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Awakening to thunder from a late afternoon nap,
flashes of brilliant lightning lanced through
the windows, burning my eyes with white magic.
There were massive black storm clouds outside
the window when I peeked through the curtains.
Though there was no place I needed to go, I put
on my shoes, grabbed my keys and went to the
truck, feeling the need to chase the storm.
Author Sherman Alexie once noted that some children
aren't really children at all, they are pillars of
fire which burn everything they touch; and there
are some children who are pillars of ash, and fall
apart if you touch them. I am a child of the storm.
Born in the eye of a 1964 hurricane, I am a child
of wind, and of water.
Across the miles along the road of my life, I have
always chased storms. I feel an affinity with them,
some kinship which trembles and sparks in air
charged by the lightning. So not really knowing
where I would go, I chased the storm broiling to
the north, and the road led me to the Atchafalaya
Basin Protection Levee, which I crossed and found
myself on the southern shore of Grande Lake.
Ama'tpan na'mu. Beneath my feet, the broken white
clamshell was like bleached bone. It stretched out
for half a mile to the east and west, a fingernail
of raised mound deposited here a basketful at a time
by my ancestors. This was Ama'tpan na'mu, a very
large village which looked out over part of Sheti,
that great series of interconnected lakes from which
we took our name in kinship.
I parked the truck away from the attendant's shack,
for today this is a boat landing, bulldozed at some
point in the early part of the century so that
fisherman could launch into Grande Lake here. I can
still walk along the edge and find bits of broken
pottery, some plain, some ornate. When I was a
child, I would stand here with my father and we
couldn't see the other side of Grande Lake, but
decades of man's tampering with nature have taken
their toll, and the northern bank is now easily
visible. Grande Lake is but a shadow of its former
self. Much like the people who share its ancestral
name.
Over that now-near treeline of cypress and willows,
a blackness as absolute as midnight churned and
spit silver fire at the earth. The bolts found
some ground below, discharged into the swampy
watersways beyond. It was here, on Ama'tpan na'mu,
that an entire village stared in amazement as a
Spanish ship sailed up Grande Lake, having entered
the Atchafalaya River from the Gulf of Mexico and
made their way north. These were no mere Spanish
colonists, no priests and missionaries: These were
Consquistadors, set upon their mission by God,
they supposed.
We call it The Beach now. It rather looks, from a
distance, like a white sandy beach, until closer
examination reveals the crushed and compacted
clamshell. The clam species rangia was abundant
when these lakes were sometimes brackish, and
Chitimacha would feast on them, using the discarded
shells as a sort of building material, a pre-historic
concrete as it were. It kept their feet out of the
mud in Louisiana's frequent rains, provided a stable
base for erecting palmetto huts, and the stark
whiteness of it was a pristine backdrop to easily
see a big, black water moccasin snake slithering
up on the children.
Overhead, silver warriors throw spears from inside
the black clouds, spears which turn into jagged,
spectacular lightning bolts. The crash of them
is created by a thunderbird, lurking somewhere
in those same billows, beating its wings like
a gargantuan raptor. There is no rain. I watch
the lightning, not a second goes by without a
magnificient blast of power, pitched down by
silver-faced dead.
When the galleons arrived on Grande Lake and
approached Ama'tpan na'mu, the na'ta of the
village refused them. He forbade them to come
ashore. If I look beyond the scattered wreckage
of old oil drums lashed together as buoys,
derelict boat trailers and assorted metal and
wooden junk, I can nearly see small children,
their faces stricken with amazement, looking
out at these huge wooden vessels with their
great sails, the strange, iron-clad men upon
them, their faces so pale and bearded. I can
see the na'ta, standing firm in his protection
of a single village among dozens in the nation.
What might have gone through his mind? Surely he
could not have imagined that he was the first to
witness the end, those who would, with the passing
of time, reduce his thriving nation from tens of
thousands to a handful of survivors numbering less
than one hundred.
If I follow the village shell bank by boat, as I
did last spring, to the east away from the ramp,
there are shallows in which huge redears gather
for a short few days each year. I chased them
with the rod, they were fat and bold. They had
come from the few remaining depths of Grande Lake
to make their spawning nests in the hard shell
shallows of Ama'tpan na'mu, where nearly five
hundred years ago, the village na'ta refused
the Spanish, and steel was brandished, cold and
glistening white, like the lightning bolts
crashing and crackling with power out across
the lake.
It saddens me, sometimes, that we do not know his
name, that na'ta, the chief of the village of
Ama'tpan na'mu who stood, surely afraid and
uncertain of his actions, against their blades.
But the Spanish were beaten back, forced to leave,
and they made their way down the lake and river,
accosted by Chitimacha warriors all along the way
as the alarm was sounded from village to village.
Eventually they reached the safety of the Gulf of
Mexico, and that first tragic encounter ended.
Traveling northwest by boat, I can enter the terribly
shallow waters of Cok'tangi, "pond lily worship place,"
which the Spanish called Grande Avoille Cove. The
levee intersects it now, and its other half to the
south is a favorite spot for fishing bream and bass
in the spring, though in the summer it's shallow
waters are too hot to support much of a fish
population. If I travel southeast, around Taylor's
Point and into the river proper, I can traverse the
entire Atchafalaya basin with its winding oilfield
canals, natural bayous, hidden ponds and pools.
But lighting is flashing everywhere, and thunder
is resonating, trembling the clamshell mound. The
storm is moving just north of me, to the southwest,
and skirting the edge of the lake. I can see gray
rain coming. Soon it will fall and Ama'tpan na'mu
will glisten under it. A chief, when the word na'ta
was no longer used, is buried somewhere on this
mound, forbidden interment in Christian cemeteries
during the mid-1800s, for after the Spanish retreated
that fateful day, they made alliances with another
tribe far to the east, and returned in force. The
first chapter in the demise of the people of the
lake was written in the war that followed.
Ama'tpan na'mu was long dead, it's people scattered
and decimated, when the Union army landed here to
assault rebel troops stationed in Franklin in what
would become known as the Battle of Irish Bend, just
a skirmish by most reckonings, but a part of local
history and folklore. Irish Bend is Oku'nkiskin,
"old man's shoulder," a steep twist of Bayou
Teche to the southeast.
The storm is passing, carrying its spears of lightning
and silver warriors with it. Clearing skies behind,
peeking sunshine and scattered rain. I am reminded
that I have not fished this side of the levee since
last year. Perhaps I'll bring the boat some weekend
soon, put it over into Grande Lake from the shell
beach of Ama'tpan na'mu. I have probably missed
the big redears, what we here call chinquapin, but
there are still bream and bass moving along the
canals and through the cypress.
I start the truck and head for home, leaving the
old village behind, white and still. I make my
way home, to T'kasi'tunshki, which the French
named Charenton. As I am climbing the road which
crosses the levee, in the rearview mirror I can
almost see, in the gray misting of rain augmented
by a few shining sunbeams far behind, massive,
parchment-colored sails, mahogany bows, glistening
swords, and one steadfast man standing at the water's
edge on Ama'tpan na'mu. His name is forgotten, but
his courage will live on in the hearts of some long
after the storms have passed. ~ Roger
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