Voyage of (Re)discovery

The other day my wife’s cousin was telling Ashley what a good time she’d had at the leprosarium, which got me thinking about how many ways there are to entertain yourself around here. If only you know where to look. Charlotte lives in Sunshine (or is it St. Gabriel?), and she and her husband had out-of-state visitors to show around. It was July and too hot to go very far, so on a Saturday morning they took their friends to the National Hansen’s Disease Museum just down River Road in Carville, which commemorates the history and treatment of leprosy in the United States, on the site of the last operational leprosarium in the country. Despite having lived two bends upriver from Carville for the past twenty years, neither Charlotte nor her husband had ever been there before. They were struck by the beauty of its campus and the grace and sensitivity of its exhibits. From Carville, they took their guests to Houmas House Plantation & Gardens for drinks, then Roberto’s River Road Restaurant for dinner, completing a thoroughly cultural, culinary, and colorful itinerary that you truly couldn’t find anywhere else in the country. All within twenty miles of their front gate.

I could identify because the addition of two French exchange students to our family last month reminded us to put our money where our mouths are, so to speak. Enora and Erell, 14 and 12 years old respectively, are from Lorient, a medium-sized town on the French coast, where it juts out into the Celtic Sea a couple hundred miles south of England. Wild and windswept, with daily summertime temperatures in the sixties (if you’re lucky), western Brittany is pretty rural; but that’s about the only thing it has in common with northern West Feliciana Parish, where we live. So when Enora and Erell tottered through the doors of the New Orleans airport into the humid, sweltering fug of a July afternoon, they looked shell-shocked to say the least. They looked even more shell-shocked when they discovered that they’d be spending the next two weeks staying in a cabin in what, from a French teenager’s perspective, must have looked like a tropical jungle, surrounded by Spanish moss, screaming crickets, and small boys from Mississippi armed with B.B. guns.

Within a week they knew how to recognize a poisonous snake, had developed a horror of banana spiders, and had both developed scorching cases of poison ivy rash. But they (and consequently we) had also danced to zydeco in Breaux Bridge; spotted alligators in New Iberia; tasted Tabasco at Avery Island; water-skied in Ferriday; swamp toured on Lake Martin; roamed mansions in Natchez; walked in the footsteps of Audubon; kayaked on the Mississippi; eaten beignets at the French Market; been told the tale of Compair Lapin en Français at Laura Plantation; visited art, history, and cultural museums; and proved perfectly capable of holding their own in a girls-versus-boys mud fight. They might even have improved their English. I hope they had a good time, because we certainly did.

Why does it take the presence of visitors to make us get out and revel in the culture that is all around us? Intent on showing our exchange students that this corner of the country has some truly special things to offer, we had broken out of our daily routine, spread our wings, and partaken of its rich cultural variety with both hands. Granted, the grass didn’t get mowed much, the beds weren’t always made, and a raccoon made good on our frequent absences to make off with most of our chickens. But I’m pretty sure that the America Enora and Erell discovered is not the one that they came expecting to see.

But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? We live somewhere special, folks. It’s not all beautiful, neat and tidy, or remotely predictable. But unique spirits flow across its scruffy, inimitable landscape that win hearts and minds despite the heat, humidity, and bugs—or possibly because of them. It’s rewarding to watch a French kid spot her first alligator or get the hang of a two-step, but it’s also fun to do it all for yourself, without waiting for visitors to call. There’s no excuse for ignoring what’s all around us. Support it, celebrate it, discover it, and I promise you’ll come home gladder, and prouder, that you get to call this place home.