The Spring of Living Damply

It’s a beautiful day as I write this. Sun shining. Breeze gentle. Not too hot. A few clouds scattered across a pale blue sky. Typical Louisiana springtime—the sort of conditions you associate with a perfect day at Jazzfest or an afternoon spent pulling fat bass through the mirror surface of a pond or bayou. It’s also the sort of weather that we, spoiled by soft warm springs, have come to expect when we fill our calendars with festivals, excursions, camping trips and garden parties. And visitors. Come about April there aren’t many things my wife and I enjoy more than inviting friends or relatives who live at higher latitudes to fly down to Louisiana, to share a few days lounging in the sun, shuttling between festivals and fishing trips, admiring azaleas and irises; and stuffing their faces with boiled crawfish. This works well with northeasterners, since by about March your typical New Yorker hasn’t experienced an outdoor temperature above freezing, or voluntarily exposed any skin to the sun, in six months or more. It works even better if this is their first trip south, since if they’ve reached middle age without ever having set foot in Louisiana, they’ve usually come to believe such surreal stereotypes about life here, they’re surprised to arrive at the airport and discover that everyone has teeth. But it only takes a trip to Tony’s, a day fishing on a country pond and a chance to dance in the sun to change those perceptions. By day three we’re beginning to wonder if they’re ever going to leave. But that’s OK. It’s fun to pretend it’s like this all the time. And so long as they don’t come back in August they’ll never know the difference.

But this spring the weather just didn’t cooperate. Two times in March and April we lured permafrosted New York transplants down here with watertight promises of blue skies and balmy temperatures. At the end of March my English cousin Pete, his wife Siobhan and their three maniacal children—fled the cabin fever of their first New York winter, but exited the Baton Rouge Airport into a late-season blast of Arctic cold for which our propaganda had in no way prepared them. The temperature was actually lower than it had been when they left New York, so the shorts and tee-shirts they had packed for the trip didn’t really cut it (my cousin is a couple of years younger than me and has always believed everything I tell him). So we were forced to abandon plans for a camping/fishing weekend, opting instead for a bonfire party and souvenir LSU sweatshirts. It didn’t turn out like anyone expected, but nobody froze, the kids were thrilled to see deer, and they left threatening to come back in summertime.

In mid-April my son and I were invited down to Grand Isle by a friend, Dave, for a fishing trip. Charles is eight and loves to fish. And despite the fact that he’d never been to Grand Isle he was captivated by the notion of a tropical isle in South Louisiana—a fisherman’s mecca where small boys were hauling in speckled trout and flounder by the boatload. And of course, Grand Isle can be a small boy’s fishing mecca, if (a) the fathers of the small boys know anything about where to find fish; and (b) if the weather cooperates. But on Saturday night it rained so hard that our tent (yep, another camping trip) took on several inches of water and we woke up in a puddle. Next morning a forty knot gale was sending ten-foot waves crashing over the jetties, and Blackbeard himself wouldn’t have gotten in a boat. Still, Charles talked me into taking him down to the state park fishing pier, where not even squalls that literally lifted him off his feet prevented the world’s most determined child from catching a medium-sized catfish. Bloodlust satiated, we fled for the State Park’s palatial bathroom pavilion which, having been built to weather hurricanes, made a good place to wait out the storm. Better than our tent, which by this time was ragged, flapping, and resembled a partially sunken ship protruding from a shallow lake. Perfunctorily dried, a very cold Charles was finally bundled into the car with instructions to stay put while Dave and I reeled about in the rain, wrestling with the remains of the tent between pulls on a bottle of rum that made us walk and talk like pirates. I hadn’t been much of a rum drinker, but now I’ve experienced it straight from the bottle, in a howling gale while soaked to the skin, I’ve really come to appreciate it in a whole new light. Yo-ho-ho; a pirate’s life for me.

A couple of weeks later still more visitors took the bait. Steve, an Australian high school friend who had relocated to New York right before Hurricane Sandy, came to Louisiana to defrost; to let his young son Henry feel some green grass under his feet; and to attend Jazzfest. Remember what the weather was like for the first weekend of Jazzfest? On Sunday as we parked the car there was so much water falling from the sky we couldn’t see across Esplanade Avenue. Optimistic to the last, Steve and family had also packed nothing but shorts and T-shirts. A visit to a hardware store netted souvenir shrimp boots and ponchos for the grownups; but nothing for little Henry, who experienced his first Jazzfest wearing a black garbage bag secured with duct tape, with his head poking out of a hole in the top. Thus attired and undeterred, Henry and his shrimp-boot-wearing parents waded into the lagoons of mud that were the grounds of the New Orleans Racecourse, and proceeded to have a foot-stomping, mud-splashing, trash-bag-wearing, hell of a time. What spirit! We were impressed. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that life goes best when you go prepared to enjoy every eventuality. None of our planned April adventures turned out the way we’d imagined (or advertised) them. But every one was a great experience in its way. So with spring at an end, no visitors on the horizon and the hot weather here to stay, my wife and I are making some notes before next year’s visitors call. Adopt, adapt and maybe keep a bottle of rum within reach. Ah, springtime. It’ll always surprise you. Just check the weather first.