Life in the swamps is a choice, a state of mind, a lifestyle. There are people who work in the city but live in the swamps. They function in settlements consisting of a few, sometimes a dozen houses. All the families know each other. They form tight-knit communities. Visiting is done by boat, even if a neighbor’s house is only a few dozen meters away. Entering the water is too risky. These people live in two worlds: the urban and the swamp. Every morning, they get up, hop into their boats, and head to the nearby parking lot. There, they switch to their pick-up trucks and head to work. A school bus arrives at the parking lot every day, which is also the boat launch point. Local residents drop off the kids at a set time and then pick them up in the afternoon.
There are also those who live in the swamps and rarely go to the city. They usually work seasonally on drilling platforms, catch catfish for restaurants, work on shrimp boats, or take any job that occasionally earns them money. They leave home for a while, and after returning, they stay in the swamps for weeks. It wasn’t difficult to find one of these places. A resident of one such settlement, Frank, took me there in his boat.
Along the river’s current, on the left and right, stood houses on stilts. Most of them were quite large, bigger than the weekend camps I would later see many times. These are year-round homes for entire families. Spacious verandas and piers allow the residents to spend time outside their homes. On the pier of one of the houses, a tall, overweight boy, about 16 years old, was walking barefoot. He wore a dirty gray t-shirt and black shorts. When he saw us, he began throwing caps onto the pier. He made a lot of noise and stared at us with a dull, sad look, watching to see if his behavior would provoke any reaction from us. These kids, before they turn 15, can gut and dress a deer in 30 minutes. They can professionally clean any fish. Life in the swamps means eating anything that crawls, swims, flies, or runs. They know how to survive.
A few dozen meters away, in front of another house, the owner stood on the pier where a neighbor had just arrived by boat. The other man stood on the boat and handed him freshly caught fish. In the house next door, the owner had built a deck with a roof and a large wooden table, on which, when we arrived, he was preparing the fish. He hung them on hooks and started working on the next ones.
Artur, do you know how to recognize a redneck (an American term for a “country bumpkin”) around here? – Frank suddenly asked me.
No, how? – I replied.
By the fact that when his wife is putting on the bait and casting the line, she doesn’t take the cigarette out of her mouth – he answered, then nodded toward a woman sitting on a boat tied to her house with a cigarette in her teeth, holding the fishing rod with both hands, staring at the water’s surface. At one point, she lifted one hand and waved at us friendly. The cigarette stayed in her mouth, and a cloud of smoke hung above her head.
Life so close to nature is tied to low living costs and a sense of freedom. It’s also independence. In a situation where our civilization would cease to exist, they would survive. On the other hand, these houses are like islands in an ocean full of “monsters” that inhabit the water. You can’t go for a walk or jump in the water to swim. You must always stay on your island.
- Do you know these people, Frank? – I asked at one point.
- Most of them, yes.
- What are they like?
- Specific. Tough, and if they don’t like you, they’ll make you feel it.
- Could you arrange for me to stay in one of these houses? To meet them?
- No, I wouldn’t leave you here with them. I don’t know anyone here whom I could trust that much. They don’t live here for no reason. It’s a conscious choice. They avoid strangers. Sometimes even from each other. When I was a kid, they didn’t even have electricity here. A few years ago, you see there, behind the trees? They brought electricity here at their own cost, so now they have better conditions. Now everyone has satellite TV. They can watch their family members fighting it out on Jerry Springer (a TV show where violence regularly occurs between quarreling participants. It’s a very low form of entertainment for extremely undemanding viewers) – Frank smiled.
In the swamps, you depend on nature and its whims. The first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is turn on the TV or radio to listen to the weather forecast. Any strong wind, hurricane, can push so much water from the bay that it will take your house. It doesn’t happen every year, the last time it happened was Katrina, but it does happen. The weather forecast is therefore crucial. To survive, you need to know when to run. These people constantly watch hurricanes forming over the Atlantic, heading for the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and then reaching here, potentially taking everything they have. Frank lives 16 kilometers up the river in a place similar to this, so he is also a regular viewer of weather channels, just like most of the people in Louisiana, who feel the effects of them every year. If you live in a house by the water, you always have something to fear.
All the houses standing in the swamps were built from materials brought in from the land. Every element was transported there by boat. If you buy a property in the swamps with a dilapidated house, you first have to haul it away and clean up the site before you can build a new home. If the land is empty, half the work is already done for you. Building can sometimes pose problems, because, for example, there may be a cypress tree on your lot. If that’s the case, it’s easier to build a house around it and place the trunk in the center of the living room than to get permission to cut it down. Homes in these conditions deteriorate quickly. They require constant repairs. Some people live in the swamps their whole lives, always fixing their homes. Eventually, the owners get old enough that they can no longer stay there. They have to move to solid ground.
To live in the swamps, you need to be in full physical health. A house left for a few years after the owner moves out will inevitably collapse. If the owner doesn’t have the money or enough strength to dismantle the shack piece by piece, haul it to land, and throw it away, the building is left to decay. In Louisiana, property taxes are only assessed on homes worth over $75,000, so such a shack can stand for years without generating any costs. There’s always a chance that younger generations may one day dream of living there or building a vacation home and clean up the lot. Until then, uninhabited, collapsing houses stand among the trees, slowly being swallowed by the swamp year after year. Honestly, they look spectacular. Made of wood, they don’t mar the landscape. They add an air of mystery to it.
To live in the swamps, you don’t necessarily need to own land and build a house on it. There are other ways. You can buy an old barge or a boat, known as a boat house, and remove the engine. According to Louisiana law, a boat without an engine doesn’t need to be registered, so you don’t have to pay taxes on it. To live on it, you call your friends and ask them to come with their boats and tow you deep into the swamps, to the place where you want to live. You tie your new home to a tree to wake up every day in the same spot… On the roof, you install solar panels and a rainwater filtration system. You become self-sufficient. In this way, you disappear from the radar of the tax office and other authorities. Literally, you’re gone. If you have a gun and a fishing rod, you don’t even need to return to civilization. You can live in the swamps undisturbed. Every now and then, you need to buy tools, fuel for the generators, and pots, but food is available locally, water is filtered, and you can even make moonshine.
You can sit in the camp for months and live in harmony with the rhythm of nature. When you’re hungry, you sit on the porch, take out your fishing rod, and wait for dinner. If you want meat, you climb up a hunting stand to shoot a deer, and if you want seafood, you shoot an alligator. It might seem that the only thing preventing you from enjoying life in the swamps would be the mosquitoes. These can make even a grown man with the build of a bear cry. There’s a solution for that too. As absurd as it seems to fish for catfish with soap, the fact that the best insect repellent in Louisiana is the scent of Amber Romance from Victoria’s Secret is mind-blowing. In some of the brand’s stores in Louisiana, they place it by the cash registers and sell it by the box. It’s extremely popular among fishermen, hunters, and swamp residents. The company probably makes more money from it than from its famous lingerie. Frank recommended that before using it, I should inform my wife, because when you get home, you’ll smell like you’ve just visited a French brothel. The fact is, this stuff works, everyone knows it, the company knows it, the business is booming, and the mosquitoes are looking for new solutions.
Thousands of people head to the swamps for hunting and fishing. It’s a Louisiana sport and way of life. A popular pastime among locals and tourists is fishing with bows. These lightweight, state-of-the-art sporting bows are equipped with reels and lines, similar to those used in regular fishing. Specialized companies that organize such hunts take clients out on small, shallow-draft boats to swamps along the ocean. They travel there at night, equipped with powerful spotlights. The spotlights help spot trout and carp, and clients shoot them with bows, aiming at them like targets, with a high success rate. Later, you can see hundreds of posts on social media of successful, extraordinary hunts.
To hit the target, you have to aim a little ahead of the fish. If you miss a few times, you learn quickly,” Frank laughed as he told me this.