grand isle march 2020
Photo by Jackson Hill.
Every year, The New York Times releases a list of “Places to Go,” a collection of worldwide locales off the beaten track deemed geographically, culturally, or socially worth considering for your next adventure. Past lists have included destinations like Houston, Texas; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming; but one of this year’s stateside picks —though familiar to the hunters and anglers of Louisiana—will likely strike an exotic chord with less local Americans.
Grand Isle, listed at number nineteen, is the last of the inhabited barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana, an eight-square-mile outpost at the mouth of Barataria Bay, where famed privateer Jean Lafitte steered his ships past turtle-filled inlets and pelican rookeries, and where Kate Chopin set the feminist angst of Edna Pontellier in the 1899 classic of Southern literature, The Awakening. These days, the island is famous for its sandy chenier forests, the chaotic thrill of the annual tarpon rodeo, and the spring descent of migrating songbirds arriving from across the Gulf of Mexico, whose rising tides and regular subordination to hurricane season have drawn Grand Isle to the forefront of conversations about climate change. As Christopher Hall writes in the Times’ listing: “Does a place appear more hauntingly beautiful when you know it’s disappearing?”
“We have certainly watched our marshes and coastlines disappear,” said Jean Landry, program manager at The Nature Conservancy on Grand Isle. At the time of our interview, she had just finished decorating signs for the local rotary club’s upcoming wild game cookoff, one of the regular community events that furnishes friendship and coming-of-age on the island, where all four of her children grew up. “We’re grateful for what we have right now, and we know that there will be changes in the future,” she said. “We’re always working to preserve sections of the forest for the birds, and the history here is amazing, and we’re confident that people are working diligently to help.”
In this early spring, the sounds of the surf remain calm and untroubled, a throughway for porpoise and silvery schools of leaping fish. Boats rev their motors and sails, and oak trees bend northward, away from the wind. What the gusts will bring in later years, only time will tell. But today, one of the rarest destinations in America lies waiting in the Gulf. Even the Yankees say so.
Read the article at nytimes.com/interactive/2020/travel/places-to-visit.
