buildings that are Spanish in origin rather than French. At that hour of a damp, gloomy morning, however, it looked bleak and deserted and as unlike a mecca for tourists as a back alley in New York City. Its streets, cluttered with the debris of last night’s merrymaking, badly needed the washing they were about to get. The tourists were still in bed nursing hangovers.
Hotel Maria Theresa, a small, family-run establishment, had a lovely, gallery-surrounded courtyard—balconies are called galleries in New Orleans—and, since I had no idea when I would see it again, I gave myself a treat and stood on my own private, second-floor gallery for all of ten seconds to admire the view. In the courtyard below, amidst a stylish arrangement of potted tropical plants, there was a heated swimming pool surrounded by a clutter of tables, chairs, and chaise lounges, all deserted at that hour except for a custodian who was rearranging the clutter in a disinterested manner. I quickly changed into the most appropriate clothes I had for a visit to a fishing village in threatening weather, slipped several photos of Marc DeVarnay into an inside pocket, and hurried back downstairs.
“Here I go again,” I said to Tosche, not cheerfully. “Wild goose chase the second.”
He made no comment.
During my flight, I had wondered whether the predicted bad weather would dampen my enjoyment of New Orleans. The question was no longer relevant because I would shortly be contemplating an entirely different kind of wildlife. I could see only one bright side to the stupid case I was trapped in. If we got completely bogged down, which seemed likely, we would still be in New Orleans for next spring’s Mardi Gras. At least I could work with something to look forward to.
By the time we reached the lengthy Greater New Orleans Bridge over the Mississippi River, rain was coming down hard. We headed toward a landscape that made my fleeting glimpse of the Vieux Carré seem like a drizzly hallucination.
Pristine, lush beauty fills the Mississippi Delta except where corrosive touches of civilization, in the form of factories, shopping centers, housing developments, warehouses, oil depots, offices, trailer camps, and bars advertising cutesy drinks called “Sex on the Beach,” or “Jungle Juice,” or “Cement Mixer,” ooze into it from the New Orleans metropolis. When we finally put the corrosion behind us, we entered a different world—and a very wet one.
I had thought I knew all about swamps and bayous. Now I discovered how different the two things are. A swamp is a swamp. A bayou may look like a wide canal with low banks and carry an enormous quantity of shipping, or it may look like an almost overgrown stream leading into a wilderness.
Where there are roads, this is a land of bridges. Water laps the edges of embankments, and thick vegetation conceals the swamps just beyond. The bridges carry the roads over bayous. Looking about me, I became increasingly skeptical that the cultured, highly educated, extremely wealthy Marc DeVarnay would have ventured into this soggy landscape or that I could find a trace of him if he had.
My guide and chauffeur remarked that the water level was up half a foot. I looked about me—gray sky pouring rain, grayer land, gray water where it was visible—and pondered the difference another six inches of wet could have made.
Road signs suddenly got exotic, with drawings of alligators and advertisements of swamp tours. An unlikely looking restaurant, a shack in the middle of nowhere, called itself the Gator Inn and bragged about its alligator dishes. There was one glimpse of history in a reference to the Jean Lafitte National Park, Lafitte being the pirate-cum-hero who is alleged to have won the Battle of New Orleans for General Andrew Jackson in 1815—a truly notable achievement since he wasn’t there at the time.
I asked Tosche about the gourmet qualities of alligator meat.
“Some think it tastes like chicken,” he said.
“You don’t think so?”
“Tastes like duck to me. You should cook it the same way you cook duck.”
“At the airport, I heard a tourist say alligator was very good, but she might have enjoyed it more if she hadn’t known what it was. I thought alligators were an endangered species.”
“Not any longer—not in Louisiana. They’re protected, but they’re not endangered. Regulated hunting is allowed to control the population.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
He shook his head. “You couldn’t qualify. You have to own the place you hunt and live there.”
He lapsed into silence. As the road became lonelier, the soggy landscape showed fewer and fewer contours. White herons patrolled the water at the edge of the embankment. They were the wrong species, but they somehow seemed symbolic of this new wild goose chase I had been launched on. The entire watery wilderness unrolled before us like a vast plagiarism. The further we penetrated into it, the samer it looked. Eventually we turned onto a side road—I had thought we were on a side road—and reached the fishing village of Pointe Neuve.
The road paralleled the bayou, which was at least a hundred yards wide there, and the village consisted of a scattering of houses strung out along the two of them. Those on the bayou side of the road were built on the edge of the water, with large front yards that haphazardly displayed heaps of junk as well as boats in varying stages of salvage or disintegration. Across the bayou, and almost out of sight around a bend, an industrial wasteland had flowered in the wilderness, thrusting up a clutter of warehouses, derricks, and the ungainly shapes of oil tanks. Barges and good-sized ships as well as a tug or two were tied up at its docks.
Most of the ships docked at the village were shrimp boats with high booms suspending nets. The houses, which ranged from neat, well-built cottages to shacks, were constructed on posts that raised their living floors six or eight feet or more above the ground. Those along the bayou extended out over the water, and the lower level served as a double garage, housing a boat at one end and a car at the other. Across the road—and on higher ground—a few bold souls had houses that were supported on pillars of cement blocks or bricks that raised them only two or three feet.
Tosche summarized the area’s economy succinctly—fishing (for shrimp, fish, crabs, and oysters); oil (the industry was a huge presence throughout the delta as well as offshore, with reminders everywhere); and the hunting, fishing, and trapping carried on by visiting sportsmen as well as residents.
When I commented on the elevated houses, he grinned. “That’s a lesson Cajuns learned. In storms, the tide can be raised six or seven feet—or even more if a hurricane was to hit directly.”
Corrugated iron streaked with rust was the “in” thing for fishing village roofs. The generic Pointe Neuve home had a high peaked corrugated roof, a slightly pitched corrugated extension over the front porch, and a similar extension over the rear porch if the owner enjoyed the luxury of having two. Those who lived along the bayou could fish from their rear porches.
Midway through the village, we passed the only business establishment I saw there, a combination grocery store, café, and gas station housed in a long, shack-like building. The sign said, “Community Store and Café.” The gasoline side of its business went unadvertised except by its two weathered-looking pumps.
At the far end of the village and somewhat remote from the other homes, several rustic palaces were set far back from the water, each with its own dock and boathouse. The boathouses looked more homelike than some of the shacks I had seen elsewhere in the village. There were cabin cruisers parked at the docks and sport cars parked in the driveways. The docks had shelters built over a picnic table. These were summer or year-around retreats for families whose wage earner—or earners—had lucrative jobs in New Orleans.
