The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  I met the late poet and novelist James Dickey at an academic party one night in Wisconsin when I was in my early twenties and he in his late thirties. We got drunk together on red whiskey appalled a professor or two, and then lay down on somebody’s living room floor and arm-wrestled. I beat him, whereupon he grabbed my head joyfully in both his big hands and whooped, “You’re one of mine, goddammit! Boy, you’re one of my own!”

  Periodically throughout my life, maybe once or twice a decade, I meet a woman who instantly makes me want to shout the same thing; I see in a female face a particular shining mingling of beauty, wit, and unabashed appetites, and I just want to pop a straw in that person and drink her. This cannot properly be called a crush. I am a very happily married man, and I get pretty much the same feeling every time I look at my daughter, Greta, and at my seventy-two-year-old quail-hunting friend Peggy Pepper. I just happen to have a strong affinity for lovely, unafraid women with a sweet tooth for life. And here, in Prejean’s Restaurant, was clearly such a woman.

  Over the next two hours or so we drank a few bottles of wine and we ate: shrimp wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon, pepper jack cheese, and grilled tasso, then deep-fried; a pheasant, quail, and andouille sausage gumbo that won the state gumbo championship six years in a row; fire-roasted yellowfin tuna; south Texas blackbuck antelope with black butter crawfish; and Acadian bread pudding with coconut, caramel, and pecan sauce. Rebel Kelley had a Cupid’s-bow mouth painted with ardorous red lipstick, smart, inquisitive eyes, a sense of humor, and an unhidden disdain for regulations. She was thirty-two years old, the age of one of my sons. “We educate and legislate” is all I can remember of what she told me, professionally and at length, about the Coastal Conservation Association. My own professionalism, case-hardened as it usually is on these trips, was already weakened by the wine and the sublime food when Rebel finished it off completely over dessert.

  “You know, my two favorite things in the world,” she said, “are fly-fishing and cocktail dresses.”

  I didn’t grab her head and cry, “You are one of my own!” but I might as well have. “Come with us, Rebel Anne,” I said, sealing my fate and that of my co-road-trippers. “Come with us into the Atchafalaya!”

  “Okay,” she said, “but I have to go get my fly rod first.”

  “Hey, Chuck,” said Jody, when we were back in our rented white Pathfinder with all of his coolers tied messily on top. “I’m still learning the ropes here, so I need you to fill me in on something.”

  “Anything, my boy. Just ask.”

  “What kinda ball is it exactly we gonna be keepin’ our eye on out there in the swamp with Rebel?”

  Well, the thing is, you have to be light on your feet in this road-tripping business, as well as beautifully organized. You have to leave yourself open to a certain amount of serendipity. You can’t afford to be afraid to paddle onto a good wave when it comes along, whether you’re exactly ready for it or not. It would have taken too long to explain all these principles to Jody, so I just decided to let the road be its own hard tutor, as it had to Tom and me.

  “Sportsman’s Paradise” is what the state of Louisiana calls itself on its license plates. Being sportsmen chronically in search of paradise, Montgomery and I had taken that, the very moment we learned about it, as a personal challenge to mount one of our patented sorties of sporting exploration, camaraderie, self-indulgence, mishap, passion, and revelation. We had made similar trips to Montana and Florida, two of a number of states that might legitimately advertise themselves on their license tags as sportsman’s paradises; but it was only Louisiana that had done so. The boldness of that appealed to us—who as road-trippers had learned to value boldness over all—and we determined to put the claim to a fair test.

  We began this trip, as we had our previous one to Florida, in the company of Jimbo Meador. A native of Point Clear, Alabama, Jimbo is my generation’s true Natty Bumppo, the dead-center real thing in a world suddenly full of outdoors knockoffs, who throws a cast net as well as a fly line, who studies birds as lovingly and skillfully as he hunts them.

  “You know why white pelicans have those black feathers on the ends of their wings?” he asked me on the first morning of the trip.

  We were in a custom-built Go-Devil mud skiff with guide Mark Brockhoeft, afloat in a marshy estuarial basin of the Gulf of Mexico near Myrtle Grove, Louisiana. This basin is less than a forty-five-minute drive from the French Quarter of New Orleans, but it might as well have been a two-day drive from any civilization for all the sign of it there. There was not a building, nor a road, nor another boat or angler in sight, though it was a clear, calm, inviting day with a climbing temperature in the fifties. We were stopped for lunch, gunwale to gunwale with the skiff holding Tom and Bubby Rodriguez, who, along with Mark, operates Big Red Guides and Outfitters. Mild winter sunlight lay over everything like a blessing. We drifted, eating subs, talking, and watching birds. In the air and on the water were thousands of birds: ibises, herons, egrets, gadwalls, widgeons, teal, and white pelicans . . .

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “’Cause black feathers have more melanin. They’re stronger. The pelicans need the strength down there to get their lift.” Jimbo is out of that line of Southern boys who kept the Civil War going so long by their riding and shooting and skill in the woods, but mostly by the things they noticed that other people didn’t. “Nature’s really got things figured out,” he said, knowing that to be true, and satisfied and consoled as he has been all his life by that knowledge. He grinned at the gentle noon. “She dudn’ miss a trick.”

  We spent the afternoon as we had the morning, poling through clear, shallow water among islands of golden coontail and widgeon grass, looking for redfish to throw flies to. And finding them. Owing to recent, stunningly successful Gulf Coast conservation efforts, redfish are now present from Texas to Florida in good-old-days numbers. The marshes, bayous, and flats that constitute the coastline of Louisiana have become the nation’s largest fishery and a gigantic nursery for redfish, fattening them on blue crabs, shrimp, and baitfish until they are large enough (at twelve to fifteen pounds) to move offshore. That nursery is a fly-fisher’s playground. At almost any time of year, except during the coldest snaps, Mark and Bubby can put a fly rodder on redfish averaging six to eight pounds—waking, finning, tailing, even “crawling” after food in water so shallow their whole backs are out of it—so many of them that forty to fifty “shots,” or casts to individual, sighted fish, is considered an average day.

  We drifted and caught fish and watched the clouds of ducks trading the bright, empty marsh. And that first day’s mellow, easy abundance seemed a good omen, a promise of largesse to come. The next morning Jimbo went home and Tom and I studied the merry world of New Orleans’ Jackson Square for a while over beignets, fresh orange juice and café au lait at the Café du Monde. Then we walked over to Central Grocery and picked up for our lunch two of the great, greasy meat and olive salad sandwiches known as mufulettas, and drove our Pathfinder west through Baton Rouge and into Cajun country.

  Traveling west on I-10, you enter that country as if through a looking-glass around the town of Henderson. Suddenly all the men seem to be wearing camo. There are hand-lettered signs advertising catfish and gaspereaux, lots of dead dogs and nutria along the roads, alligator-skin stores, raised cemeteries, little roadside crosses commemorating fatal crashes, dual Rottweilers in a few front yards, and bass boats and jet boats in the others. A billboard near Crowley showed us Bubba Oustelet, “Car Dealer of the Year.” A bumper sticker on a camo-painted monster truck said “Coonass and Proud.”

  “Coonass” is a self-embraced nickname for Cajuns. It derives from cunaso, a Carib Indian word (via Spanish), meaning a man who lives simply on and with the land. “Simply” here distinctly does not mean joylessly or witlessly. “Youda man, Bubba,” I shouted at the giant billboard showing Mr. Oustelet’s joyful, shrewd, land-loving face. “These are my people,” I gushed to Tom.

&
nbsp; What I meant was that I loved the Cajuns. I wish I had been born Cajun. For those of you who somehow are not aware of who or what the Cajuns are, they are descendants of (and their name an abbreviation for) the Acadians. The Acadians were among the first white people to settle North America, coming from France in 1604 to settle what is now Nova Scotia. In 1755 most of them were gathered up and thrown out of Nova Scotia by the Brits, and many of those refugees wound up in south Louisiana, where their descendants today number over 700,000 strong and happy souls.

  For six months a year I live in Nova Scotia, in an Acadian village settled by escapees and returnees from the 1755 Expulsion. The names there, as in Louisiana, are Thibodeaux and Boudreau and Pettipas. There are boats and Rottweilers in the front yards, faces are more often than not shrewd and fun-loving, and life is lived close to the land. Driving into south Louisiana feels to me like coming home, and I love the same things about the people there (a wondrous anomaly of a people in this job-whipped, pleasure-averse nation) as I do about my Acadian neighbors—their music and hospitality, their irony and devotion to family, their gaiety, and how relentlessly, how wholeheartedly, they carpe every single diem.

  It was on Highway 14 from Gueydan through Abbeville and New Iberia and then on 90 East through Franklin and Morgan City that I began my Cajun music appreciation initiative for Tom’s benefit. I stopped at a Wal-Mart and surprised him with Wayne Toups, Waylon Thibodeaux, Bayou Pon Pon, Raisin and Almonds, the Cajun Playboys, Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas, Beau Jacques and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers, and Fernest Arceneaux. With shrewd, joyful, land-loving music pouring out the windows of the Pathfinder, we sped past cane-fields, some of them burning, ricefields, and oil wells.

  Then we were in Houma, where everyone seemed to have a Ram 1500 truck with an ATV in the back; where we could have driven into a Mitsubishi dealership and gotten a picture taken of ourselves with Santa. We were there to fish with a redfish guide named Danny Ayo, but that was not until the following day. To fill up that afternoon, Danny had mentioned on the phone that his wife’s brother-in-law, a shrimper, might take us out on his boat.

  Vincent Menge, his wife, Anna, and his seven-year-old son, Opie, lived in Chauvin, south of Houma, in the middle of Bayou country. They greeted us when we arrived in their driveway, blasting Cajun music, as if they had been hoping for months we would come. Vincent was short and stocky, with brushy black hair, dark skin, lively and friendly hazel eyes, and the most purely delighted face I have seen in years. He and Opie took us out for a couple of hours on their twenty-ninefoot shrimp trawler, the Captain Opie.

  Vincent was forty-one, one-hundred-percent Cajun with a one-hundred-percent Cajun life. That morning he had shot a limit of ducks in an hour and a half before breakfast. He was carefully teaching Opie to hunt, and the week before the boy had killed two teal with one shot. Vincent shrimps for six months and does carpentry work for the rest of the year. He has been a shrimper since he was fifteen, and for years he ran a sixty-two-foot open-water trawler until he got tired of the overhead and being away from Anna and Opie so much. Now all his shrimping is done inshore, and that leaves more time for the rest of his life. When the shrimp run out in late November or early December, he shoots ducks, geese, and deer, and traps nutria, mink, muskrat, and otter until the end of February. Then, until mid-April, he and Anna crab. Pretty much year-round Vincent fishes—for bass, specks, and reds inshore, and for bull reds, cobia, and tuna in the Gulf. Last year in December and January alone he caught eighty-six speckled trout between two and a half and six pounds in the Bayou right off the boat dock forty feet behind his house.

  “The good Lord’s been kind to me. I’m a very, very, very happy man, bru,” he said. He was grinning, setting out his winglike trawling nets on either side of the boat and stating an evident fact. Opie ran around helping him. The scrappy, homemade-looking little Captain Opie chugged down the bayou toward the Gulf. “If you get bored or unhappy living here, man, there’s something wrong with you. And Anna does it all with me. Shrimping, everything. Best thing ever happened to me is my wife. You know, we’ve been married eighteen years and I don’t leave the house without her, bru.”

  Shrimping is best at night. Night after night during the season, Vincent and Anna and Opie go out at dusk, set their nets to the white light of moon and stars, and come in again just after dawn. All we caught in the nets that afternoon were a few jellyfish, and on the way in Opie talked to his dad about different kinds of jellyfish and what they can do to you. Though the white shrimp season had three more weeks to run, Vincent thought they had already gone, moved back into the deep water of the Gulf. He had had a pretty good season, grossing close to $28,000. In order to net twenty from that, he does his own engine work, builds his own nets, welds his own A-frames and skimmers. He earns another ten thousand dollars or so from his carpentry. Thirty, thirty-five thousand a year is all he and Anna and Opie need to be happier than kings. “My old man told me a long time ago it’s not what you make, it’s what you save. We have everything we want, bru, and money in the bank.” How could this be, you might wonder, as I did: “We make our living off the land as much as we can. We eat what we catch and trap and shoot. We don’t buy much.”

  I asked Vincent about the legendary Cajun disregard of fish and game limitations. He grinned; it’s a question Cajuns have learned how to answer. A man who fishes and hunts to feed his family, Vincent said, becomes a conservationist by necessity. It’s the corporate boys who are in it for the big profit rather than subsistence who do the real damage, like the huge, steel-hulled, V-12 open Gulf trawlers he called “slabs” that are putting the white shrimp in decline by overfishing and fishing inshore—working lakes and bayous, sometimes in water as shallow as three and a half or four feet when they draw five, tearing up the bottom and muddying the water.

  It was almost dark when we tied up back at Vincent’s pier. Anna was waiting for us. The next day was Thanksgiving, and she and Vincent invited Tom and me to eat Thanksgiving dinner with their family after we finished fishing with Danny. “We have plenty of food, bru,” said Vincent. “No end of food.”

  He and Anna stood in the driveway with an arm around each other, their faces radiant in the closing dark. I opened the driver’s door on the Pathfinder and asked Anna what they had in their life that kept them so happy. I told her I would put whatever it was in this story and maybe it would help somebody. “Us,” she said after a pause, hugging Vincent and motioning to Opie. “Just us together.”

  Danny Ayo, who is married to Anna’s sister, laughed the next morning when I told him what Vincent had said about Cajun conservation. “Even coonasses learn. Listen, we used to measure the fish we caught in boxes. Same with ducks. But that way of doing things carried to extremes is what led to gill-netting out the bayous, and the purse-seining in the Gulf that took all the breeding-stock redfish. When there weren’t any redfish around anymore is when the Cajun got to be conservationist. But now that they’re back, we’re taking care of them. Like I say, even a coonass’ll learn.”

  It was early on a calm, cool, flawless Thanksgiving morning and we had just run from a boat launch to the mouth of the first bay we were going to fish, somewhere in the enormous system of marshes and bayous that extends for over thirty miles south of Houma to the Gulf. We could hear the guns of duck hunters around us, but, as at Myrtle Grove, there was not another angler in sight, though this place, too, was literally crawling with redfish. I had just stood up on the casting platform in the bow of Danny’s skiff and was stripping out line, with the fly lying dead in the water twenty feet away, when a thirteen-pound redfish ate it. After we released it, Danny poled into the bay and redfish scattered like rats off the shallow bottom ahead of us, leaving trails of mud boils.

  The pug-nosed, blue-collar, toe-to-toe fighting redfish can go from piggishly indiscriminate to confoundingly picky in his eating habits day to day, and sometimes even hour to hour. Occasionally, one will munch any old fly dumped right on his head, or even his tail, or fo
ur feet away from him. More often they can be even spookier than most bonefish and the only productive cast drops the fly two feet in front of a cruiser and a foot beyond him so that it can be retrieved virtually into the fish’s mouth. Even then sometimes a red won’t eat it, particularly when the water and the air are cold, as they were that morning.

  I caught a few fish; we ran over some; a few more wouldn’t eat. Then Tom took the push pole and Danny Ayo took the casting platform with his Orvis 1-weight fly rod. When asked why he prefers to use a fly rod designed for quarter-pound bream while fishing for six-to-twenty-pound redfish, Danny answers, “Why be normal?” But there is also the fact that he would like to break the current thirteen-pound, three-ounce world record for redfish on two-pound tippet, and he believes the 1-weight is the rod God wants him to catch that fish on. A while back he boated an eighteen-pounder on two-pound test and let it go because it was not caught on the 1-weight.

  Usually he fishes alone when he is not guiding—a thin, intense, opinionated man, born-again, casting the tiny little rod from the poling platform with the pole gripped between his knees. He enjoys solitude—“When I work by myself, I get along with everybody,” he says—and he enjoys difficulty. He built his house himself. He built his eccentric one-off boat and trailer himself, learning how to weld from a book. He is a photographer, a carver of decoys, a maker of stained glass, a truck-driver for Consolidated Freight, and a redfish guide, when he wants to be, on Saturdays, Sundays, and Thursdays.

  Danny devoutly worked a few fish with no appetites: “That’s the one, that’s the cast. . . God wants me to have this fish!” After one of the reds gave us the fin and swam off in a huff, Tom, on the pole, said, “I’m afraid in my apostasy I’m not helping you.”

  Then Danny caught a six-pounder, very nicely on his 1-weight. Then I caught one, an eight-pound tailer. Then Tom hooked a monster of maybe eighteen pounds and his leader broke at a knot. . . The fish had turned on a little bit and there were thousands of them. In a lifetime of redfishing I have never seen so many reds in one area, and Danny Ayo and his clients have them all to themselves.