A Jaunt to Jean Lafitte
The scenic small town on the Bayou Barataria holds the spirit of adventure in its name
Early morning on a cloudless day in March, I clung to my youngest and oldest sons on the front row of an airboat skidding over the bayous encircling Jean Lafitte. Our ears were clamped in canary yellow soundproof earmuffs, and the three of us hung on tightly as we swooped to the left and skimmed across the water. Our youngest, Bryce, whooped with joy while his older brother, Charles, sat stoically still in clichéd teenager fashion. Behind us, middle son August buried his head in his father’s chest, silently praying for the thrill ride to stop. My cheeks ached from the enduring smile plastered on my face.
Tic Toc, our fearless captain, had started out slowly in the Bayou Barataria, leaving the home of Airboat Adventures and steering us past an old cemetery with white-washed tombs clustered around an Indian mound. Chitimacha, Houma, and other Native American tribes lived in this area for thousands of years before European contact, living off the marsh and bayous in much the same way as the small town’s residents do today.
While the vital waters here often bestow an abundance of seafood, they also put the town’s residents on the front lines of rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes. Just beyond the cemetery, an open refrigerator floated on its side. Tic Toc grimaced, “We had twelve to fourteen feet of water from Ida. Any debris you see is from then.” Despite the 2021 hurricane’s mass devastation, time and nature have hidden much of the storm’s remnants strewn across the waterways.
Beyond the no-wake zone, Tic Toc ramped the airboat to top speed, and we bounced across the water, shivering against the cold wind overcoming the warm morning sun. Entering a narrow channel overhung with tree branches, he slowed to a crawl and pointed at a six-foot alligator sliding silently into the water. “This is where we go swimming,” he announced with a grin, but before August could reach heart attack mode, the boat raced off again.
Our destination was Lake Salvador, one of Louisiana’s largest lakes. Along the way, we admired massive snakes and great blue herons against the backdrop of giant palmettos and cypress trees, accented by the delicate white blooms of bulltongue arrowhead. At one point, a flock of white pelicans circled overhead as three alligators drifted toward our bobbing boat. “The biggest one I’ve seen was sixteen feet, but the largest alligator on record out here was nineteen feet, two inches,” Tic Toc noted while placing a marshmallow on the end of a stick and giving each kid a turn at feeding them.
"The people here exude the distinctly defiant resilience that has come to define so many south Louisianans, and they embrace their swampy surroundings with good nature and characteristic white shrimp boots."
We docked on a strip of land, and two raccoons—Mama and Spooky—skittered over to take a marshmallow straight from Tic Toc’s mouth. When an alligator hauled out onto dry land behind him, our guide shooed the raccoons out of harm’s way and then leaned over and scratched the reptile on his head.
Returning to the boat, Tic Toc drove us beyond the cypress trees into Lake Salvador and ran a short jaunt along the lake’s edge. Weaving around the crab traps, he turned back inwards to the marsh where the female alligators build their nests. Many of the eggs laid here will be harvested and hatched at a farm, where baby gators are raised until they reach three to four feet long. A portion are then released back into the wild through a program that has boosted alligator numbers over the years.
The airboat tour was the first stop on our day trip adventure in Jean Lafitte, which lies on Bayou Barataria, just south of New Orleans. Named for the notorious privateer, the town exists on the edge of civilization in arguably one of the most scenic, albeit vulnerable, spots in Louisiana. The people here exude the distinctly defiant resilience that has come to define so many South Louisianans, and they embrace their swampy surroundings with good nature and characteristic white shrimp boots.
Much of the town’s two-hundred-year history is typically told at Lafitte’s Barataria Museum, which traces the town’s roots as a historic fishing village through artifacts, exhibits, and wildlife specimens. Sadly, the museum has been closed since Hurricane Ida, instead housing a temporary town hall within its space. Next door, though, progress is being made on the new Louisiana Wetlands Education Center, slated to open in late 2023.
Behind the construction zone is the half-hidden entrance to the Wetland Trace, a little-known gem that is one of the best swamp boardwalks in the state. Here, green anoles and blue-tailed skinks scurried along the boardwalk underneath moss dripping from cypress trees. Clumps of iris sprouted from the wet soil below, flanking the trail leading to docks and a pavilion overlooking an inlet. Charles threw a few quick casts in the water, pulling up several bass before we completed the one-mile loop back.
During weekdays, the town’s food trucks line up at the Fisheries Market, but on a Saturday afternoon, Tewelde’s Family Market makes for a quick, delicious stop. Newly opened since Hurricane Ida, the grocery store filled our empty stomachs with a buffet of fried seafood, hot wings, and fries. Down the road, we popped in at Higgins Seafood to admire the day’s offerings of crawfish, shrimp, crabs, oysters, and catfish.
Retracing our drive along the town’s main thoroughfare, we then crossed the high bridge spanning Bayou Barataria/Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and made our way to the Barataria unit of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. At the Visitor’s Center, the ranger quizzed the kids on the animal hides on display while we browsed the museum, reading about the importance of Louisiana’s swamp. A twenty-minute, in-and-out boardwalk behind the Visitor’s Center brought us once again up close to the swamp, where enormous pig frogs and chirping cricket frogs serenaded our walk. Every ten feet, we spotted another snake soaking up the afternoon rays, and near the trail’s end, a six-foot alligator lay protectively close to a smaller female in what Bryce explained to us is called “team bonding.”
The park offers several trails throughout its twenty-six thousand acres, including marsh and swamp boardwalks and hiking trails through hardwood forests. One of our favorites is the Bayou Coquille Trail, a pleasant stroll along Bayou Coquille to the Kenta Canal. The trail meets up with the Marsh Overlook Trail, which normally leads to an expansive viewpoint of the marsh, but unfortunately has been closed since Hurricane Ida. The Bayou Coquille portion remains open, though, and features several interpretative signs detailing the area’s history. As we walked, large clumps of tiny black creatures scattered before us, revealing tiny, newly-hatched lubber grasshoppers, which will grow to several inches in length by late August.
Across Leo Kerner/Lafitte Parkway opposite the park sits Restaurant des Familles, serving Creole and Cajun fare inside an Acadian-style building overlooking Bayou des Familles. It felt appropriate to end our family outing here, sharing the crabmeat au gratin and alligator stuffed mushroom appetizers. As we dug into our main course of red beans and rice, chicken and sausage gumbo, and the customer-favorite, soft shell crab sandwich, we watched an egret alight from a cypress tree out back and fly gracefully home down the bayou. We heeded the sign that it was time to return to the lights of the big city, but we enjoyed knowing that the swamp will be here waiting for our return.
Disclosure: Airboat Adventures hosted our writer on their airboat tour free of charge, though the thoughts and experiences described in the above article are hers alone, and expressed independently from this fact.