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Two weekends ago, I was in New Orleans visiting some friends. It’s a beautiful, friendly, unpretentious place with plenty of natural greenery, where it’s easy to strike up conversation and find live music.
It’s also a swamp. Hot, sticky, and swarming with bugs. You may need to shower multiple times a day. The friend we stayed with had a giant humidifier, which would fill to the brim three times a day with a gallon of water, which he’d ceremoniously dump in either the sink or his outdoor plants.
To get the full experience, we took a bayou tour on Saturday. All sorts of people were on the boat with us. There was a group of girls dressed in fancy, shimmery dresses in the back corner, and right next to them was a family of three, the dad sporting wide-legged jeans and a big smile, his young son trying and failing to locate alligators for most of the trip. Across from them on the other side of the boat was another family with another dad with another pair of wide-legged legwear (cargo shorts).
Unfortunately, this dad’s in a sour mood because before we leave, a young woman stalls our departure, pleading with the boatman to wait two more minutes for her friends to arrive. The dad shouts, “It’s past four o’clock!” And then he crosses his arms and looks to the side and says to his family, and then to himself, “That’s not right. That’s just not right.” His proclamation starts a small movement. All around us, people shake their heads at this tardy woman and murmur to themselves, “That’s not right at all,” and “We got here on time, didn’t we?”
But that initial bonding (plus the heat) relaxes us once we undock and start floating through the foggy green water. Around us is every kind of tree: some big, some small, some wide, some narrow, some evergreen, some deciduous. Surrounding some trees are these sharp stumps that rise just above the surface. When we pass our first alligator in an open clearing, everyone stands and shifts towards one side of the boat. All you can see is the gator’s head lurking above the surface, but upon closer inspection, you can see its tiny arms and legs floating on either side of it underwater. Its body is an adorably rotund shape; it has the energy of a retiree relaxing in a pool float.
By this time, the insects are upon us1. In fact, they’ve been upon us the whole time, steadily growing in number. My friends and I are sitting in the boat’s middle bench, nicely protected from the boat’s edges, but we’re still targets. Enormous hornet-looking things double-jump through the air while giant dragonflies hover near our faces with precision. None of us like bugs2, especially none this size.
One of my other three friends has been suffering from food poisoning on and off throughout the trip, so he’s fighting a far greater battle that these bugs couldn’t hope to compete with. Another one of my friends pulls his knees up to his chest and sits in the middle of the bench, shielded basically on all sides. He has a history with insects. He’s deathly afraid of bees, but, having been raised as a Jain3, he also knows how to nonviolently trap bugs with just a cup and paper to release them back into the wild.
Here, though, we already are in the wild, so there’s no strategy besides impotently swatting the air. While we search for gators and admire the rich green textures of the bayou, insects land on our clothes and flit by our eyes. An undertone of buzzing permeates the rest of the journey. Most people seem unbothered, though. The girls in the corner wearing fancy dresses and designer shades nonchalantly wave bugs away before snapping pictures together, their phones hovering dangerously over the edge of the railing. What professionals. The little child searching for gators has a couple of face-offs with a dragonfly, but also doesn’t seem upset. He’s an up-and-coming adventurer. I find my own legs bouncing, my arms waving in front of my face even if nothing’s there, just to send a message to any prospective flying critters.
The little child near us is antsy. He’s hardly taller than the boat railing, probably no more than six years old, and he peers over it on his tiptoes hoping to get a better view of one of the nearby alligators. “What happens if I fall into the water?” he asks his dad.
“If you fall, then I’ll say, ‘bye-bye.’” the dad says, waving at his son.
“What do you mean, ‘bye-bye?’”
“Because the alligator will eat you.” The dad grins.
“No it won’t!” The kid huffs and puffs. His mom joins now too, and both her and his dad wave at him saying, “bye-bye!” He paces back and forth, swatting at insects, before wearing himself out and sitting back down. His parents plop down next to him and squeeze him affectionately.
Then, the boatman pulls a baby gator out of a small closet in the back of the boat and explains how to hold it. Grip the body firmly and elevate its tail so it feels balanced. Its tiny arms flail a little bit as the boatman carries it around. They’ve wrapped electrical tape around its tiny gator mouth like a muzzle so it doesn’t bite anyone. We pass it around and hold the little guy. Its skin is smooth and cool to the touch. Its tiny gator lungs grow and shrink against my hand. For a moment, I forget about the insects surrounding us. I don’t expect this infant reptile to be so pleasant.
After we pass the gator around and squirt half a cup of hand sanitizer into our hands, the tour comes to a close. We return to the dock, where gigantic crickets await us in the grass between the bayou and the parking lot. They look like large animal droppings climbing on top of each other, maybe fighting, maybe mating. Unfazed, we salute them as we pass. We climb into our friend’s car, the inside of which is about 3,000 degrees, and drive back home, where, halfway through the drive, we witness two young men wearing skinny jeans and snapbacks riding giant horses into a suburban neighborhood.
The creatures of New Orleans are something else.
Other Things Of Note
Nothing else! Just a few other photos from da trip!
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—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)
I googled “New Orleans Bayou Insects” and the first hit was this elementary school curriculum about traveling to the bayou and identifying its bugs...NOLA kids are just built different.
Safe to say most people don’t.
Jainism advocates for nonviolence against all living things, which has largely adapted for the modern world, but still requires a discipline and patience that I can only look at with awe.