When I first met Rabalais, six months before, he was sitting with his staff at 10 a.m. The navigation lock is not a formal place. But that red handkerchief-with that, you are pure coonass.” The lockmaster wore a white hard hat above his creased and deeply tanned face, his full but not overloaded frame. I told him that I always have a bandanna in my pocket, wherever I happen to be-in New York as in Maine or Louisiana, not to mention New Jersey (my home)-and sometimes the color is blue. “You are a coonass with that red handkerchief,” he said.Ī coonass being a Cajun, I threw him an appreciative smile. The people of the local parishes (Pointe Coupee Parish, Avoyelles Parish) would call this the apex of Cajun country in every possible sense-no one more emphatically than the lockmaster, on whose face one day I noticed a spreading astonishment as he watched me remove from my pocket a red bandanna. The adjacent terrain is Cajun country, in a geographical sense the apex of the French Acadian world, which forms a triangle in southern Louisiana, with its base the Gulf Coast from the mouth of the Mississippi almost to Texas, its two sides converging up here near the lock-and including neither New Orleans nor Baton Rouge. This, to say the least, bespeaks a rare relationship between a river and adjacent terrain-any river, anywhere, let alone the third-ranking river on earth. In evident defiance of nature, they descend as much as thirty-three feet, then go off to the west or south. Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth-many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge-a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river.
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