When Death Arrives With Wet Feet
In the brackish wetlands and marshes of South Louisiana, there exists a natural organic substance that is neither solid earth that can be guaranteed to hold your weight if you step on it, nor freely, flowing water headed surely and obstinately toward the open Gulf of Mexico. The Creole French word I’ve heard used in sentences thick with Yat accents in reference to these objects sounds like “flota” pronounced “flow-TAU” and the English words I’ve heard from buttered Southern lips to describe them are “floatin’ marsh grass.” When there are miles of nothing but floating mats of marsh grasses attached to no soil, the people of Delacroix Island, LA, a town about an hour southeast of New Orleans, called that landscape a prairie. I used the past tense of the word call because the Delacroix Island of which I write was swept away with the roar of the wind and water on August 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina leveled almost every man-made structure on the island. Hundreds of years of culture and t...
