Lakeview RV Park
The first thing I noticed was the baby. The baby was making some curious, unsteady motions across the concrete floor of the immense ramshackle barn that sits in the back of the Lakeview Park & Beach, an RV park north of Eunice on Highway 13. A young man, maybe the father, reached out to the baby, who was distracted by the band in the corner sawing away on fiddles, squeezing a beautiful din out of accordions. The baby was justifiably transfixed. Couples stepped into the clockwork cycle of a Cajun waltz careful to give the toddler a healthy berth until the young man swept the child up in his arms and joined the fray.
Things happen differently in RV parks. People who RV strike a curious balance between private and public, piloting these twenty-plus-foot mobile cabins around for weekend jaunts and summer vacations. My dad was an RV guy. Every summer we would pilot our 23-footer across the plains to Colorado, up the Blue Ridge Parkway, up to places he’d been before, with the kids from his first marriage many years before. More often than not, we would pull into one of these places and my dad would fall right into a rekindled friendship with someone he met at this very campground decades past—one based not on work or background or social circles, but instead based on simple simultaneous presence. We are here, so let’s be friends.
Some of my fondest memories are at these parks. I remember seeing a family of bears outside one near Silverado, Colorado. The same in which, in the post campfire dark, among the din of tree frogs and cicadas, I managed my first real kiss off a girl from Denton, Texas, whose dad also had a taste for the mountains. What I’m saying is: you make friends fast in these places.
Compared to some of the primitive campgrounds I remember, Lakeview is pretty swank. Owned and operated by Eunice natives Lance Pitre, Laura Pitre Rodriguez and Bonnie Pitre, its 95 tree-lined sites are spread out among the 42-acre park. A few one-bedroom cabins are being added to the property as well. There are playgrounds, a fishing lake, a cool, freshwater beach, even a laundry. All it is missing is a coffee shop, but then a general store is also in the works, so who knows? Lakeview really has everything, but it also has something special in its barn dances on Friday and Saturday nights.
Pulling from the rich pool of talent in the Acadiana area, the bal de magasin kicks off every Friday and Saturday night around 8pm with a nominal cover charge, and this is where I encountered the baby and crowd of seasoned travelers, skinny Lafayette hipsters and the usual masterful Cajun dancers, all caught up in the spell of Feufollet. One of the best of the trans-traditionalist Cajun bands to come out of Lafayette in the last decade, Feufollet is the perfect band for this setting. They look young and a little hungry, channeling their young energy into songs of old, imbuing them with a modicum of ragged charm that practically blends into the clapboard walls of the barn.
The barn is a partially refurbished dance hall on the property, that in an earlier life hosted renowned Louisiana artists like Dewey Balfa and Marc Savoy. In my attempts to take in the bar’s current, cavernous state—its rafters festooned with holiday lights makes you feel like you’ve been swallowed by some sort of celestial whale—I accidentally stumbled right through a pair of beers that had been carefully set on the sidelines by a dancing couple. Stepping on the beer of a man and his date might be fighting words in some places I frequent, but all’s good in the RV park, and so I headed to the makeshift bar in the back corner to replace them, and there, bouncing on the hip of a young woman behind the counter, was that baby again. That baby gets around.
The dance had none of the formality of the more traditional Cajun dance halls; you had the old couples that appear to slide around as if on glass, hip kids more than ready to break out some very practiced chank-a-chank acrobatics and some folks who just let the canned beer and convivial atmosphere put their feet in whatever motion for which the moment calls. It reflected the easy mix that comes with RV people: homey, nuanced, and most importantly, a shared temporary hominess. The barn at Lakeview is about as sweet a place as I’ve been in recent memory. It made me wish my parents still had that RV so I could join in.
On my way out, there were those tree frogs and cicadas competing with the band to add a musical counterpoint to the stars. It was like the campgrounds I remember but even better. I wondered if some boy was out there wandering the dark with some girl from Texas.
Then I looked back and saw that baby once again being whirled around the dance floor in the arms of a new person, in a way, in the warm embrace of everyone there.
Alex V. Cook is an author, music critic and cultural explorer from Baton Rouge. He is currently writing a book about Louisiana juke joints, honky tonks and dancehalls. If you know of a place that deserves to be more widely celebrated, drop him a line at cookalexv@gmail.com.
Dances are Friday and Saturday nights from 8 pm–midnight. Cover is around $7. See the website for the schedule.
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