LAPLACE, La. — In the far reaches of southern Louisiana, where the earth is sea level-flat, it is sometimes difficult to determine the fusion point where water and sky meet. The horizon melds the two together in a tapestry of colors – velvety sapphire, glowing green and metallic silver and gold — and are so richly and expertly woven that it’s sometimes difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends.
Water is the lifeblood of this part of Louisiana’s Mississippi River delta, with the entire wetlands comprising some three million acres striated with canals, creeks, swamps and bayous, all threaded together by verdant forests of Spanish moss-fringed pine, oak, tupelo, and cypress.
It's amazing that romance and romantic getaways can be found in the most unlikely of places, including the hauntingly beautiful backwater swamps and bayous of Louisiana.
It is here in Manchac Swamp, about an hour’s drive from downtown New Orleans, where my husband and I found wildlife outside of the wild life of the city. And it’s incredible wildlife at that, with critters and creatures and birds galore, all living and thriving among the wetlands that define this part of the state.
On an entirely-by-boat journey into Manchac Swamp with Cajun Pride Swamp Tours in LaPlace in St. John Parish, just in that sweet spot of back roads between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Captain Tom Billiott leads a small group of guests on a spellbinding sojourn through nature.
“The swamp ain’t got no schedule or menu,” the captain intones as he expertly maneuvers the boat away from the dock and then out through the chicory-colored water fringed with great strands of Louisiana cypress. “We’ll just see what we can find.”
Billiott is a Cajun through and through. He’s been leading swamp tours for a few decades now, but on each journey out into the backwater, he’s probably as animated and excited about talking about the swamp as he was on his first day more than 30 years ago.
At times you have to strain to understand his unique vernacular that is a singsong mix of Cajun and French. His “that” becomes “dat,” and like most Southerners, his r’s evaporate and become h’s and thus changing words like “weather” to “weathuh.” He calls the ladies on his swamp tour “cher,” as in short for the French “cheri,” and the gentlemen become “beau.”
The difference between a bayou and a canal, says Billiott, is that bayous are natural waterways, while canals are man-made. Swamps, he says, are all over southern Louisiana. Note that a swamp is not a bayou, though. It took thousands of years for the region’s formidable bayous to form, mostly from the ever-swirling outlets of the Mississippi River.
A bayou’s brackish water is slow-moving to the point it often appears stagnant, but a swamp is more forested, spongy and saturated with water. As we move farther among the cypress, Manchac Swamp looks pretty spongy and springy, I say to my husband, almost as if we could jump up and down on its mud, like a trampoline.
Billiott is so knowledgeable about the flora and fauna of the swamp that he can tell individual gators by their scars, scales, size, and other significant traits.
As the pontoon glides almost silently along a canal, on a morning when the sky was incredibly blue and brindled with wispy, thin clouds, he points out an egret, graceful and serene as she takes flight, and then a stand of milkweed, a gentle yellow flower that attracts monarch butterflies.
A crow watches the boat warily before flying off into the deep of the woods. Before the day is done, we see raccoons and whitetail deer, flits of bright garnet-red cardinals winging off in the woodlands, turtles, and even a snake or two slithering among the vegetation. Otters and nutria, a large rodent known as the river rat, are also denizens of the swamps, but on this day they manage to stay out of sight.
In the natural amphitheater of the swamp, we pass gators, lots of them, big and small, and learn that the males are called bulls while the females are cows. Almost no one here calls them alligators, maybe because saying the extra two syllables takes too long.
As the boat drifts quietly, almost stealthily through the water – made almost black because of tannins leaching into it from decaying vegetation – gators pay us no attention as they peek through the lush, emerald-green foliage on the banks of the swamp.
When we stop for a moment, Billiott reaches into a box akin to a small cooler and lifts out a baby gator, bigger than a hatchling but much smaller than the big bulls sunning themselves on the muddy banks. The miniature gator’s mouth is gently taped to prevent it from munching on Billiott’s hands.
“We keep them until they get too mean and too big,” he says as our boatmates ooh and ahh at the little varmint whose species is Louisiana’s most famous nonhuman resident.
The general assessment is that there are more gators than people in Louisiana, but curiosity got the best of this cat and I looked up the numbers. There are instead more people than gators, with the human population spiraling upwards toward the 5 million mark, while the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimates 2 million wild gators roam around the state, while another million live on gator farms.
That’s a lot of gators, a bumper crop of them, and all living among the bayous, swamps, lakes, canals, creeks, rivers, and, well, wherever there is water.
A gator, a primordial reptilian battleship with no known enemies except for a man (or woman) with a gun, can be vicious. Get in their way, perhaps getting too close to a mama’s nest, and they can hurt you and have been known to be the demise of many, their powerful jaws no match for neither man nor beast.
The biggest one ever found in the state measured in at 19 feet and two inches from the tip of its snout to the end of its mighty tail. Stay away from them, and they’ll stay away from you.
Do people eat gator? Yes. Supposedly gator meat tastes like a cross between chicken and pork, maybe a porky chicken. Billiott says that in some regions of Louisiana, you can go into a store and ask only for tail meat and the butcher will know immediately that you want gator tail.
A lot of crawfish are around, too, and are also called crawdad, crayfish or mudbug, but in any case is an ugly spiny-looking thing that some say resembles and tastes like a small lobster. Neither is for me, and I prefer chicken, pork or lobster as it was originally intended and not disguised as a reptile or crustacean.
It’s been a spectacular ride through the swamp, and as the tour ends and our group, more educated on gators and swamps than we thought we would ever be, prepares for the short trip back to our hotel in New Orleans. Captain Billiott, in his lyrically resonant voice, bids us adieu and c’est tout — goodbye and that’s all —as we leave our Cajun-style walk on the wild side.
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If you go
Visit Cajun Pride Swamp Tours at www.cajunprideswamptours.com. Reservations are recommended and can be made online. Shuttle service is offered from most New Orleans, Metairie and Kenner area hotels. Dress is comfortable and casual. Tours begin at 1.5 hours and start at $27 per person for adults and $16 per person for ages 4-12. Combination tours include swamp and nearby plantations such as Oak Alley. During fall and winter, cold-blooded animals including alligators and snakes, are not active, so there is a chance of not seeing them on tour.
You can also see the swamps and bayous by kayak with New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours (www.neworleanskayakswamptours.com) or airboat with Airboat Adventures (www.airboatadventures.com) or Swamp Adventures (www.swampadventuresnola.com). Other tour companies by boat or pontoon include Wild Louisiana Tours (www.wildlouisianatours.com), Jean Lafitte Swamp Tours and Airboat Tours (www.jeanlafitteswamptour.com) and Dr. Wagner’s Honey Island Swamp Tours (www.honeyislandswamp.com). Several tour operators offer transportation to and from New Orleans hotels, making it easier to access the nearby swamps.
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