the ham served spent weeks in a tilted, hand-built smoke shed and came from an animal that, for its allotted time, had a name.
If he pressed farther south, against the Gulf breeze that is sometimes mild but now blows with the force of the coming hurricane, he would hear more of the French patois but also a Spanish laced with its Canary Island origins though cut off from those roots for more than two centuries. In one village, he would hear more Italian than any other language spoken. If one of the women there caught him admiring her lush vegetable garden, she might invite him in for a flute of carbonated wine made from her homegrown oranges, and he would understand that the invitation was an order, that he could not say no to her.
Indeed there are sundry reminders of what life was like before my father and men like him and some unlike him laid rail and felled trees and, through their labor and sometimes treachery, made the soft, sterile bed on which we rest our modern lives. For anyone who listens closely and looks with attention, there are suggestions everywhere of life as it was lived before men with the power of money changed it forever.
And if a traveler were to come across an establishment more or less untouched by our national fads and fetishes, if he entered and waited patiently over a cup of strong coffee for the best shrimp stew he could ever hope to eat, if he eavesdropped on the old-timers—usually claiming stools at the counter and smoking cigarettes if they still can—he should not be surprised, not even a little, when one of their stories is about the water that rose in 1927. And he should not be surprised, not even a little, when one of those stories is about my father, William Proby, or about Olivier Menard or one of the other men whose names, before the flood, mattered.
Here on the eve of what the newscasters say will be more devastation by water, it is a few of these stories that I try to tell, mixing as best I can what I saw with my own eyes and what I understood later to be fact into the most complete picture I am capable of making. Yet the older I get, and despite all my training as a man of reason and method, the harder I find it to understand anything at all. If you were to place, side by side, the historical account of something that happened, a painting of it, and a scientific explanation of how and why it occurred, you might still not understand it unless, maybe, you lived through it yourself. Even then, you’d succumb to forgetting. An old man may remember the facts of his youth, but he cannot always remember what they felt like.
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