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Poetic justice visited me
last night as my Cannon S30 digital camera battery conked out as soon as I
too a picture of the interior of Preservation Hall, which I later found out is
prohibited. I'm being doubly punished as I forgot to pack the recharger and
have found, with the assistance of a wonderful concierge, that one doesn't
exist at any camera shop within the city limits.  This
means that all further photos will be taken with some strange disposable
instead of my brand new shiny 3.2 mega pixel toy.
It really wouldn't be a vacation for me unless I took some sort of organized
tour of my surroundings. Beth isn't as enamored of these forays as I and when
she found out I was planning to take a Swamp Tour and that there would be
Alligator sightings, she decided a bit of shopping would be more to her
taste. I chose the Honey Island Swamp tour as the boats were smaller and I
figured I wouldn't be jostling with as many persons to get a good view of the
flora, fauna and wild life. Being picked up at the hotel, it's about a
40-minute drive toward the Mississippi border to get to the swamp and, once
ensconced on the swamp boat, the tour lasts for about 2 hours. Three boats of
20 persons each went out into the swamp, rendezvousing at various points
along the way.
And yes, there were Alligators -- lots of them. A Captain would toss
marshmallows in the  water
to draw them closer to the boat. Apparently, the gators are attracted to the
color white perhaps thinking that these are eggs that are one of their
natural sources of nutrition.
Some gator facts (at least according to the naturalist Captains who man the
swamp boats):
- They don't eat human
beings -- they'll kill them, but they won't eat them
- As mentioned, they are
attracted to the color white, somewhat like bulls to the color red. You
don't see very many white Bichons in Cajun back yards. (Bullfrogs are
attracted to red also, hence Bullfrog.)
- They're attracted by
sound more than motion (the marshmallows were slammed on the water
surface)
- They've been around
for 200 million years. They're really one of the few creatures we have
surviving the age of dinosaurs.
- Gators lay 5 eggs on
average of which only one offspring will survive the first year.
- There is virtually no
way of telling a female from a male alligator without killing and
dissecting them. One way, if your brave enough, is to shine a flashlight
into their eyes at night. A male's eyes will reflect a Red Orange color
and a female, Amber. Gators don't much likes this, though.
- They swallow their
prey whole. They don't really chew. The teeth are used for killing, but
they prefer to swallow prey (fish, crayfish) alive.
- As adults, their only
predators are Man and other Alligators. A large gator will eat a small
gator if he can swallow him.
- A group of them is
called a Crèche of Alligators.
Now, you can take all of this with a grain of salt because prefacing
everything the Captains said was this bit of wisdom:
"Do you know the difference between a Fairy Tale and a Swamp Story? A
Fairy Tale starts out 'Once upon a time' and ends 'happily ever after.' A
Swamp Story starts out 'No kidding, it really happened this way' and ends
with 'Y'all.'"
Swamp story: No kidding, it really happened this way. If you look at a
crawfish (or crayfish, depending on where you're from), it looks very much
like a tiny lobster. The story goes that Maine lobsters got sick of the
weather up there as well as all the Yankees they had to contend with. So a
bunch of 'em decided to make the long trip south to the warmer climes of the
Louisiana swamps.  But
the trip was so long and arduous, that they just kept pining away till they
were only a tenth of their normal size. And that's how the crawfish got into
the swamps, y'all.
One of the more interesting moments occurred when one of the Captains picked
up a live crawfish from a trap, lured an alligator to his boat with
marshmallows and basically hand fed the crawfish to the gator. Don't try this
at home.
We saw many interesting fauna as well as animal life, the most abundant being
the Spanish Moss seemingly hanging mid-air from the trees. Called Spanish
Beard by the French to tweak the Spanish, it was renamed by the Americans
when they arrived. Also, in abundance were the water hyacinth, a plant
artificially introduced into the environment and, like so many such
introductions, has become an almost impossible pest to the swamp. It
multiplies at such a rapid rate, doubling every 12 hours that it chokes out
almost all other surface plants in the swamp. Throw just one plant in your
backyard pond and it easily will cover the surface before the summer it out.
Speaking of introduced pests, the Nutria must be one of the worst of all.
Introduced because its fur is very similar to the mink, this oversized
rat-like water creature breeds three times faster. It gnaws on anything in
its path and is virtually undermining all the bridges and building structures
in New Orleans. It has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. It
is also one shudderingly ugly looking beast. Think slithery giant rat gliding
through the water and you'll get some idea.
A number of motion pictures have been filmed in Honey Island swamp --
naturally Burt Reynold's Gator, but also the James Fond flick Live
and Let Die and Anne Rice's, Interview With The Vampire. We
stopped in an area where, in the motion picture version of the book, the
vampire Lestat's body is dumped into the swamp -- a spot close to a famous
landmark called the Moonshine tree, which is clearly visible in the shot.
Rice lives in a Garden District mansion and New Orleans has always been
somewhat central to her fantastical narratives.
11:48 pm - New Orleans,
Day 3 (con't)
We continued our gastronomical tour de force by dining at Feelings
Café. Because of the part of town in which it is located, we decided to cab
it rather than walk. I'm can only assume
that as the restaurant got its start in the 70's, that it may very well be
named after that unbearable song that was so popular then. I'm glad it didn't
prevent me from visiting. Originally a slave quarters on the D'Aunoy
Plantation , we sat for drinks in an outdoor brick paved patio and it didn't
take much imagination to get a sense of what the living conditions must have
been during the pre-civil war era. The restaurant is a history lesson as well
as somewhat of a tribute to those who had to bear those ungodly conditions.
Viv, Beth and I all decided this would be the time to try our first Sazarac.
A potion of Rye whiskey and the controversial liquor, absinthe (banned in the
U.S. in 1912, but legalized in a few states just recently), this witches brew
has to be one of the most potent drinks I've ever encountered. Merely one of
them had my eyes glazing and my head whirling in a not unpleasant manner.
We dined in the upstairs balcony overlooking the courtyard and in a weird
architectural oddity, had our own private restroom. I didn't visit, but the
others said it was a quirky bricked room, well-lighted, but voodoo kind of
scary. I suggested it might originally been some sort of slave punishment
room, but no one liked that idea and I forgot to ask the owner before
leaving.
I was tempted to buy a book that was on sale at the restaurant called Obituary
Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans, a sort of  history/survey of the New
Orleans bar scene. I decided to wait till I got back to the east coast where
I could get a better look at the book (I have a birthday gift certificate at
Barnes & Noble). I spoke to the owner of Feelings and he said that
the author of the book, Kerri
McCaffety, is very controversial in New Orleans and a new version of the
book (originally published in 1998) was coming out and substantially altered
because of plagiarism issues. Additionally,
in her role as a photographer, she published a picture of a local priest
emerging from a gay bar. The priest has apparently since been defrocked.
Our day wasn't over however as, after dinner, we cabbed up to Ramparts Street
to visit a jazz hangout named Donna's and the music of The New
Orleans Pot Hole Brass Band. I think Arch and Viv particularly enjoyed
the authenticity of the old jazz players in the band. True toe-tappin' music.
Me-O, My-O, havin' big fun on the Bayou
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