|
"It's
thin there," he said, looking over the lake at the lights dancing
above Peach Coulee after we had settled down, offered him a beer.
"Thin," he repeated, taking the beer and then he nodded to us
knowingly and took his leave.
|
When
the water
is high and the color of stained parchment, I ponder maps and search
for hidden sloughs and canals, ponds tucked away in farm fields I might
be able to get permission to fish, little remnants of much larger lakes
deep in the swamp, hopefully on public land. The digital age has
simplified this: Rather than trekking to the parish courthouse to dig
out maps from various agriculture, forestry and tax assessment agencies,
attention to Louisiana's coastal erosion problems has yielded a plethora
of online mapping resources. Stunning satellite imagery has been made
available to the general public.
There is a canal on the north shore of Lake Fausse Pointe
in southern Louisiana called Peach Coulee. It is a place of mystery and
stirring, restless ghosts.
No one is sure why it was named Peach Coulee. It is a
natural canal, not one of the many manmade channels dug during the
logging days of Louisiana. Its east bank is, for quite a stretch, topped
by prehistoric Indian construction. Winding from the lake down the
coulee's shallow spine, off the boat's starboard gunnels there are
occasional glimpses of white clam shell peeking out like bleached bone,
indications of my forebears. But I have never found a piece of broken
pottery on that shell embankment. Unlike most of the other ancient
Chitimacha sites I have located and visited, I cannot guess its purpose
or use. The Indians avoided the place in recent memory, told stories
about it to frighten the young away. My grandfather hunted pirate's
treasure there, for it was long rumored that the infamous pirate Jean
Lafitte used Peach Coulee as a hideout. My grandfather said that when he
was a young boy, the very tip of a sailing mast was visible at the mouth
of the coulee. They would dive from it to swim in the coulee. Over
the decades it sank into the mud and vanished.
He also said that, during the Great Depression, he and a
friend earned money by picking Spanish moss from the overhanging limbs
along the lake, While in Peach Coulee, they noticed a cypress knee
shaped like a saddle. Nearby was a pile of oyster shell.
"Looks like some old Indian sat down for his lunch
there," he laughed. They passed the spot for months each time they
picked moss in Peach Coulee. Finally he got to wondering about the spot,
and went back to find it, but both the cypress knee and shells were
gone.
There are many stories about Peach Coulee. Most I disregard
as fabrication, though who am I to judge another man's stories? Tales of
headless women; monstrous, shadowy beasts with red eyes; hanging nooses
strung from tree limbs, wooden crucifixes that appear and disappear at
random. I know that it is a place of power, though I have never seen
anything within it to describe. Yet it is always silent within Peach
Coulee, no birds, no croaking frogs. My father and I took many fine bass
and bluegill from that little slough, but we never stayed there long.
Trees sway and twist in the breeze within Peach Coulee, except that
there is no breeze.
Many ages ago - after the onset of the Great Sadness that
began on this continent five centuries ago - a Chitimacha family was
searching for food when a white deer appeared near them. Though it was
forbidden to harm such an animal, their hunting grounds had diminished
greatly, and they killed, cooked and ate it. After their hunger was
satiated, the old people say, each member of the family stood up, as if
in a trance, and walked deliberately into the lake, never to be heard
from again, at least in their human form. Yet it is said among my people
that they sometimes emerge from the lake as balls of fire, penance for
their crime being eternity in such form.
And when I was a teenager, my friends and I would camp on
the eastern shore of Lake Fausse Pointe. Nearly every time we were
there, late at night, we would see them: Four bright lights, circling
over the northern shore of the lake, over Peach Coulee. They danced
there, nearly jubilant, almost frenzied. We could never explain their
source.
An old fisherman, heading home late after dark with a skiff
full of dying catfish, stopped near our campsite as we were watching the
lights dance over Peach Coulee. We were teenagers, hiding our beer and
smoking cigarettes out by the lake where the only eyes were those of
nutria and the occasional waterfowl. He scared the beejezus out of us,
approaching from across the lake in the shadows of the moon. Drifting up
to the bank and calling in a way that was little more than a guttural
growl, we nearly leaped out of our skins.
"It's thin there," he said, looking over the lake
at the lights dancing above Peach Coulee after we had settled down,
offered him a beer. "Thin," he repeated, taking the beer and
then he nodded to us knowingly and took his leave.
I didn't know what he meant at the time, but I think I do
now. There are places in the world where the boundaries between this
world and the next, the separations of the seen and the unseen, are not
so substantial. I first heard the quavering voice of the old fisherman
use thin to describe such locations. Peach Coulee is one of the thin
places, and now and then, the comfortable lines we depend on to organize
and make safe our world bend, converge and overlap.
Likely most of us who seek out and relish wild lands and
waters far and away know such places. A crawl on the nape of the neck, a
twilight with odd luminescence or a call in the trees not quite
recognizable…some signal or another that something here is…thin. Not
quite separated from what comes next or has come before.
There are times when I wonder if the old fisherman who
stopped by that night came from within the lines of comfort, or behind
the thin places.
I go there still, chasing fish. The coulee forks not far
from the lake, and the east channel eventually ends at a rise in the
topography. My grandfather said there had been a farmhouse there, though
it had long been abandoned even when he was a boy. He stumbled on it
while treasure hunting. He met an old black gentleman who told him a
story at the local waterin' hole one night. The man had been but a lad,
and somewhere at the back of Peach Coulee, a group of white men dug a
massive pit. They had erected a tall fence around the site, and he was
not allowed within.
As he was standing there trying to get a look, the man told
my grandfather decades later, he suddenly noticed a small woman by his
side. She said to him, in a language he should not have understood but
somehow did, "What are you doing here? This is not for you,"
and she promptly picked him up and threw him over the fence.
At the exact moment he fell, hard and bruised, to the
ground, the men digging the pit emerged, screaming in terror, running.
The young bystander, his own eerie experience with the small woman now
compounded by the mass hysteria, fled with them. Later, he told my
grandfather, he learned that the white men in the pit had looked up from
its depths, and they saw other men in uniforms standing around the edge.
My grandfather suspected they were military uniforms, perhaps French or
even Spanish. They were firing down into the pit with muskets, though
the diggers heard no sound. Yet, when they looked at each other, they
saw horrifying wounds.
Now convinced that there had been a treasure excavation
ongoing, my grandfather asked the old gentleman if he remembered where
that spot was in the back of Peach Coulee. He said he did, and promised
to take my grandfather there. They set a time of six o'clock, after my
grandfather got off work.
He was half an hour late. Walking up the driveway, he met someone
coming out of the house.
"Where's Mister Beau?" my grandfather asked the
other man. I don't know what his name really was, that was never passed
down to me.
The other man shook his head sadly, hat grasped in his hand
in respect.
"He died at six o'clock," he said.
I go to Peach Coulee when I can. It does not frighten me,
though I do not go at night. When I reach the edge of the finger of
clamshell lining the east bank, I sprinkle tobacco over the ancient
embankment and into the green-black water. Whatever spirits there seem
to be appeased. I fish the channel down to the fork, follow it as far as
there is enough water to float the boat. There are big bluegill there in
the spring, coming into the shallows to spawn, and in the summer, the
occasional old and seasoned largemouth lurks under a canopy of
overhanging cypress limbs.
They like the hardpack shell along the east bank.
Now and then, when the trees sway in air still as stone, or
when silence becomes deafening enough to raise the hair on the back of
my neck, I understand that this is still one of the thin places. It
causes me no alarm. It is but one part, a facet of the whole, of my
world.
***
So I sit with a mug of coffee, hot and black like Cajun and
Chitimacha half-breed dreams, and look over maps and images, searching
for sparkles of water. The winter had been none too severe, really, but
not mild. There had been no hard freeze of the kind necessary to keep
the water hyacinth and hydrilla at bay. Scrolling and mousing and
clicking my way around St. Mary Parish from a synchronous orbit above
the planet, I laugh when I consider what my grandfathers must think of
their descendant searching so for fish.
I found a little pond on the map that happened to exist in
a state wildlife management area, not far from Peach Coulee. It was well
into the woods, through what appeared to be relatively high ground, or
at the worst nothing a good pair of knee-high rubber boots couldn't
handle. It was, I thought, worth going to take a look at and late winter
was the best time, with the snakes down and duck and deer season just
over.
One day when the weather was not quite so cold I readied
myself. I have a sort of backpack that is a tackle bag where I keep all
my gear. I slipped a rod tube containing my vintage bamboo Granger
Victory fly rod into the straps on its side, along with a graphite
backup rod. Thick rubber boots - usually called Cajun Nikes here - and a
small caliber pistol on my hip just in case. A handheld GPS I left at
home; it would be useless in the dense cypress and tupelo stands, but I
brought a trusted compass. I was a little worried about my pickup, but
found a nice niche in the tree line to conceal it from all but the most
curious of passersby.
I hoisted my pack on my back, put my fedora on my head and
headed into the brown jungle. Within moments the truck was out of sight,
and then the road, and the distant drone of occasional passing vehicles.
Moments after that, there were no reminders on the ground: No beer cans,
no worm buckets, no orange plastic tape on the trees. A couple of wild
hogs, big and brown and snorting, scared up within fifty feet of me and,
chortling angrily, stalked off while I stood there with my hand on my
pistol. Wild hogs can either be timid or ferocious. These two big sows
were apparently somewhere in between, because they grudgingly took their
leave at my intrusion, but scolded me harshly as they departed.
I checked my compass to make sure I had not strayed too far
off course: Perfect, still. I nodded smugly at my woodsman's abilities,
but reminded myself that being too confident was tempting fate. On I
went, noticing huge fallen cypress logs that would bring thousands of
dollars for their heartwood, and smiled with satisfaction that they'd
never, ever be harvested or see the saw. A pair of wood ducks took
flight as I passed, whistling. Now and then, though, the bright red and
brass of an expended shotgun shell on the ground reminded me that I was
still far too close to civilization, far too lodged in linear time.
Something rumbled to the northwest and I cursed angrily. I
had the good sense to check the weather forecast before departure, and
there had been only a small chance of rain for the day. The adage,
"If you don't like the weather in Louisiana, stick around a
minute," may have been adopted by other members of the Union, but
it was definitely birthed here. I was probably nearly halfway to the
pond, if it indeed still existed and was not merely a low spot in the
woods no more than three inches deep. The canopy of cypress was thick
though defrocked for the winter. I decided to continue, congratulating
myself for packing my rain gear in my bag.
It's tempting to imagine that I was seeing the swamp like it was
five hundred years ago, but I knew better. All the trees around me were
second and third growth after the lumberjacks deforested Louisiana of
cypress and most of its oak. Who knows what spirits they freed or
banished, depending on its nature, with their saws? After that, invasive
and secondary species had settled in, forever changing the landscape.
But I could dream, perhaps, that it was something like this. In fact, I
saw few signs of invasive plants this deep in the wood. Perhaps they did
not do so well under the thick canopy of even successional growth
cypress and tupelo, as these were larger trees than I expected. Now and
then a palmetto patch would appear, green against the stark brown
backdrop, and I was, as always, glad to see it. Chitimacha covered their
huts with these plants, a natural-made shingle of the finest kind. The
gutter-shaped fronds displaced water neatly. But I knew these woods. It
was near here, on the way to Peach Coulee, that friends of mine as teens
found a wooden cross nailed to a tree and a hangman's noose nailed below
it. It was not far from here that there were wild hogs big as men, one
of those same lads' fathers said, and another shot a squirrel that
screamed like a man until it broke its neck in the fall. In those woods,
just off the lake, headless women floated through the trees and red-eyed
beasts stared back at hunters in their deer stands.
It's thin there. Thin.
At last I detected an opening in the distance and the
familiar dank of swamp water. I reminded myself it still might be
nothing but a puddle, or it might be choked full of water hyacinth since
the aerials were shot. But I emerged from the trees and there it was, a
little pond, just less than an acre, nestled into the woods. I saw no
bobbers, no monofilament line and no cellophane. Could it possibly have
gone unnoticed? I had walked perhaps forty minutes to reach it, and
since it was public land all the way and I had seen the few shotgun
shells farther back, it would seem like someone should have been here.
Bass fishermen, bait fisherman, a duck blind in a patch of reeds. But I
saw nothing to indicate anyone had been there since my ancestors were
unfettered.
Poking around with a fallen tree branch revealed the pond
had some depth to it, and I was so encouraged and excited I dropped the
mid section of my rod twice trying to mate the ferrules. I had the tip
on in three tries and strung it up. There were no signs of life on the
surface, no rises, but that meant little. It was midday, temperatures
hovering around fifty-five. I had no room for a back cast but the pond
was shaped oddly enough that I could stand sideways to it and work
various juttings and pointings along its margins. I opted for a small
Clouser minnow, about a size six, to descend slowly and probe the pond's
depths.
Rumbling to the northwest again troubled me, and over the
trees I could see the sky darkening. Forty or so minutes back to the
truck. I had my boots on. Would the lightning be ground-contacting?
Lightning always is unpredictable, of course. But I couldn't turn from
this little pond, now that I was there. My grandfather claimed that if
you find pirate's treasure you mustn't leave it. It would vanish before
you returned. You mustn't curse or turn your back on it, he said. I was
afraid this little pond - its potential still unknown - would dissipate
into some marginal place if I departed, turned back by a little rain and
thunder. Notions like that may defy sensibilities reared and honed on
city streets and in office buildings and urban sprawl, but they are at
home in the swamp. They are indigenous where places are barely real,
places were my ancestors might dance, in the back ends of dark canals.
It can only be sensed in the swamp, the power and substance of such
notions.
I focused on my fishing. If I were a vintage bamboo fly
rod, I mused, I'd like to be a Granger. No doubt about it,
when it came to the classics I never held one I liked more than a
Granger. Some might say it's long and heavy at nine feet, and to be
certain, the Victory's tip-top might well have been touching the
darkening clouds above me. I set the Clouser into a patch of reeds, let
it settle for a moment then began a slow, steady strip in. A Granger, I
mused, has no illusions of grandeur such as a Leonard might hold, but
holds its head higher than a hardware-store bin Montague, for goodness
sake. It would probably share a beer with a Heddon, make fun of
blueblood Winstons and sadly mourn the plight of the common rods piling
up in hardware stores everywhere.
Thunder rattled and a gust of wind twisted the bare cypress
tops. I swung the Clouser out and set it back a little over to the right
from its previous spot, stripped in slowly. Nothing. Perhaps the cold
had put any fish down? The pond might have been deeper in the center. I
sent it there next with a pathetic roll cast, letting the Clouser settle
longer, began a different strip, much slower, much longer between pulls.
A glimpse of something out the corner of my eye made me
look up, but I couldn't be sure it was anything more than a roll of the
clouds, a billow expanding and collapsing, churning along as the
thunderhead moved just north of me. I could tell by the flow of clouds
that it would likely miss my location by only half a mile, tops. I was
hopeful, anyway.
Another cast into the pond, fanning. I stripped slow, but I
realized the water was shallow. Hidden there in the trees with little
sunlight throughout the day, it would be colder than a deeper pond.
Largemouth and bream within would be sluggish, reluctant. And the
threatening shadow of the clouds darted across the curve of the
Granger's nickel silver ferrules.
I took the rod down. The storm worried me, and a dozen
casts had produced no hits. I decided I would return when the weather
warmed but before the snakes became active again. I was sure there had
to be something there in that secluded little pond. When the cane was
back in the sock and tube, I looked up at the clouds again and it might
have been great wings up there, gargantuan and black, or it might have
been a purple spot on my cornea. I don't know.
But I do know that I didn’t go back that spring
because the fishing elsewhere was so excellent. I did go in the fall,
but whether because of the hurricanes that wracked Louisiana that summer
or some thinness of being, I could never find that little pond again.
Gone, as if it had never existed at all.
|
About the Author:
 Roger
Emile Stouff is the son of Nicholas Leonard Stouff Jr., last chief of
the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, and Lydia Marie Gaudet Stouff, a
Cajun belle. He has been a journalist for 25 years and author of the
award-winning column "From the Other Side" in the St. Mary
and Franklin Banner-Tribune. He is the author of Native Waters: A
Few Moments In A Small Wooden Boat, a memoir, and Chasing
Thunderbirds, a collection of short fiction. He has been featured on
"Fly Fishing America" in 2006. He currently resides on the
Chitimacha reservation. |
