritate me with their language or their loud music or
just because I'm trying to tightline a spinning rod with a
glob of earthworms for catfish on a hot summer day. But I'm
sure I irritated my elders too, so I just let it go.
Let it go. That's what it seems like to me, here on the edge
of Bayou Teche, where I've lived for more than four decades,
where my family's lived for at least one hundred and sixty
years and where my people have been for eight millennia. It
seems like the rivulets and eddies of time and space converge
here, at least for me. The dog comes and nuzzles my hand and
I scratch behind her ear. We both sigh in contentment at the
same time, and I laugh at the coincidence. The sound of it
makes her leap away, spinning joyous circles around me. I
throw her a stick and she gallops for it, brings it back,
wide-eyed and ears perked for a redux. We throw sticks and
retrieve them, making our way back to the old house, and
the timelessness within. ~ Roger
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