Photo by Joshua S. Hall
At the Blind River Chapel, the Virgin Mary sits serenely atop a hollowed out and lacquered cypress trunk, blessing pilgrims, accepting handwritten prayer intentions, and sometimes, purportedly even performing miracles.
Over sixty years ago, a sixteen-year-old in Gramercy, La., had an important train to catch. He was early, so he grabbed a table at the Sycamore Inn, hoping for a bite to eat before he hopped on the train to meet his girlfriend in Baton Rouge. It was there that Bobby Deroche met sixteen-year-old Martha Waguespack—beautiful, charming, and proudly engaged to a soldier overseas.
“I gotta go see my girlfriend now,” Bobby told Martha as he left, “but I’ll be back.”
“I’m engaged, buddy,” she curtly replied. “You don’t have a chance!”
Shortly after his arrival in Baton Rouge, Bobby discovered that, as fate would have it, his girlfriend had come down with chicken pox. “He couldn’t be with her,” explained Bobby’s daughter Patricia Hymel years later.
Naturally, Bobby went back home to Gramercy, beelined straight to Sycamore Inn, and married Martha Waguespack three days later.
In January of 2012, Bobby Deroche left the plane of the living; Martha followed him about a year later. The couple had lived out their days on the wild banks of Blind River: the natural border between Livingston, St. James, and St. John the Baptist parishes, which later flows eastward to join Lake Maurepas. Their lives in that remote locale, however, were anything but solitary. By the time of Martha’s death, she’d met thousands of strangers who had stumbled upon the gift that she and her husband had constructed for the world to discover: a hand-built chapel honoring the Virgin Mary, accessible only by boat, hidden five miles deep in Blind River’s cypress-kneed wilderness.
HOUSE OF THE HOLY
Getting to the tiny chapel on Blind River is no cakewalk. In fact, no amount of casual walking will get you anywhere near it. That’s one reason why the chapel was built in the first place—Martha wanted a prayer sanctuary that wasn’t a five-mile boat ride away. “Mom was a very devout woman. She always was,” Patricia explained. “When they moved out on the river from Gramercy, they couldn’t really get to church every Sunday like they wanted to. She wanted a place where she could go just to pray.”
But that’s only one reason. In the early ‘80s, Martha told her husband that she’d been having visions of Christ kneeling at a rock in prayer. Months passed and the visions didn’t stop coming; soon, she felt the need to build a place of worship. Ever the loving husband, Bobby obliged.
Patricia described her mother as a warm and inviting presence who insisted on personally greeting every boatload of strangers that came to see her sanctuary. Every pilgrim got a scapula and a finger rosary along with a personal tour of the chapel’s history, as depicted in an oversized, aging photo album.
ON CYPRESS KNEES
The decades-old photo album contains everything you’d ever want to know about the chapel, from inception to ordained dedication—mostly because Martha Deroche took pictures every step of the way. “They started building on Easter Sunday, 1982,” said Patricia, “and they finished it three months later.”
Bobby and about a dozen volunteers tackled the chapel’s construction. The patience and skill exercised by this group is still apparent—the exterior is layered with over two thousand cypress shingles, each one hand-cut to overlap the one below it. Those cypress cuts have kept the walls and ceiling dry for more than thirty years, though Patricia said the shingles are due for a makeover. Look past the craftsmanship, and three decades of sun and wind are visible on the exposed edges, where time and humidity have done their part to fray the wood.
Inside, Mary’s altar pops like a pansy on a gray day. The enormous, brightly-painted likeness of the Virgin stands tall, swaddled by yet another hand-hewn cypress work of art: a cross-section of a whole cypress trunk, hollowed out and lacquered to a shiny finish. A naturally occurring knot in the tree created a small hole below the statue, and over the years, it’s been used as a receptacle for handwritten prayer intentions from visitors.
“The guys who made that really knew what they were doing,” Patricia added. “They floated it all the way down the river and cut it to fit that space.”
FAITH AND PHOTOS
Oddly enough, Martha’s favorite photo isn’t actually in the album.
In the late ‘80s, a random visitor snapped a Polaroid of Mary’s altar inside the chapel, then took one of the sign above the entrance. Whether by God or camera mishap, both shots ended up in a single photo, resulting in a double-exposure that seems to show the Mary statue pulled outside of the church. In the photo, Mary stands beneath the sign above the entrance, which reads, “Our Lady of Blind River.”
Martha took it as a sign that Mary was happy with that title and told the traveler to keep the Polaroid as a gift from Heaven. Thus, the only evidence of the intervention is a photo of the original photo, which leaves imagination to fill in the gaps left by the glare.
“Mom saw it as a holy event,” Patricia said, “and I’ve heard that Polaroid cameras can’t do that.”
Martha, and Patricia by proxy, have witnessed other mysterious works over the years—usually invested upon those who have arrived seeking divine healing. “People will come here sick, in pain, paralyzed, and they pray to the Blessed Mother,” she said. “We’ve heard back from people who’ve been healed in the months after they come visit—from cancer, from all kinds of things. It’s amazing what faith can do.”
WORLDLY VISITORS
Among the other pictures layering the album’s pages are details of the chapel’s dedication day—August 23, 1983—when a local Catholic priest came out to bless it. Standing on the humble dock in the present, it sounded improbable to me that four hundred people could have occupied the space; but Patricia said it happened on that (likely sweltering) August day. “There were people still in their boats,” she recalled. “Everybody came out that day. My mother always said she got more visitors out here than she ever did in Gramercy.”
Just inside the chapel’s entrance is a modest podium with a simple spiral notebook where guests have logged their names and hometowns over the years. In some cases, even a country of origin is given. “People come from all over the place—Australia, Germany, everywhere,” Patricia said, adding that many of them had heard of the chapel beforehand and knew what they were looking for when they came to Blind River.
In the first few years after it opened to the public, Patricia’s husband, Kenneth Hymel, said the chapel logged over seven thousand visitors. As he flipped through the guest book’s most recent pages, he counted over one hundred entries made between September and December of 2013. “Generally the summer months are when most people end up out here,” he added.
A FAMILY LEGACY
Unlike Patricia’s parents, Kenneth and Patricia Hymel don’t live on Blind River; but they take the ten-mile round-trip ride to the chapel about once a week during the spring and summer. Using the small amount of visitor contributions, as well as her own pocketbook, Patricia maintains the constant stash of finger rosaries and scapular pendants that her mother lovingly handed out. The former Deroche residence, now inhabited by a cousin, still stands next to the chapel.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Patricia says that the chapel doors are never locked, nor will they ever be—her mother wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’ll keep those doors open as long as it’s there. This place is special, it’s meant to be shared,” she said. “Mom always said, ‘Never lock that door! Never, ever, lock that door.’”
Details. Details. Details.
Seaworthy vessels may launch for free at the St. James Parish Boat Club. From there, Blind River Chapel is a five-mile ride, ten miles round-trip. All may enter the chapel free of charge.
Directions:
From Baton Rouge: Take I-10 Exit 187, turn right onto Airline Hwy. (US 61) toward Gramercy. Drive 5.7 miles to the St. James Parish Boat Club, on the left side of the road.
From New Orleans: Take I-10 West, Exit 194 toward Lutcher/Gramercy. Take LA 641 toward Airline Hwy. (US 61); veer right on Junction US 61. Drive 3.9 miles to St. James Parish Boat Club.
