//mouton's acadiana//

One of the major lessons I learned about creative writing in college was to "write about what you know." I grew up in Acadiana, New Iberia exactly and I feel the simple things in the following passage are signposts of life as it was when one feels free from adult responsibility; when time seemed to stand still waiting an eternity for high school graduation. Maybe that's how I capture the feeling, try to explain it.

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...And that was one method of their youthful repose in one of the flatter, mundane parts of South Louisiana where a child's perception of hills made the even smallest bumps larger than life.

      Even in the 70's people seldom, if ever traveled farther north than Opelousas, or venture past it up the intermittently complete I-49 leading diagonally north from Alexandria to Shreveport. It's true, a Cajun must travel well north of Opelousas, near Washington, a small town full of antique shops, for a change in landscape or accept the closest features similar to hills in the Acadian geography, three diminutive saltdomes, as sufficient. They are little more than hiccups of earth crusted over an upheaval of primordial salt rising from the alluvial marsh. The plug of salt deposit is deeper than Mt. Everest is tall, they say, and the domes spread in a geographical line perpendicular to the southwest of Connor's hometown, New Iberia.

     The world beyond the Iberian heart of Cajun Country's twenty-two parishes called him to leave.  The world grew in league with his maturity beyond the naive charm of youth he would always relish. Connor would never lose his appreciation of nostalgia, imbuing his image of purity in simpler surroundings.

     That is New Iberia: simple and unchanging yet filled, sometimes, with a destructive urge to grow, to be something else when it should remain simple—doing different results in the detritus of empty strip malls and shells of abandoned K-mart's or relocated Wal-Mart. During the oil boom Conner heard New Iberia and Lafayette would merge wthin ten years, swallowing up the hamlets around it like Patoutville, Rynella, Lydia, Migues, and Coteau. But it didn't. The boom busted and the outskirts of New Iberia along the Highway 90 became a litter of closed oil businesses.

     Connor’s impression of New Iberia was one of a town at odds with its own heartbeat. When he was young, he was eager to leave. When he was gone, he was eager to return to the food and its unique topography. New Iberia never has, and never should break from the mold in which it was made, Connor thought. It should always keep its manor-lined Main Street through a downtown guarded by great multicenturion oaks, vestiges of an Antebellum echo that never fades, allowing the time to creep as slowly as the vines growing on its own Episcopalian church.

     He knew he'd never lose his appreciation for the singular beauty of a live-oak tree, the ominous marsh, or the serenity of a placid bayou at night far from anywhere, when the only illumination was his spotlight from the Jo'boat piercing the darkness and shining off the reflective eyes of scaled creatures slung low and far across dark water; the hidden denizens diving or sliding off the banks into the murk, almost silently. Bugs and black clouds of mosquitoes hover in leaf-clogged branches stooped low over the bayou, their congregations waiting for the sense of warm blood to guide them to their next meal. One can hear their ravenous huddle in the stillness. It's quiet and the only sounds are gentle waves of subdued paddle strokes and the boat drifting slowly through the water. Mullets jump at random and the legions of bloodsuckers thrum the air, causing thunder in the silence as you pass their clusters near the banks. The smell throughout: a fecund combination of rotting plants, new vegetation, mud, sour marsh, and silt clogged tepid water. Cutting through it or when the animals splashed, one can almost smell the bottom, like vague hint of bowels and salt.  But it is not as horrible a smell as it sounds—it was, for Connor home.

     He also loved the rain and the approach of thunderstorms deep purple skies and horizontal veins of streaking white lightning. The sounds of distant thunder tumbling over the Louisiana flatness shaking his windows often soothed him to sleep. When the rain follows, it arrives in great dull drops in a steady thrumming on rusted tin roofs and the flat topped trailers so common there, its echoes tinny and hollow on their simple construction.

     When Connor moved to Washington State after college in Mississippi, he would fish for salmon and river trout up there but look forward to trips home to catch specks and redfish from Vermillion Bay, something he desired as much for their taste as for the fight they put up. The Northwest has no crawfish, blue crab, farm-raised catfish, nor the associated catfish fry houses found all over the South and he missed those.

     He'd been to the Northwest once, but he was an infant. His parents, Alex and Katherine Mouton, had moved away for the Navy to Oak Harbor, a small town on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Of the hundreds of islands in the Puget Sound, Whidbey is the largest and has been home to a Naval Air Station for decades, a lifeblood for the little town the Mouton family briefly called home.