Three Questions
The oldest cypress tree in St. John the Baptist Parish is an amputee. His ruined arm held out like a warning over the bayou’s slow moving waters. The stuttered branch is the day’s second forbearance. The first came courtesy of the writer Bob Marshall in the low ceilinged living room of his Uptown cottage. Bob has a shockingly dense head of gray hair and a mouth full of the dark humor common to people who trade in bad news.
Louisiana is swallowing itself he tells the group congregated around his table — it is sinking as fast as it is flooding. He shows us slide after slide of rising sea levels and vanishing wetlands, of pipelines and water logged maps, of trees gone dry with salt water. By way of negligence, human error and the will of oil seeking sinners that had dug at the belly of the Mississippi, Louisiana, Bob tells us, is doomed.
Bob’s presentation is given as a precursor to a leisurely Saturday kayaking trip through the bayou. He sends us on our way with a wave and a smile. Nothing like a grievous Biblical reckoning to get you in the boating spirit. Our group caravans across the broad asphalt highways, drawing away from the city. Our destination is a pull off, a patch of grass where half beached kayaks rest.
Our guides are lean and bearded, wearing smiles and no sleeves. They are buoyant in their enthusiasm for the landscape we move through — pointing out wildlife and new growth. Bob had prepared us for the funeral but not the revival. A warmer than usual fall has failed to send the mosquitoes underground. They are heavy in the air but only the females bite, looking for iron to produce their eggs, blotting blood like Morris code on my skin.
When I was twelve and growing into that skin my older sister asked me what body of water I would most like to swim in and three reasons why. Her inquiry was a bastardization of a Carl Jung questionnaire meant to uncover subconscious leanings. I didn’t know that when I gave her my answers, I mostly just tried to impress her with them. I felt important when she asked me things.
“The Dead Sea,” I said after some time, trying hard to sound dangerous, “there’s nothing else like it, nothing survives there and it’s disappearing.” She looked at me and laughed, loud and quick like a ricochet.
“The water is how you view yourself in sex and relationships”, she explained. I hadn’t had sex or a relationship yet but somehow I felt proud of the Dead Sea and me. I was deeply influenced at the time by the nihilist lyrics of Nine Inch Nail’s sophomore album and the final zen fatalist scene of the movie Point Break.
“How did you answer the question,” I asked her.
“I said a bathtub in a nice hotel, because you can control the temperature, you can see the bottom and you can get out any time you want.”
The thing I got wrong about the Dead Sea was the dying. Recently scientists have found that it is heavy with the humming of microbial bacteria — below the surface, beyond explanation and the range of human sight, they are making a home at the bottom of the world. I still haven’t seen it, instead I have brought my body to Louisiana. In these braided parishes with their war hero trees to another kind of disappearing.
I wonder what kind of lover the bayou would make; she is at once swollen and starved, abiding and punishing, most of the time you can’t see through or even into her. And just when you’re convinced she’s doomed, she bites. In your own blood she tells you she isn’t through yet.
