Learning about the Bayou Country in southern Indiana

    I went to Louisiana when I was a 5th grader. I learned a few things about New Orleans, and the areas around the bayous. The rivers of the lower areas of that region. Bayou means river, likely in Cajun. It's its own culture, and habitat.

    I feel like literature, movies, television shows and popular media have made the culture of the city and southern Louisiana pretty popular, but there are tropes that arise, too. Adam Sandler, a comedian from the northeast United States, plays a character called the Waterboy in this part of the deep south, where there are characters caricaturized as Cajuns and bumpkins. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise play vampires in the French quarters centuries earlier. They have wards and cantons, instead of boroughs and counties, unlike the rest of the country.

    I walked Bourbon Street a little when I was ten; our family ate at an expensive second floor restaurant. Yul Brynner and other famous folks had eaten there! A lot of money was spent for a family of five in 1982.

    I did not know back then that many Louisianan or bayou folks ate crawfish as a delicacy. I played with crawdads or crayfish in a local stream when I was little. I am not sure how many hours and days I and other buddies did this, but I don't think that I knew that people thought so much of them on their plate as a yummy dish. Perhaps one of my neighbors like Tanya or Andy told me so. They were smart, aware kids.

    I didn't like lobster as a kid, so the thought of eating a freshwater crustacean seemed abhorrent to me.

    But, a million or more people south of the 10 interstate along the swamps and marshes of the Gulf of Mexico were chowing down on these babies!

    I went to Louisiana in 2019 for almost a month, and finished off the experience with a big bowl of both gator and crawfish, I think. The dish had a Cajun French name.

    What else? 

    Voodoo, vampires, boogey men monsters, Cloak and Dagger, songs from Sting and Harry Connick...

    Oh, yeah, music!

 I returned to my home state of Indiana from the Inter-Mountain West in September of 1997. I went to a restaurant near the shop that my parents owned as a child, selling it off when I was fourteen. At the almost age of 27, I spoke to my server at that restaurant, a place new to me, and ordered only a drink, perhaps for price considerations. And, I was likely trying to keep some calories off. But it was probably more about the money, knowing me. I was eating fine at home, between two sets of parents.

    A little conversation arose, as the naturally curious part of me engaged with this guy. He may have had a beard, and perhaps a tattoo or two. Maybe he was thirty? Perhaps younger or whatever, but he brought the knowledge of the music of zydeco to me. It was Cajun music, a southern taste and cultural thing from the deep south of Louisiana. Perhaps it was playing on the restaurant sound system.

    It had accordions and a playful, different feel. Like a movie I saw about Vietnam vets in the bayou being picked off by the locals when offended, a film called Southern Comfort. The marsh peoples played music and were dancing, I think. I saw that movie when I was ten years-old or so. It has been some forty years to think back on it! But sentiments and recollections and feelings linger, and conjure, and mix with other dendrites and images, smells and tastes and sense, like eating alligator at a southern-style restaurant in a wintry-cold winter when our first daughter was a baby, in the Midwestern Cincinnati. Circa 2002, visiting from southern California.

    We drove to Cincy from my hometown, years after moving away. Visiting parents, and grandparents.

    Yes, even in southern Indiana we can learn about a far-off place. Or two hours away in a freezing Ohio town.

    I learned more about the region and its peoples at age 42 in Kabul, Afghanistan, of all places. Thanks to you, Josh. Soon to be oil worker, I guess. From the city of Lafayette.

    The Cajun south.

    Learning and growing and living and thinking from southern Indiana.

    To the bayou. Region and peoples of another clime, another culture, a different way to think and live.

    I took my family to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2014, the year my mother died. Just a few months before her passing. We did a little RV camping. A little southern visitation, food tasting of gator bits and shrimp.

    And we left southern Indiana to go there.

    Cycles continue.