Alligator Wrestlemania
Saturday started off a bit late because I am very good friends with sleep and we like to see each other as much as possible. I was really excited because we were taking a swamp tour in Lafitte National Park and so I would have my best possible chance of fulfilling a lifelong dream of wrestling an alligator. The only potential snag was a National Weather Advisory warning of scattered severe thunderstorms which could cause as much as “four inches of rain in an hour” and “overwhelm the capacity of boat pumps.” Good news when you are about to take a boat trip.
Anyway we drove on down to the park and when we finally got out we were alongside a channel with a giant barge being pushed down the river. There were a few shrimp boats around and it really reminded me of the scene in Forrest Gump where he is cruising down the channel and sees Lieutenant Dan. Well we all pile on this boat (the sky is overcast but not raining, which is perfect because it suppressed both the heat and bugs), like a stereotypical airboat with a few rows of seating and giant fan on the back, all the way down to the redneck pilot/guide. These airboat tour guides defined the term “redneck.” They had it all, from the far-from-politically-correct language to the love of hunting animals while heavily intoxicated to the distinct lack of intelligence to the cutoff sleeveless camouflage shirt. Our particular guide tried to be funny, with mixed results. The tour itself was fantastic. The guide was actually very knowledgeable about the swamp. They are having problems with water hyacinth clogging up the waterways because they grow too fast, as well as these giant swamp rat things that are supposed to eat the hyacinth and instead eat everything else and are eroding at the landmass at a startling rate. We also learned about alligators and fish and how Hurricane Katrina actually sucked a lot of water out of the swamp to dump on New Orleans, while Hurricane Rita landed to the west and dumped all the water on the swamp, drowning a lot of plant and wildlife. We got to see another part of the area that we would have missed out on staying in a large city like New Orleans. I loved it. If Canada is the Rome of the wilderness, the Louisiana Bayou is Venice. That probably made no sense other than you have to use boats to navigate the bayou, and Canada is awesome.
It was absolutely beautiful cruising around and looking over all the marshes and swamps and lakes. It was definitely my kind of place. Anyways we got a couple miles out into the marshes and we could see storms back inland. When it was time to go (after an interesting stop because something broke and he tried to fix it while we hung out on a boat in the middle of nowhere) we cruised on back through the marsh and saw an alligator silently and smoothly knifing through the water from one riverbank to the other. All you could see was the head above the water but it still looked decently big and it was exciting to see a predator like that in the wild. Exciting, and enough to end my lifelong dream of wrestling an alligator. So after this it started raining and also the wind kicked up the waves on the lake a bit. This led to me getting pretty effectively drenched. A crawfish po-boy at Cajun Seafood made it all better though. So I had that going for me, which was nice.