Jim Bradshaw
On the official Louisiana road map, the town of Plaquemine on the Mississippi River and St. Martinville on Bayou Teche are only 3.5 inches apart. That’s about 35 miles. But those miles cross the heart of the Atchafalaya Basin, a place travelers have described for centuries as one of the wildest, prettiest, lushest, scariest, and fascinating places in North America.
Even today it is not so very different in some remote spots from what William Darby saw it in 1815. He described its “awful lonesomeness,” the “windings and intricate bendings” of its waterways, the “rich green of forest trees ... rendered venerable by ... long trains of ... Spanish moss.” It is a place, he said, where “the imagination fleets back towards the birth of nature, when a new creation started.”
An anonymous writer described it in 1842: “The huge trunks of the cypress trees, which stand four or five feet asunder, shot up to a height of fifty feet, entirely free from branches, which then, however, spread out at right angles to the stem, making the trees appear like gigantic umbrellas, and covering the whole morass with an impenetrable roof, through which not even a sunbeam could find passage. Within this realm could be found thousands, tens of thousands, of birds and reptiles, alligators, enormous bullfrogs, night owls, anhingas, herons (all of whose dwellings were in the mud of the swamp or its leaky roof, [and which] now lifted up their voices bellowing, hooting, shrieking, and groaning.
“Bursting forth from the obscene retreat in which they had hitherto lain hidden, the alligators raised their hideous snouts [through] the green coating of the swamp, gnashing their teeth, and straining toward us, while the owls and other birds circled round our heads, flapping and striking us with their wings as they passed.”
Another anonymous writer crossed the basin by steamboat in 1830, and recorded this:
“As we passed up the Mississippi ... to [Plaquemine] bayou, our steamer edged along ... a huge drift of stuff, lodged at the junction ... and, above this ... was another raft ... threatening as a nest of snakes. Between these two rafts the water draws in from the Mississippi with great force.
“Our boat... passed [the bayou entrance] ... until her bows were nearly opposite ... the upper raft, when all of a sudden ... she turned her snout towards the opening between the rafts, and in a few moments ... plunged into one of the most crooked, uncivilized bayous that nature ever invented. It is so crooked that a water snake would be likely to lose the channel and run into the woods … [but] suddenly, the channel takes a short crook, and the waters roll around a point, and the steamboat saves her bacon and moves on.”
Boatloads of visitors get a calmer view of the Basin these days. Tourist officials say one of their goals is to make the Atchafalaya Basin a household name like the Everglades. They put emphasis on the scenic beauty of the place, the bird watching possibilities, fishing and hunting opportunities, and talk less about alligators with “hideous snouts” or an “obscene retreat” as “threatening as a nest of snakes.”
But even though the tour boats never threaten to run off into the woods and owls hardly ever wing-whip anybody anymore, it’s still possible to get a sense of the awful lonesomeness and power of nature embodied in our magnificent wetland wilderness.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.