The french connection, pt 1

Heading west from Oberlin, I entered Evangeline Parish. In Louisianna the state is divided into Parishes instead of counties, they amount to the same thing.

Evangeline Parish is part of a region known as Accadiana. This area was originally settled by people of French origin known as Accadians or Cajuns. The Accadians first settlled in Newfoundland, Canada but were later ejected by the British who wanted to ensure control of the region by setttling it with only their own people.

This ejection began a journey of Odysseyan proportions for the Accadians, taking them to France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, even the Falkland Islands in a search of a place to call thier own. Ultimately they settled in the swamps of what is now Western Louisiana.

The Accadians have maitained many aspects of their old culture such as festivals, customs, music, dance and cuisine. However their version of the French language is finally dying out, being spoken only by the older generation.

In the three days I spent in Cajun country, I was dissapointed not to hear a single word of their French dialect. Being a keen French speaker I would have been interested to see if I could understand, or indeed be understood .

Accadiana is very flat indeed. In fact I think it is the flattest place I've ever been.
Most of the land lies on a flood plain, and is actually below the level of the major rivers that surround and divide it.

Over the years huge dykes have been built up on either side of the big rivers in an attempt to contain them. The Mississipi River is particularly prone to finding a new path to the Gulf of Mexico every few years.

This is a natural phenomenon which has no doubt gone on for centuires. However it does not suit the modern towns and cities which have grown up alongside it, for the river to choose to be somewhere else instead.

Hence an ongoing struggle between man and river has ensued for over 2 centuries. Levees have grown higher and higher only for the river to burst through or over them just the same. Now the grassy levees rise 30ft above the flood plains, completely obscuring the river from view as you ride along.

Some of the flat fields are wetter than others. I passed by rice, sugar, cotton, grazing and hay. In the rice fields little lobster pots are placed in rows to catch freshwater crustaceans.Field sized ponds break up the 'dry' land. These are used to grow catfish, another key ingredient of Cajun food.

Water birds are plentiful I've seen egrets, herons, ibis, ducks, plovers and pelicans, all a keen to plunder the wetland's riches.

No doubt these parishes were all a swampy jungle 300 years ago. Most of the land has now been cleared but small wooded areas have been kept across the region. They give cover to the birds and to deer, possums and raccons which skulk in the shadows hoping not to be noticed.

Louisiana dubs itself a 'Sportsman's Paradise', a picture of a pelican accompanying the slogan on the car number plates. Hunting is more popular in Accadiana than anywhere else I've been.

Nearly every little clump of woods has a pick up parked nearby it at dusk, its occupants off in the trees hoping for a kill. The sport seems to cross more social and economic boundaries here than it did in Texas. With few fences there is a lot of public access to the land, legally or otherwise.

Unfortunately this results in hunters of all sorts in all sorts of places, Elmer Fudd may well be lurking somewhere in the Louisiana woods. The chances of geting shot by accident in the woods seems to me to be a lot higher here in the Deep South.

Soaked to the skin and surrounded by rice fields I decided to spend the night in a hotel in the town of Mamou. With the campsite closed for the winter and the tiny woods awash with gunmen, I didn't really have any choice.

The next morning as I left town, I started to doubt the accuracy of Johnny's version of Louisiana. Mamou was definately populated by both blacks and whites and they seemed to be getting along just fine, sharing a joke and working together.

However it was a Sunday morning and I did notice that the congregations leaving the churches were either one colour or the other. As an outsider it struck me as a little odd for Christians not to be united before The Lord.

Still, I reckoned Johnny and Edward's ideas of life in their state may have been a localised impression based on their own area. Possibly they were also little out of date, having grown up in a very different times.

Sometimes the world around us changes faster than our state of mind, leaving us with the idea that things are still how they used to be.

As I rode on I occasionally met people and one thing certainly wasconfirmed – a mindset of mutual mistrust is alive and well in rural Western Louisiana. Well meaning strangers of all sorts would allude to the danger posed by other people within their community.

This was the first time in nearly 2 months of camping and cycling in the USA that I had come across such a level of fear one another, I wondered how it came to be so.

Was this the legacy of slavery and the legally sanctioned social divisions that continued until the civil rights reforms in the sixties? Or was it the result of mass poverty due to mother nature's frequent violent outbursts across the state? Would this attitude prevail throughout the Deep South?

Time would tell...