Thin Places

There are places in this world where the boundaries are thin.

When the Atchaflaya River basin is high and the color of stained parchment, I ponder maps and search for hidden sloughs and canals, ponds tucked away in farm fields I might be able to get permission to fish, surviving remnants of much larger lakes deep in the swamp, hopefully on public land.

So I sit with a cup of coffee, hot and black like Cajun dreams, and look them over, searching for sparkles of water. The winter had been none too severe, really, but not mild. There had been no hard freeze of the kind necessary to keep the water hyacinth and hydrilla at bay. Scrolling and mousing and clicking my way around St. Mary Parish from a synchronous orbit above the planet, I cringe to consider what my grandfathers must think of their descendant searching so for fish. Those old Indians, who knew this river basin thousands of years before Columbus even glimpsed Hispanolia, would surely think me more a fool than a warrior.

My father told me that back deep in the swamps of Peach Coulee, his father had gone squirrel hunting and found an old farm. Nothing there to really indicate it except neat rows in the soil, large trees rising from them, and a bit of old brick, enough evidence to convince him it had been there. There might, he said, been an old lake back there, too. It’s all private land now and there are signs all along Peach Coulee forbidding entry, despite my childhood claims to it. There’s not much public land left in Louisiana, though my people had no concept of ownership, and territory was as near they could imagine to possession. I thought of challenging their black letters and white backgrounds, thought of arguing with their plywood and nails but shrugged it off as yet another product of the Great Sadness that began on this continent five centuries agoI thought I saw a little pond on the map that happened to exist in a state wildlife management area, not far from Peach Coulee. It was well into the woods, through what appeared to be relatively high ground, or at the worst nothing a good pair of knee-high rubber boots couldn’t handle. The image was tenuous, shadowy, half-real. It was, I thought, worth going to take a look at and late winter was the best time, with the snakes down and duck and deer season just over.

Teenage friends and I camped not far to the south regularly. An old fisherman, heading home late with a skiff full of gasping catfish, stopped near our campsite as we were watching the ghost lights dance over Peach Coulee. We were teenagers, hiding our beer and smoking cigarettes out by the lake where the only eyes were those of nutria and the occasional waterfowl. He scared the beejezus out of us, approaching from across the lake through the shadows of the moon. Drifting up to the bank and calling in a way that was little more than a guttural growl, we nearly leaped out of our skins.

“It’s thin there,” he said, looking over the lake at the lights dancing above Peach Coulee after we had settled down, offered him a beer. “Thin,” he repeated, taking the beer and then he nodded to us knowingly and took his leave.

I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I think I do now. There are places in the world where the boundaries between this world and the next, the separations of the seen and the unseen, are not so substantial. I first heard the quavering voice of the old fisherman use thin to describe such locations. Peach Coulee is one of the thin places, and now and then, the comfortable lines we depend on to organize and make safe our world bend, converge and overlap. There are times when I wonder if the old fisherman who stopped by that night came from within the lines of comfort, or behind the thin places.

When the weather was not quite so cold I readied myself. I have a sort of backpack that is a tackle bag where I keep all my gear. I slipped a rod tube containing a vintage bamboo fly rod into the straps on its side, along with a graphite backup rod. Thick rubber boots, usually called Cajun Nikes here, and a small caliber pistol on my hip just in case. A handheld GPS I left at home; it would be useless in the dense cypress and tupelo stands, but I brought a trusted compass. I was a little worried about my pickup, but found a tight niche in the tree line to conceal it from all but the most curious of passersby.

I hoisted my pack on my back, put my fedora on my head and headed into the brown jungle. Within moments the truck was out of sight, and then the road, and the distant drone of occasional passing vehicles. Moments after that, there were no reminders of the present: No beer cans, no worm buckets, no orange plastic tape on the trees. I understood again the lure of hunting: It gives a man something to do between fishing seasons. I had not been much of a hunter, except a few teenage years shooting quail with a .410 shotgun before completely giving it up for the rod. I disdained the notion of sitting in a deer stand or a duck blind freezing to death for hours upon end. But as a pastime until the fishing gets good again, well, I guess there’s at least that much to say for hunting.

A couple of wild hogs, big and brown and snorting, scared up within fifty feet of me and, huffing angrily, stalked off while I stood there with my hand on my pistol. Wild hogs can either be timid or ferocious. These two big sows were apparently somewhere in between, because they grudgingly took their leave at my intrusion, but scolded me harshly as they departed.

I checked my compass to make sure I had not strayed too far off course: Perfect, still. I nodded smugly at my woodsman’s abilities, but reminded myself that being too confident was tempting fate. On I went, noticing huge fallen cypress logs that would bring thousands of dollars for their heartwood, and smiled with satisfaction that they’d never, ever be harvested or see the saw. A pair of wood ducks took flight as I passed, whistling. Now and then, though, the bright red and brass of an expended shotgun shell on the ground reminded me that I was still far too close to civilization, far too lodged in linear time.

Something rumbled to the northwest and I cursed angrily. I had the good sense to check the weather forecast before departure, and there had been only a small chance of rain for the day. The adage, “If you don’t like the weather in Louisiana, stick around a minute,” may have been adopted by other members of the Union, but it was definitely birthed here. I was probably nearly halfway to the pond, if it indeed still existed and was not merely a low spot in the woods, or an odd shadow. The canopy of cypress was thick, though defrocked for the winter. I decided to continue, congratulating myself for packing my rain gear.

It’s tempting to imagine that I was seeing the swamp like it was five hundred years ago, but I knew better. Most of the trees around me were second and third growth after the lumberjacks deforested Louisiana of cypress and nearly all of its oak. Who knows what spirits they freed or banished, depending on its nature, with their saws? After that, invasive and secondary species had settled in, forever changing the landscape. But I could dream, perhaps, that it was something like this. In fact, I saw fewer signs of invasive plants the deeper I went into the wood. Perhaps they did not do so well under the thick canopy of even successional growth cypress and tupelo, as these were larger trees than I expected. Now and then a palmetto patch would appear, green against the stark brown backdrop, and I was, as always, glad to see it. Chitimacha ancestors covered their huts with these plants, a natural-made shingle of the finest kind. The gutter-shaped fronds displaced water neatly. But I knew these woods. It was near here, on the way to Peach Coulee, that friends of mine as teens found a wooden cross nailed to a tree and a hangman’s noose nailed below it. It was not far from here that there were wild hogs big as men, one of their fathers said, and another shot a squirrel that screamed like a man until it broke its neck in the fall. In those woods, just off the lake, headless women floated through the trees and red-eyed beasts stared back at hunters in their deer stands.

It’s thin there. Thin.

At last I detected an opening in the distance and the familiar smell of swamp water. I reminded myself it still might be nothing but a puddle, or it might be choked full of water hyacinth since the aerials were shot. But I emerged from the trees and there it was, a little pond, just less than an acre, nestled into the woods. I saw no bobbers, no monofilament line and no cellophane. Could it possibly have gone unnoticed? I had walked perhaps forty minutes to reach it, and since it was public land all the way and I had seen the few shotgun shells farther back, it would seem like someone would have been here. Bass fishermen, bait fisherman, a duck blind in a patch of reeds. But I saw nothing to indicate anyone had been there since my ancestors were unfettered.

Poking around with a fallen tree branch revealed the pond had some depth to it, and I was so encouraged and excited I dropped the mid section of my rod twice trying to mate the ferrules. I had the tip on in three tries and strung it up. There were no signs of life on the surface, no rises, but that meant little. It was midday, temperatures hovering around fifty-five. I had no room for a back cast but the pond was shaped oddly enough that I could stand sideways to it and work various juttings and pointings along its margins. I opted for a small Clouser minnow, about a size six, to descend slowly and probe the pond’s depths.

Rumbling to the northwest again troubled me, and over the trees I could see the sky darkening. Thunderbirds, I supposed, making concussion. Forty or so minutes back to the truck. I had my boots on. Would the lightning be ground-contacting? Lightning always is unpredictable, of course. But I couldn’t turn from this little pond, now that I was there. My grandfather claimed that if you find pirate’s treasure you mustn’t leave it. It would vanish before you returned. You mustn’t curse or turn your back on it, he said. I was afraid this little pond " its potential still unknown " would dissipate into some marginal place if I departed, turned back by a little rain and thunder. Notions like that may defy sensibilities reared and honed on city streets and in office buildings and urban sprawl, but they are at home in the swamp. They are indigenous where some places are barely real, places were my ancestors might dance, in the back ends of dark canals. It can only be sensed in the swamp, the power and substance of such notions.

I focused on my fishing. If I were a vintage bamboo fly rod, I mused, I’d like to be a Granger. No doubt about it, when it came to the classics I never held one I liked more than a Granger. Some might say it’s long and heavy at nine feet, and to be certain, the Victory’s tip-top might well have been touching the darkening clouds above me. I set the Clouser into a patch of reeds, let it settle for a moment then began a slow, steady strip in. A Granger, I mused, has no illusions of grandeur such as a Leonard might hold, but holds its head higher than a hardware-store bin Montague, for goodness sake. It would probably share a beer with a Heddon, make fun of blueblood Winstons and sadly mourn the plight of the common rods then piling up in hardware stores everywhere.

Thunder rattled and a gust of wind twisted the bare cypress tops. I swung the Clouser out and set it back a little over to the right from its previous spot, stripped in slowly. Nothing. Perhaps the cold had put any fish down? The pond might have been deeper in the center. I sent it there next with a pathetic roll cast, letting the Clouser settle longer, began a different strip, much slower, much longer between pulls.

A glimpse of something out the corner of my eye made me look up, but I couldn’t be sure it was anything more than a roll of the clouds, a billow expanding and collapsing, churning along as the thunderhead moved just north of me. I could tell by the flow of clouds that it would likely miss my location by only half a mile, tops. I was hopeful, anyway.

Another cast into the pond, fanning. I stripped slow, but I realized the water was shallow there. Thin. Hidden there in the trees with little sunlight throughout the day, it would be colder than a deeper pond. Largemouth and bream within would be sluggish, reluctant. And the threatening shadow of the clouds darted across the curve of the Granger’s nickel silver ferrules.

I took the rod down. The storm worried me, and a dozen casts had produced nothing. I would return when the weather warmed but before the snakes became active again. I was sure there had to be something there in that secluded little pond. When the cane was back in the sock and tube, I looked up at the clouds again and it might have been great wings up there, gargantuan and black, or it might have been a purple spot on my cornea. I don’t know.

But I do know that I didn’t go back that spring because the fishing elsewhere was so excellent. I did go in the fall, but whether because of the twin terrible storms that had wracked Louisiana that summer or some thinness, I could never find it again. Gone, as if it had never existed at all.