A Waterborne Tour of Livingston Parish

As a citizen of Baton Rouge, you could be forgiven for not realizing the beauty of Livingston Parish. Unless your high school sports team traveled to play Denham Springs High then it is possible that your only experiences with Livingston Parish are watching a stretch of piney woods fly by as you travel Interstate 12 towards Florida or some other point east. From the main road it looks like a lot of other parts of Louisiana. But Interstate 12 just grazes the northern boundary of the parish. Off of those main roads, Livingston is as diverse and beautiful as any part of Louisiana.

The parish is even shaped a little bit like our state, sweeping southeast towards the gulf. Sandy, red-clay soil and quiet little towns define the northern portions of Livingston, while, the southern part of the parish is a familiar, Louisianan, watery paradise. Nearly half of Livingston Parish is water, encompassing a significant portion of Lake Maurepas and many of the swamps, bayous and cypress stands that surround that little brother of the Pontchartrain.

The casual traveler sees a residential, sleepy Livingston. Those more familiar with the slow curling of Blind River or the raucous parties on Maurepas’ sandbars know better. Eric Edwards, the ebullient head of the Livingston Parish Convention and Visitors Bureau, took me on a waterborne tour of Livingston Parish where all you need to appreciate its natural beauty is a full ice chest and a full bottle of sunscreen. From what I could tell, a fishing pole and some water skis might come in handy too.

Leaving the still water of the dock by Eric’s house, our pontoon boat edged out into one of the many tributaries that eventually flow into Blind River and then into Maurepas. Named for an eighteenth-century French nobleman, the Comte de Maurepas, this large inland lake collects north of the Pontchartrain and shares some of its tidal, brackish characteristics. Salt water is pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico into the Pontchartrain where some of it passes into Maurepas. In turn, four rivers (the Tickfaw, Amite, Natalbany and Blind) dump fresh water into the shallow basin.

No matter how many times it is demonstrated to me, it is easy to lose sight of how vitally interconnected the great forces of tides and rivers are, even in a place as far from the open Gulf as Livingston Parish. The same ecosystem that is typically associated with the Atchafalaya is present around Lake Maurepas. The great cypress forests that stood for centuries before they were logged in the early 1900s were nurtured here too. Their passing is just as evident in the form of gigantic stumps rising from the waterline and the occasional piece of discarded logging equipment.

If anything, the swamps and slowly re-growing cypress stands in southern Livingston Parish have fared better than their cousins in the Atchafalaya. These green, flooded places all share a certain similarity. There are snowy egrets and blue herons, alligators and our native hibiscus, the marsh mallow. But each section of swamp is different; each possesses an intangible character that speaks when you give it space to be heard. With the engine turned off on our boat, bobbing near some tree-covered and sunken island in Black Lake, the wind through the forest canopy and along the water’s surface just feels different than it does at Bayou Sorrel or somewhere out from Henderson. Each swamp in Louisiana is the same in many respects, but each has its own unique, peaceful quality, too.

Along the swamps and rivers of Livingston, heavy yellow and black towropes dangle from tree limbs that arch over the water. These are rope-swings that our boat driver Mickey describes as “the original water park.” Generations of kids have rocketed into the cool water from these makeshift amusement parks in a sort of do-it-yourself, rural approach to fun. A tranquil, undisturbed section of river makes a turn, revealing a clapboard bar accessible only by boat or four-wheeler. A big bend in the Amite is dissected by an arrow-straight diversion canal lined with million dollar homes, lively restaurants and tiki-thatched bars all awaiting the next big holiday weekend, when this area will swarm with people looking for a respite from the summer heat. Then another turn in the river takes you back to an untroubled, liquid world of crab trap buoys and old fishing camps, their tin roofs rusting in the blinding sun.

Livingston Parish is heavy on the sort of isolated, get-it-done-ourselves entertainment and utilization of Louisiana’s rich landscape that was a hallmark of the whole state a few generations ago. It seems to have been forgotten in a lot of areas, but for a very long time, people knew that all you needed to appreciate the overawing beauty of Louisiana is a piece of rope and something that could be relied upon to float most of the time.

This old-time appreciation of nature is sometimes intruded upon by a long, fast speedboat slicing through the tea colored water, pop-music pumping from speakers mounted above the driver’s head, but such is the nature of a place open to everyone. You can launch your boat into the pristine, aquatic maze of Livingston Parish less than forty-five minutes from downtown Baton Rouge; how you choose to spend your time there is your own business. The good news is that the parish has plenty of space for both those inclined to beery, boat-bound poker runs and the folks who want to cast a quiet line, hoping to pull up a dinner’s worth of fat, white bellied catfish.

Time and again I marvel at all this state has to offer. Its wildness is barely outside of the city limits. A short drive from the tentative sophistication of our capital city brings you to within footsteps of a vibrant, powerful and ever-changing natural world. Concrete and fast food can be traded for swaying Spanish moss and the slap of a paddle against smooth water teeming with fish and crab. The sporting wonders of places like Grand Isle and Cocodrie are well-established, but a similar sort of sunburned, outdoor fun is as close by as many people’s daily commute.

That is Louisiana, ever sloping toward the salty Gulf that both threatens and sustains us. The balanced, interwoven world of land and water slips to within a few miles of virtually every point south of Interstate 10. Beauty and solitude, community and merriment, all these factors are like the interlaced fingers of a pair of hands defining the variety of Louisiana.

In some sense Livingston Parish is just like the rest of Louisiana—proudly, intensely diverse. Look closely out of the window as your car winds its way down one of their country roads and you will notice no two spots are the same. The remarkable wonder of its richness offers something that can appeal to everyone, if we just take the time to notice all that we have been given.

Photojournalist Frank McMains can often be found this time of year wiping sunscreen off of his camera lenses and looking for the perfect poboy.