As my first step on this new day of the search, I spent yet another hour waiting at Café du Monde and considering where, if she did not reappear, I should look next. It seemed to me that the swamp was my best choice. We had planned to take one of the boats. She had picked up her camera after leaving the dinner party. . .and she had expressed a desire to Torelli to photograph the swamp. Remembering that, I paid my bill. . .and, map in hand, set out to purchase a ticket on a Louisiana Swamp Tour van. Jean Lafitte Swamp Tours, Captain Terry’s, Magnificent Alligator Adventures, Cajun Cap’n—there were many to choose from
Once on the docks, which were out at the end of a rural road, I went from booth to booth, waiting through lines so that I could show Julienne’s picture. . . No one remembered Julienne. One captain, who had a stuffed alligator head mounted behind the wheel of his boat, asked me why I thought he ever looked at the tourists when he had “snakes, an’ snags, an’ ‘gators” to keep his eye peeled for. The last ticket taker, a woman less patient than the rest, glared at me through the wooden frame of her booth. She had dark, rough skin and a crooked nose and wore a raveling cardigan sweater buttoned over a flowered dress. “You come to my window, you buy a ticket,” she said, a look of ferocious determination on her face. Obviously anyone taking up space in her line was expected to come up with swamp fare. I bought a ticket and went back to tour with the alligator captain.
I was here; Julienne wasn’t, so I might as well see this swamp about which she had talked so much. I stationed myself at the rail adjacent to the wheel as we pulled slowly away from the dock. The captain had already begun his spiel over the loudspeaker system as he piloted his boat, the ‘Gator Belle, out upon the brown waters.
You may think of a swamp as suffocatingly green. Not in winter, not near New Orleans. The vegetation was abundant on the shores but ranged in color from bone white to a brown-green that reminded me of desert bushes. Some of the trees appeared full and healthy; some bare of leaves with thin branches haloing the trunks like ghost thickets. Some thrust up black and dead from the water’s edge, raising twisted limbs to a white sky, and many hung heavy with the mysterious, killing moss that blanketed and stifled life. Occasionally there was a white, bony skeleton of a tree, leaning precariously toward extinction, still weighted down with its burden of moss, and the moss was white too, having sucked the life out of its host before dying itself. No wonder Julienne had wanted to photograph this. I took pictures myself as we cut through the water, leaving a wide, white wake behind us that washed into the bushes where the banks narrowed toward one another.
Our captain pointed out a cemetery on the shore, its pure white box graves and crosses overhung by great moss-laden trees. A rough barricade of rocks separated the graveyard from the bayou. The greenest sight in the swamp was the grass in this cemetery, but that grass was not fertilized by the bodies of the dead, for corpses had to be buried above ground here because the water level was just below the surface. While the captain explained this, I screwed up my courage for a question, afraid that my inquiry would meet with the same brusque retort as the last I had made to him. He was an off-putting sight with his alligator trophy, his mirrored dark glasses, and his camouflage fatigues—more like a mercenary or right-wing, backcountry militia person than a Cajun boat captain.
“Do these boats run at night?” I asked timidly, after tapping him on the arm.
He ignored me and pointed out a small shack and tottering pier passing by on our right. I knew that he had heard me, so I waited for my answer. He pointed out a wide-nosed alligator, which looked as if it might slide into the water and head our way. The sight of such an ugly, dangerous creature sent a shiver up my spine.
As we passed a narrow outlet, clogged with fallen branches, I repeated my question about night tours. The captain turned slightly in my direction, mouth grim. “No ma’am. Da ‘Gator Belle don’t cruise at night.”
“Do any of the swamp tour boats?” I persisted. How had Julienne planned to photograph the swamp at night if no boats ran and she could get no one to accompany her?
“Nothin’ to see. It’s dark,” he muttered. Then he pointed out a snake undulating in our direction. As it was the same color as the water, it could only be detected by the path it cut.
“The boat could have a headlight,” I pointed out.
He turned into a narrow passage where the river branched. “Dis swamp is huge, lady. You live here all your life, you might not know all da passages. So you think someone’s gonna take tourists in where dey cain’t see nothin’ an might git ‘em lost an’—” He shrugged, disgruntled, and began to talk about the creatures, other than man, who lived in the swamps—alligators, egrets, black bear, feral hogs—
“What if someone wanted to take pictures here at night?’ I asked him.
“Dey’d be a damn fool,” he said shortly. Other tourists were beginning to mutter because I kept interrupting the lecture.
“But if someone did? How would they go about it?”
“Rent a boat, but don’t do it, lady. You’d never come back. Only a tourist would think up such a damn fool—“
Obediently, I strolled toward the front of the boat, from which I saw more alligators, one actually nosing the boat as we idled in a side channel while the captain talked about raccoons. Some how or other, raccoons were a comfort to me. We’d had raccoons knocking over our garbage cans when Julienne, her family, and I vacationed at their cabin on the shores of a lake north of home.
As I left the ‘Gator Belle to catch the van back to the city, the captain called after me, “Your friend wouldna been dat dumb.”
Dumb? No. But venturesome? I was afraid she might be. . .
Because the van wasn’t scheduled to leave for ten minutes and I didn’t care to sample any of the uninteresting food offered by vendors in wharf shacks, I stood out of the crowd at the edge of the pier, leaning against a pole and studying the bayou. I could understand Julienne’s fascination. There was an otherworldly quality to the brown landscape with its twisted, bearded trees. I had just raised my camera to take one last picture when I was so rudely jostled by a passing tourist that my desperate attempt to grab the pole did not serve to keep me on the boards. Down I plunged into the brown water, my panic-stricken mind conjuring up all the snakes and alligators I had seen on the tour. When I surfaced, slimy, rotting swamp greens, a salad from hell, trailed from my mouth, and I was still clutching my camera in one hand, flailing wildly as my clothing dragged me under again.