Postmark Bayou Chene

In 1972, Gwen Carpenter had just gotten her master’s degree in speech at LSU and was about to start work on her doctorate  when she happened to read Alone, Admiral Richard Byrd’s account of five months in 1934 that he spent in isolation at Advance Base, a tiny hut in Antarctica. “Reading Alone probably put the notion in my head that I would not be teaching speech at LSU forever,” she said. “About three months after I read it, Calvin showed up with his dream of living in the Atchafalaya River Basin swamp, and I couldn’t get out of civilization fast enough.”

Calvin Voisin is her second cousin—she thinks. “Our grandmothers were sisters and our grandfathers were brothers. Our parents were double first cousins.” They had known each other all their lives, while Gwen was growing up in Central and Calvin in Bayou Sorrel.

Using the book How to Build Your Home in the Woods, Gwen and Calvin designed a houseboat they built on a steel barge that was 103 feet long and 26 feet wide. They lived there for about eight years with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. They ate fish they caught, chickens they raised, and vegetables they grew. Not long after they took to the swamp, Gwen and Calvin met photographer C. C. Lockwood, who made regular treks to the Atchafalaya. His photographs of them and their floating house were published in National Geographic magazine. 

Gwen began writing about their life, in a column called “Swamp Gas” for Gris Gris alternative newspaper and for such magazines as Mother Earth News, Prevention, and Organic Gardening. In 2006, LSU press published a collection of Gwen’s columns in her book Atchafalaya Houseboat: My Years in the Louisiana Swamp, illustrated with Lockwood’s photos. Louisiana Public Broadcasting made a documentary based on the book in 2008. 

In the book, Gwen writes about how she took jobs cooking on riverboats to earn money for her dogs’ vet bills and a new outboard motor. On one of the trips, she met and fell in love with engineer Preston Roland. Although she tried to forget him when she returned to the swamp, she found herself scanning the horizon for passing boats. She married Preston in 1981 in the back yard of Maw Maw Josephine, her maternal grandmother. They began married life in Breaux Bridge, living in a converted barn and working as welders—a skill that Gwen had taught Preston.  

Eventually the couple moved to Naples, Florida, where they worked for a city magazine. But neither was fond of the social ramble and dressing up, so they moved to the Everglades where they worked for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, collecting biological data. “We weighed game, pulled deer jawbones, and counted turkeys at daybreak,” said Gwen.

By 1994, they were on a thirty-two-acre spread in Meansville, Georgia. Gwen worked as the communications specialist for SARE, the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program’s southern region at the University of Georgia in Griffin. “I was the liaison person between the researchers and the farmers,” said Gwen, who produced written materials and, later, a website. Preston worked as a research assistant, a job that, to his delight, required driving tractors. 

After working for SARE for sixteen years, Gwen retired in 2010. “I was tired of writing,” she said. “I wanted to do physical stuff. I threw myself into our community’s need for an animal shelter and became involved in a humane society called Coco’s Cupboard.” The nonprofit’s goal is to help reduce the number of abandoned pets in Pike County. “There are lots of abandoned dogs here,” said Gwen. “People don’t see the necessity for spaying and neutering. 

“I’ve always loved dogs. I have four of my own now, including Buddy, a German Shepherd puppy who arrived in a hail of bullets—somebody was shooting dogs in the area—and Pearl, a black Labrador retriever who tried to climb the picket fence into my yard one morning as I sat on the porch drinking coffee.” Gwen and Preston have also fostered dogs, helping to socialize animals that are up for adoption. “We’ve had sixty foster dogs in the last five years,” she said. 

Gwen often posts about dogs on her Facebook page. One entry reads,  “Fell asleep after lunch in the deep hay and winter sunshine coming through the goat house door. Three foster pups and three of my big dogs flopped out all around me. Preston said we looked like the body count in a disaster movie.”

The life suits Gwen, who lives in overalls she finds at thrift stores and dyes different colors. “I started doing this when I was in the swamp and found it was a style that worked for me. Contemporary clothes just don’t look or feel right on me.”

In 2011, she wrote on Facebook, “I’ve been enjoying not writing for someone else since I retired. Some of my favorite editors keep asking when I’m going to get off my butt and write something but so far I have not been able to find the time. I do spend a few hours each day on Postmark Bayou Chene, my novel set in 1907.”

The idea for the novel, about the community where her ancestors had lived, first came to her in 2005. “I Googled ‘Bayou Chene’ and a letter popped up as part of a collection being sold by an auction house. It originated in Bayou Chene and was addressed to a person in France, but it never got delivered.” For those who wonder, she describes its location thus: “It is just about mid-way in the Basin—north and south, east and west. If you draw a line from St. Martinville on the west side of the Basin to Bayou Sorrel on the east side, Bayou Chene would be about in the middle.”

Gwen embarked on a mission to find out all she could about Bayou Chene. “I spent years lost in census records, old letters, and a small library of books ranging from Carl Brasseaux’s Steamboats on Louisiana’s Bayous to the 1897 Sears and Roebuck Catalog. 

“I spent more and more time in my head with all these characters swirling around. We’d weed together, walk dogs together. I saw how much fun that was.” 

Periodically, she heard from Margaret Lovecraft, the acquisitions editor at LSU Press, who wanted to know how her novel was coming along. “Margaret called me a couple of times a year. She wanted a follow up to Atchafalaya Houseboat.” Postmark Bayou Chene was published last month. On Halloween Day, Roland was a featured author at the annual Louisiana Book Festival at the State Capitol. At a panel discussion, she described how her grandmother’s stories inspired her to write about Bayou Chene.

“My picket fence in front of our little house in Georgia is reminiscent of the split-cypress fences that surrounded the yard of my grandma Josie Ashley Voisin of Bayou Chene. I listened to her stories as I followed her around the picket fence, watering plants, stomping on grasshoppers, and pulling weeds. So gardening and telling stories came as a package to me.

“I was writing the book I wanted to read about the place my ancestors came from. Maw Maw Josephine grew up in Bayou Chene. She was born at the end of the nineteenth century. She filled my head with stories. I felt, if no one has written a novel, it has to be done now.”

The 1927 flood effectively destroyed the Bayou Chene community; in the 1930s and 1940s, people began moving away. By the time Gwen moved there in 1972, there were few people left. “Calvin and I were just about able to duplicate their lives,” she said. “There wasn’t a community there, but there were still lots of stories told by people like Alcide Verret, who lived there all his life.” 

She already has an idea for another novel. “When we moved to Georgia about twenty years ago, the first thing I did was set up my double garden/chicken yard plots with the chicken house in the middle. Over the years I’ve written more stories about chickens than just about any other subject. They play a prominent role in Postmark Bayou Chene, but I have known so many remarkable chickens, I’ve thought about writing a book of chicken stories.”

She works at a pine desk, chair, and computer desk that Preston made as a combination birthday, anniversary, Christmas, and retirement present. “When we worked on the riverboats together, he would look at all those willow trees lining the banks and say, ‘If a fella could turn those into money, he wouldn’t have to work on boats.’ When we were first married and living in Breaux Bridge, he started making furniture from the willows along the Atchafalaya.”  

Whether chickens will play a prominent role or not, Gwen said the setting of her next book won’t change. “I’m still only interested in the past of the Atchafalaya Basin. I just want to investigate it. It’s fun, plus it feels like I’m saving it.”

Gwen Roland’s website is at gwenrolandbooks.com. Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.