Delta Queen in 1998
On the north bank lay the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, but, other than a few birds one might come across in a city backyard east of the Rockies, I saw no creature—of the night or day—whose presence was totemic to a vast and distinctive watery world; perhaps it was the wrong season or disturbance from our arrival. The Queen went under a bridge, a thing uncommon enough along the route to cause passengers to rise to see it. Once, cable ferries were the usual means to cross the waterway, but those boats are disappearing to leave overgrown and rotting pilings, a loss since lore typically gathering around ferry crossings shows little capacity to accumulate under steel bridges.
For a couple of dozen miles, save a single negligible jog, the canal ran straight eastward almost to Port Arthur, Texas; to those who delight in lines curved and sinuous, the route was not especially scenic, but before we could reach the end of the straightaway, darkness overtook us to offer better chances to encounter the Dutchman’s nightmarish country. Yet with views from my observation posts along the rails obscured, any possibility of a nightmare would have to manifest itself in mere sleep.
I awoke just after sunrise to find us tied to the wharf at Port Arthur, a place remarkable for the near-total abandonment of its small commercial center. Given that the city bears the name of railroad magnate Arthur Stilwell, a man who confessed to founding the town on the advice of “brownies” appearing before him in the night, perhaps such is the economic fate of pixie-driven endeavors.
After a walk through the remains of Stilwell’s dreamland, we were again under way and soon crossed the Neches River to reach the northern edge of a large spread of water I initially took for the Gulf but which proved to be Sabine (Say-bean) Lake, surprisingly shallow for its size. A long-legged horse could wade the four miles across that upper embayment. Even there, though, the canal lies almost entirely behind the protection of slender islands before it enters marsh again west of a refinery between two channelized bayous. The first Texas oil boom began in 1901 nearby at Spindletop Dome, something Stilwell’s brownies may have had in mind when proffering advice to him.
Just below the docklands of Orange, Texas, the Delta Queen crossed the Sabine River as if it were simply a highway intersection. Ahead lay twenty-one miles of channel, once again as straight as a dredge can dig. Taking a vessel along such a course would seem simple enough, but the captain told me otherwise. While the ICW is essentially rockless, currentless, tideless, and a large boat cannot get lost, hazards of another sort are everywhere. He said, “On the Mississippi and Ohio, big boats have room to keep clear of each other, but down here we can just about shake hands when we pass. Then there’s the bank suction the hull creates as it displaces water. A stern of a boat tries to go this way, that way. It behaves like the tail end of a dog with worms.”
The haulage on the canal is largely petroleum and other chemical compounds like isopropyl alcohol, ethyldiamene, and caustic soda. There’s also salt, scrap metal, and agricultural products, all of it moving on low—if huge—barges not built for the open sea. Beyond, in ports or in passes to the Gulf, I saw no ships on the canal, and in that way it is more terrestrial than nautical and resembles a wet interstate.
Where the Calcasieu (Kal-kah-shoo) River enters its lake, the ICW makes a sharp ninety-degree turn, bends a few more times, then straightens to pass through a flat world only about three feet above sea level, where pools and ponds and shallow lakes, often surprisingly circular, are sometimes hardly distinguishable from the marshes around them. Considering the thousands of miles of drainage ditches in the region, one has to wonder how much wetter it used to be. Before engineering, the area would have seemed a place just emerging from Noah’s flood. A century ago, to find the way through channels that twist and shift like a line dropped overboard, along courses that appear only to quickly disappear into the reeds, cane, and willows, must have been a mosquito-blitzed nightmare.
(It’s useful here to recall that bayou, marsh, and swamp are not interchangeable words. A bayou is a river; a marsh is a wet and sometimes inundated grassland; a swamp is flooded woodland. Along the central Gulf Coast, those distinctions are useful.)
At Gibbstown, noteworthy for its complete lack of anything you might associate with an actual town, such as a house or a human, the Delta Queen entered another huge marsh with a scattering of trees. Near its center lies Lake Misere, a lovely thing in the late autumn afternoon light and just then not deserving its name—unless transit was by canoe or bateau, as indeed it was for those who bestowed the name.
Beyond the debouchure of the Mermentau River into Grand Lake, the canal narrows. The ICW avoids the hundreds of lakes lying along its course as if they were islands because its builders, the Corps of Engineers, believed it easier to construct and more economical to maintain a ditch dug through what passes there for high ground than a channel dredged through a shallow lake. The canal in that stretch often runs for a dozen miles between a series of bays and lagoons lying just beyond a scrim of grasses or trees, the Gulf invisible to anyone at canal level. If you’ve ever been down an English lane between hedgerows entirely containing your line of sight, then you have an idea of passage east of Grand Lake. Happily, my cabin was on the sundeck, high enough above obscuring foliage to open to vistas I couldn’t have seen from a small boat.
The challenge for a voyager along the straight runs is to avoid going numb to the miles of apparent sameness; this is a land for people who do not grow bored in crossing the Great Plains and who like places that challenge even Because-It’s-There travelers to be patient and to look ever more closely; yet they too can begin to hope for a passing tow, a sunken barge, a bridge, a noisy rise of ricebirds—anything to disrupt the purgatory of rectilinearity.
In one limbo of miles through rice fields then in their seasonal pasture color, the wish for a bend, a twist, a deviation, a slight obliquity was like the cry of a parched throat on the Mojave. Just north of Grand Lake, our movement for ten miles, I must confess, was two hours of near deprivation and denial. Even though here and there the irregular and encoved natural Gulf shoreline to the south lay only a hundred feet away, it was invisible. During such passage, a wise traveler takes to a bunk, or a book, or a cribbage board. Others—members of the Because-It’s-There Association—ignore common sense and do not.
No piece of earth appeared to rise more than a couple of inches higher than anything else, yet rises must have been there, at least in former times, because the place was larded with names for this island and that isle. I heard that the disappearance of those relict islets into a dryer landscape reveals the prodigious engineered draining. What a vertical mile is to the Sierra, so along the upper Gulf is an upright inch.
Verticality is crucial in the two kinds of locks and dams on the ICW: those to maintain the water level and others to prevent the sea from salinating the freshness of the bayous and marshes. Except for locks near the Mississippi at New Orleans, the rise or descent in those backcountry chambers can be the height of a chair leg, but here, as in baseball, it’s a game of inches.
Vermilion Bay, a large inlet off the Gulf, is so shallow in places on its northern end that five miles from shore it’s still only ten feet deep, making it possible for barrier islands nearly to turn it into a lake, yet even there the canal keeps behind a spongy strip of ground. At the east side of the bay is Weeks Island, a mined salt dome. After three days in the watery flats, I thought Weeks, although surrounded by land, looked indeed like an island, rising as it does two-hundred feet. In a terrain where natural height belongs only to trees—or grasses—that salt hump is a landmark.
At sunset of our next-to-last day, the Delta Queen made a ninety-degree turn and proceeded up a drainage canal leading to the Port of Iberia where new wharves had been built to make the inland Cajun town of New Iberia into a seaport. The narrow route nearly let trees in close enough to brush the gunwales; in fact, so near that a few months earlier a flummoxed squirrel had dropped onto the sundeck of the Queen. This
was an area the Dutchman described as “nightmarish country.” In the approaching dusk, a humped form waddled across an opening in the scrub, and someone shouted, “Beaver!” and there was a rush to the rail, enough to give a list to the boat, and the captain hurried forth to see what the stir was about. “Nutria, folks!” he called. “It’s a nutria, an unwelcome invader!” But the year before he’d seen at that very spot a swamp panther, among the rarest big, native mammals in the nation. He said, “Now, that critter was worth tipping the boat.”
Given the pervasive rot resident in such a wetland, even in a cool season, the air that December was crisp and free of the scent of vegetative decay, and in the tall marsh stood a few fishing and hunting shacks atop stilts, all the sheds closed up, and everywhere was an aura suggesting humans were temporary intruders and that no engineering could ever make it otherwise. Shovels and steel and concrete could not overmaster such a bosky ground, and the slap of a paddlewheel was a feeble thing pointing up nothing more than temporary transit. In a changing climate of melting polar ice, this land was on loan, and any true tenant had to be able to endure in a world six inches or six feet deep, where water bided time before resuming its long dominion. The place was not a nightmare but a vast quagginess, a trembling terrain challenging creatures with too much wetness as the Sonora does with too little.
New Iberia, Louisiana, several miles from its port, lies along the Bayou Teche, something too small for the Delta Queen to ascend, so the next morning I boarded a bus running alongside sugarcane fields and into town. On Main Street I bought a book about alligators by Edward McIlhenny, a conservationist and son of the inventor of Tabasco sauce. In a small grocery-café I sat down to a cup of Cajun coffee dark and thick like potting soil, and I read this:
The deep booming roar of a twelve foot male alligator is a sound that once heard will never be forgotten…. When near these reptiles as they bellowed, I have felt a very distinct vibration of my diaphragm caused by the trembling of the air.
December is a time of hibernation, and so vanished hope to encounter any of those particular creatures of the night. The Dutchman’s fears—or at least his adjectives and perceptions—just weren’t holding up.
Not far from the old Evangeline movie house, I came upon Louis Dorsey, an African-American selling pepper sauce from the back of his pickup truck in hopes of sharing some of the millions that the Tabasco company earns from its plant just down the road. He offered a taste of his Brother-in-Law hot sauce made of three ingredients—two right from the parish: peppers and salt. “Don’t know where the vinegar comes from,” he said. I loaded bottles of sauce into my pockets as if they were saddle bags, and sagged back to the boat.
That night I could only try to imagine the complex universe of waters moving, twisting, swirling all about, not so much like cosmic clouds but like dark matter driven by dark energy. In the middle of the night we crossed the Atchafalaya River at Morgan City, a town according to some geologists destined to end up on the banks of or beneath the Mississippi when the big river at last breaks through the dam some hundred miles north near the mouth of the Red River and “captures” the Atchafalaya and thereby takes a shorter course to the Gulf. It’s virtually impossible to speak of anything of consequence in coastal Louisiana without considering that under every prediction, perception, and piece of history is water.
East of Morgan City in the cypress swamps, I could make out only arboreal silhouettes just before dawn came on to erase any chance of mystery beyond that of existence itself. The boat passed antebellumed Houma, a seafood-canning town also supplying equipment to offshore oil-platforms, and continued into the morning, ever approaching New Orleans. The waterway still appeared too remote and thickly overgrown to lie at the edge of such a large city, but only fifteen miles from the great river-crescent there, new houses lined the shore only to fall away again, and the waterway returned to bank-side trees before finally fading completely into urban industries.
Near the Harvey Canal Lock, we approached a raised bridge halting rush-hour drivers who watched in surprise as the old paddlewheeler chugged before them, and when she blew her whistle—whether to them or the lock tender I didn’t know—they stepped out to wave, inspired by a sound from an era before stalled traffic.
On the other side of the lock and across the Mississippi was the French Quarter and a bit farther the home wharf of the Delta Queen. We had steamed 350 miles through a realm only a boat can reach to reveal a coastal land neither a purgatory nor a paradise vanished but something better—a realm as enduringly wild as engineered yet still more disregarded than discovered.
ANCHOVIES AND OLIVES
On assignment for a now-defunct culinary magazine, I wrote “Morning in Manarola” after a week of hiking along the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy. A key piece of the story was supposed to be local food, but about that topic I must rely on my tongue rather than any sophisticated knowledge of local fare, so I tried to build a village landscape around anchovies and olives. That’s how other things, as they are wont to do in my work, crept in: secret suicides and so on.
Morning in Manarola
We travel to some places before we know where on the globe they are or that they even exist. Images arise in childhood imaginings, scenes that can express longings for a world more fantastic than the one we inhabit. All the while we understand such demesnes are impossible because common sense born of experience says hills can’t be so steep, villages can’t look like castles, and soon enough we learn that every place must answer to time and the devil. Yet, fantasy or not and however dormant, the wish to find those realms can remain until the fortunate traveler happens upon a fulfillment, often along the way to somewhere else. I think that’s how one September morning I came to be sitting in a sidewalk café in Manarola, Italy, in a region called Le Cinque Terre—the Five Lands.
More accurately for today, they are five villages—Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore—lying along the exact edge of that northern thrust of the Mediterranean called the Ligurian Sea. Some eighty miles due south, French Corsica on a map points its finger of a peninsula directly at them to summon the attention of travelers: Here be phantasms. If ever a place seems marked out by topography for notice, it is the Cinque Terre.
The opposite has happened over the last thousand years. Even the Romans, known for extending empire to almost any place they could reach by foot or boat, little heeded this piece of coast, choosing instead to build their great inter-territorial Aurelian Way on the easier, eastern side of the low—if rather rugged—mountains that trap the villages between rock and sea in a surround all but impossible for plows and wheels. Such a difficult steepness may serve birds and beasts, but humans? We’re designed for life reasonably horizontal.
Over the years, a belief seemed to spring up that what ancient Rome ignored no one else should care about either. In that neglect the villages slipped through the centuries to arrive in our time like places from another era: gifts if not quite in plain view from the interior, then at least so from the sea to which they belong as Venice does its lagoon or Perugia its hill. Such isolation gave reprieve from the ruinous turmoil that has swept Europe since the Romans themselves let their empire fall into less dominant hands. Indeed, in the last World War, the people of the Cinque Terre could watch Allied bombers on the way to blast the harbor at Genoa forty miles northwestward from Monterosso and smear the town of La Spezia, only five miles below Riomaggiore. Perhaps it was the work of the Manes—from which the name Manarola may derive—the Roman embodiments of departed souls; if properly honored with lentils, bread, wine, and oil, the Manes were believed to bring protection, health, and longevity.
The five villages, survivors though they be, are not ancient by Mediterranean standards; rather, they are expressions of the late Middle Ages heavily doctored by the nineteenth century. One morning in a Manarola café as I fended off a drizzle with a caffe corretto—espresso “corrected” with a dollop of grappa—I couldn’t visualize Au
gustus Caesar walking down the street, but I could imagine Dante on a visit from his Florence not far over the mountains, or Shelley and Byron in search of some bit of romance however defined.
Like its four sisters, Manarola shouldn’t be here at all, not if the founders had followed horse sense and looked logically at the landscape, because there is no space for a hamlet any more than there’s room for vineyards and olive groves on the declivitous and stony hills that come right to the sea like a door to a jamb. To solve the problems of a terrain running up and down rather than otherwise, Manarolans took to a cleft—you can’t call it a valley or even a dale—cradling a spirited mountain-stream, and topped the rivulet with narrow pavement while leaving access points to the darkened water below that now murmurs under their feet like Manes from the netherworld.
Being denied a lateral landscape, builders chiseled niches from the cliffs in order to stack up shops and dwellings in such a way that Manarola, were you to turn it on its side, would cover about as much space horizontally as vertically. The slender, twisted lanes seem to rest more atop each other than to lie side by side in proper street fashion, so that someone looking southward out a fourth-floor window can cross the room to peer northward into the eyes of a stroller on the very next via. Architecture like this in an unexpected location gives each of the villages a distinct aura but one that could arise in a dream: Am I up or down? Yes. In the air or on the street? You are indeed.
Then there’s the manner of the hamlets challenging the sea by setting foundations right against it, an offering like a pugilist who tenders his nose to a fist: Hit me, sucker. These abrupt stone rises of dwellings suggest more a complex of castles than a village, and of the reasons tourists come to see the Five Lands, primary is the peculiarity of ocean-beset buildings painted in warm Mediterranean colors. Here, not far from where the Riviera ends, life takes place around tiny harbors rather than beaches, and it’s not about tanning lotion and sand but olive oil and cobbles banging against old walls the waves work to take down.