It’s interesting how certain places don’t just stay in memory. They rise—slow and strange—from the deep, surfacing during times of struggle, when something in us yearns for the wild places. The ones that remain abandoned, but steady and true. Sometimes, when life throws you into muddy waters, it’s the swamp that returns, again and again. The memory filters through the brackishness of digital noise and soul-numbing distractions, until all that remains is a breeze, a stillness, and the hazy echo of a pirogue gliding through the reeds.
Back in 1991, when I was twenty-two, I’d been living in Lafayette, Louisiana, for about a year and a half when a friend of mine invited me to her home in Houma, just two hours away from Lafayette. I was there for just two days, but the visit would have the greatest impact on how I learned to appreciate the Deep South, its people, its architecture, its swampy landscape, its trees and, of course, its soul. During this time, I acquired an ear for the southern voice and accent: varied, slow, sometimes with a drawl or a slur. Whatever the style of speech, Louisianians always commanded my attention, not only because I found their manner of speaking difficult, as a newcomer, to understand, but also because their stories were so colourful, and their food just added to the sense of untamed bounty.
I arrived that day completely unaware that my friend, Jeanelle Duplantis, came from a long line of traditions. Her grandmother was French, her father Cajun, and her mother Cajun with Houma ancestry—all descendants from a line of crawfish trappers who had worked the wetlands for generations. This meant that they all spoke different dialects, and when they spoke English, each and every one of them had a distinct accent and mannerism that demanded I pay close attention so as not to continually say, “Excuse me?” “Pardon?” “Huh?”
That afternoon, I listened, intently, to the mother’s long drawl as she proudly recounted some story of an ancestor who once disappeared for a week into the swamps and came back with a string of catfish, a fever and a vision that he would one day open a bait shop at the edge of the bayou where, rumor had it, the catfish were fat and the mud was said to be filled with gold. All the while, I stared at the pile of crawfish that the grandmother had kindly laid out for me on a piece of newspaper, with a cold beer to accompany such an exquisite meal. Lunch was simple, to the point. “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” she said. I knew the phrase meant something about having a good time, to enjoy the food or the time among friends and family. In good cheer, we travel through life.
Immediately, I took a long swig of beer, even though I’d never liked the taste. But better to do something productive with my hands than to figure out how to eat the boiled crustaceans and make a fool out of myself. I saw no utensils on the table, so I waited with the beer in hand as they all began to dig into the pile of crawfish. I observed, carefully, their hands dismantling crawfish after crawfish with a sort of elegance. I found the whole act dizzying and extremely hard to follow, but after about ten minutes of trying to peel the beasts, I learned to grab the mudbug firmly with one hand on one end and with the other hand on the other end. I twisted the tail away from the head, peeled the shell from the tail and grabbed the pink flesh and ate. At first, I tasted an earthy, muddy flavour, all the while knowing that these crustaceans live and feed at the bottom of brooks, streams and swamps where all debris, animal and plant waste settle, as Jeanelle’s father had laboriously recounted to me just minutes before sitting down to eat. I tried to remove from my mind the image of the crawfish scavenging in the mud and eating dead material. I could tell the thought was interfering with my attempt to peel these hardy bugs. They looked like miniature lobsters but felt like something far more primal—prehistoric, almost. Their shells were thick, and their little black eyes seemed to mock my hesitation. Finally, after the seventh one, I could distinguish a mild sweet taste that motivated me to continue to grab, pull, peel and eat. To my surprise, a rhythm took over, and with each crustacean, I felt myself surrendering to the experience of sitting down with strangers who felt like family.
I went through this ritual thirty more times until I was full and content and, without even realising it, something of a novice expert at peeling crawfish. But more than that, I had crossed some invisible threshold. I realised that I wasn’t just tasting a local delicacy; I was learning something about patience, about belonging, about letting a place feed you in more ways than one.
Two hours later, we stepped outside into the still, oven-like heat and leaned against the veranda rail. Just ahead, about twenty feet from the house, a body of water shimmered faintly beneath the haze. At the time, I didn’t know it was a cypress swamp—part of an ancient wetland system meant to slow down coastal erosion, absorb floodwaters, and act as a natural filter for the land’s runoff. I hadn’t yet learned that these swamps were the lungs and kidneys of the region, breathing moisture into the air, sifting through what the land could no longer hold.
To me, it looked like a gloomy, brackish pond with tucked-away shadows. Moss-draped cypress trees rose like sentinels from the water, their trunks thick and flared at the base, knees jutting up from the shallows like half-submerged sculptures. Pale bark peeled in places, revealing a deep russet beneath, and tangled roots reached into the mud below. The air smelled of decay and earth. Insects buzzed in the silence. Bits of floating algae and duckweed drifted along the surface, and every now and then a ripple hinted at something moving just beneath. It wasn’t just a pond. It was a living, breathing body—strange, but somehow sacred.
Yes, the whole scene stood out like an old black-and-white film—grainy and underexposed—without a clear plot, just a string of cues that stirred something deep. Lingering. Arising. Without warning, I found myself cast into stillness, my past flickering across the mind’s screen, drawing out unresolved feelings I had buried alive, and the silences I once accepted in the name of peace. Or was it fear? And the long string of almost microscopic aggressions eroding the softer parts of me one grain at a time, until, like the swamp, it was time to stop holding the weight.
The heat, the hush, the thick air—it was all too much. The wetland, shadowed and dense, mirrored something within me: the emotional sediment collected over years of either too much motion or too much paralysis. Grief. Betrayal. Loss of Sovereignty. The longing to step away from what I had outgrown, even as part of me clung out of habit. Or was it hope?
And still, the swamp did not judge. It absorbed everything without resistance. The mess, the grief, the confusion—it took it all in. It waited, unbothered, for me to let go of what no longer served, what wounded more than it ever nurtured, what I had carried for far too long out of habit, out of fear, or out of some misplaced sense of duty. Nothing about it asked me to explain. In its presence, something shifted. A sliver of light filtered through the canopy, casting slow-moving shadows across the water. My thoughts uncoiled. A tightness I hadn’t even known was there began to loosen. My soul eased into that humid cradle of the South. And for a moment, I wanted to laugh, to weep, to call out: Laissez les bons temps rouler.
Suddenly, I spotted tiny bulbous spheres floating in the still waters of the swamp. Curious, I pointed and asked, “What’s that?” Even as the words left my mouth, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was supposed to know this piece of information. They stared for a moment, frowned, tilted their heads, then burst out laughing. “L’eau plein the cocodries! C’est le Bayou.” That’s right! The water was full of alligators, their bulbous eyes peeking just above the surface, still as stones.
I was expected to know this, because for some Cajun folk, life on the bayou isn’t just a geographic feature, it’s the whole world. And though I wasn’t born in Cajun country, I had never seen a swamp or marsh—let alone an alligator—if you’re there, sitting elbow-to-elbow, peeling crawfish with juice running down your fingers, then for that moment, you’re Cajun. It doesn’t matter if you’re from the snowscapes of Michigan, the dry deserts of California, or halfway across the world. The swamp is a living presence—omniscient, omnipresent—part of the land, yes, but also lodged in the memory and muscle of those who’ve been shaped by loss, by hard-won joy, by the wisdom of letting go. It was there, gliding through the reeds, in that recurring memory, that I began to learn what it meant to surrender. To stop clinging, and to let the good times roll.
That’s life on the bayou.
