On Duck Feet

When I first contacted Wendy Thibodeaux for an assignment, I assumed we would have to do the interview by phone. I live two hours away from her, a swamp tour guide in Breaux Bridge, and meeting in-person during these strange times is becoming harder and harder to justify. But then she offered to take me on a swamp tour; it had been a while since I’d gotten out of my at-home office and back into the field, and eager at the prospect of seeing the Atchafalaya Basin for myself, I agreed to meet her at Kern’s Landing in Henderson the next morning. “Once you see it, you’ll know why I choose to do what I do,” she had said. And I did. 

It was just after ten in the morning when we set out, but I was already sweating. As Thibodeaux navigated her skiff along the levee and into the basin, she told me about her life, often breaking off mid-sentence to point out a Great Blue Heron among the maidencane, or air bubbles traveling atop the water’s surface, indicating a wading alligator beneath. Her trained eye spotted wildlife that disappeared into the moss or murky water before I could even catch a glimpse. A fisherman passed us moving fast in the opposite direction, and she waved and turned to me, saying, “When the waves come, you have to turn the nose into them, so your boat doesn’t flood.”

As Thibodeaux, in her thick Cajun accent, recounted stories about her family and growing up on Lake Martin, we came upon the basin bridge. Her late father helped to build it, burrowing through nineteen feet of swamp and silt until they reached the earth. “This is not solid ground, this is muck.” When Thibodeaux found herself caught on a cypress log, she used a “duck feet” pole to push her way out, because a normal one pierces straight through the sinking mud. Due to fluctuating water levels, the basin is constantly changing; it’s easy to get lost, and every day Thibodeaux has to traverse its shifting landscape, seeing how it transformed overnight. “Where I bring you today, I won’t be able to go two weeks from now,” she said, looking to Mardi Gras beads slung between the cypress trees, markers to guide the way. When she does find herself in unfamiliar territory, she listens for the sound of the Interstate 10 bridge in the distance; as long as she can hear it, she knows how to find her way back. 

“This place is a gift,” she told me. “It’s beautiful, but it’s nothing to play with. You have to keep your head on your shoulders.” Thibodeaux’s deep reverence for this natural landscape reminded me of why I loved to write about it in the first place. Its ever-changing terrain keeps us in check, reminding us who is really taming who. But as much as this land humbles us, forcing us to our knees time and time again with a hard-hitting hurricane or a bad harvest season, it provides.  “People here have always made their living on the water,” Thibodeaux said. “I want to do it, too.”  So she adapts, learning how to stay afloat by turning into the waves heading our way; meeting them head-on.