Sensing Adventure

Rip. That’s me tearing a map of Louisiana diagonally from the northwest Texas border to Grand Isle. The jagged line that runs through the state’s best fishing and hunting haunts is Highway 1.

Splash. We hooked into the color, culture, and incongruity of the bayou near Cut Off, a simple town where 12-foot bass trackers and 24-foot shrimp trawlers boasting names like Geaux Phish and Lil Miss Shrimp parked like cars alongside a highway drenched with bat-and-tackle bars. We drove south through a marine kaleidoscope of fragmented blues, shattered whites, industrialized yellows, and chipped-paint reds.

Gush. The sky-tinged muddy swaths of Bayou Lafourche seeped into sticky globs of green-blue land that, in turn, melted into the blue-gray, oil-rigged horizon of Port Fourchon. Impressionistic splashes of brightly dappled light—surfers!—skipped across the churning foam of—Gulp—The Gulf. Of Mexico.

Clackety clack, the worn planks of a boardwalk sang as we traipsed past razor-edged beachgrass clinging senselessly to ever-shifting dunes. Clackety clack, it whistled as a sandpaper-wind whipped grit from thickets of sea oats to polish our skin before embedding itself between our toes. Clackety clack. It beckoned us to the sea. Clackety clack. Clackety clack. Clackety clack.

Ack! Salty air tinged with seaweed, motor oil, and dead fish filled our nostrils. Live fish, in contrast, filled the bellies of pelicans nose-diving out of formation for dinner. Against the rock-studded breakwater, low-crashing billows of the Gulf, emery-board brown sand marked the battleground where the elements struggle endlessly for control. Water always wins.

Slurp. A setting sun licked our faces and blinded our eyes. Yet we smiled, as a wispy fog drew its life from the briny deep like a sea hag coming to claim a careless soul.

Caw. Caw. Hungry caws. Above the blasts of sand and surf, seagulls laughed us speechless and into tunnels of sizzling common sense. Obeying aromas of fried shrimp spattering in deep fryers aged in peanut oil, we happened on a cash-only roadside den with a blackened back kitchen.

“Hush puppies,” We called to barking boat hands who doubled as aproned waiters. And, Clink, “More iced tea.”

Clank. Clank. We paid for our day in dollars and sense and strolled back to the B&B in the saline-infused nightfall.

Plunk. Plunk. Snooze.  With windows opened wide, we sensed the sea hag sucking life from the last fragments of daylight as she merged with the mists of moonrise.