Big Rigolette’s Bottom End
The red sandy clay of lower Rigolette Bayou held a row of riverside shotgun shanties on six-foot pilings. The occupants were on land of questionable ownership; technically Louisiana State’s “bed and shores” because the Red River occasionally surged and roiled over their lower stoops. The beard-gray cypress siding boards had not likely ever been painted but their natural rot resistance held up well pairing picturesquely with their rusting tin roofs that color-matched the red clay.
A recent Google Earth image of the bottom of Big Rigolette
Like its history, the hydrology of the place was fucked up. Bayou Rigolette (locally pronounced “row gulley”) was once an active side channel that flowed into the Red River when local rains bucketed down, then later, flowed backwards from the river into the bottomlands as rains from distant central Texas jacked up river levels. Like a beheaded snake though, Rigolette Bayou was cut off by a 50-foot clay levee constricting the river to its confluence with the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers. These levees extend onward through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. The US Corps of Engineers built that levee to prevent riverside towns, roads, and farms from flooding. Stopping that vital flow of muddy water had stopped the creative power that built the rich soils of riverine woodlands. These same soils would later be exposed to sunlight by land clearing to yield highly productive croplands. Without seasonal flooding though, the un-recharged cropland soils were soon depleted and became dependent on fertilizer injection.
The Bordelon, Cooper and Savoie families who lived in those teetering shanties were similarly disconnected from society by history. Physically, the levee and land clearing were also killing their lives of hunting, logging, and fur trapping the land. They turned their occupation toward the artery of water across the levee where natural forces continued delivering fish into hoop nets; turtles into wire traps; alligators to hooks; and beaver, mink, nutria, raccoons, and river otters to submerged metal traps. The power of the river still works for them. When an occasional high-water season backs up the Catahoula, Black, Atchafalaya, Red, and Mississippi Rivers, the bottomland woods and fields are submersed and the occasional islands of high ground become crowded with displaced possums, raccoons, white-tailed deer, gray foxes, bobcats and coyotes, thereby creating a jubilee of wildlife for the taking.
Of necessity, laws are recognized that they might be flouted. To be an effective poacher one needs to know when to be surreptitious and how to be evasive. Without the cash for even a cheap country lawyer’s defense, avoiding capture was the rule. Their creativity was legendary: stealing the Sheriff’s truck containing all the fish and hoop nets set to be used as evidence, or loosening the propeller-retaining nut on the game warden’s boat prior to their stakeout so the water patrol revved harmlessly when it was time for pursuit. When Game Wardens went on poacher patrol in the swamp, someone poured 50 pounds of roofing nails along a key stretch of access road; every tire on five game warden trucks was deflated along that stretch. Like tiny land mines, these nails kept working for years though locals knew which short stretch of swamp trail to avoid.
I went to school with some of the kids that lived on the Rigolette and I was simultaneously intrigued, sheepish, and intimidated by their silent anger, ropy skinny strength, and the feral toughness a townie like me rarely encountered. One, nicknamed “Nut” briefly played on my high school football team and like a Spanish fighting bull placed in a rodeo, measured his success by the number of opponents he injured. He was always one comment away from a fistfight with the opposing team. I later heard he eventually died from literally pile-driving into a submerged piling while diving into the current off the Red River trestle bridge. His redheaded sister, a taunt beauty who smoked with impunity, carried an edge and maturity that landed on our young male hearts. However, with a brother like Nut, none of us was going to act interested . As a citified introvert, I could never figure out how to span the cultural gulfs to befriend either of these classmates and it was my loss.
We were all in a land of clashing contrasts: the Pineville side of the river a squeaky Baptist drape ensconced in a dry county where evangelical preaching rang out of the chigger-infested piney wood churches and hair was either slicked back or piled high. The other side of the Red River held a Cajun Catholic free-for-all in the red clay bottomlands where pigs roasted on spits and tubs of beer were served as backyard radios blared sports events. Hair was either flat-topped, permed, or mulleted. The cypress stilt houses of the battue families fell into neither culture, rather, they persisted as an undisturbed clan isolated in a river bend. They embodied what modern television fails to capture in the cultish exposes of “swamp people” , Shy People, or wahoo! alligator hunters. Living local culture cannot be filtered through a Los Angeles producer and capture an accurate lifestyle portrait. Yet, these local people also carried a quiet dignity of keeping their heads down and existing in the margins — an unstirred hornet’s nest hoping not to have to flee or sting.
One did not drive down the steep mud levee access ramp into their enclave without knowing the names of the free-ranging Catahoula cur dogs, or fitting good tires to one’s 4 x 4 to get back up the steep levee incline. Most importantly, without recognition by the occupants, a bristly encounter awaited. Uninvited visitors typically had flashing blue lights on their truck tops and approached with trepidation and backup. Both sides knew there was a loaded gun by the door and a small dirt bike at the ready to rocket off into the swamp’s cane brake behind their house.
Yet I am describing 1974 and things have changed now. A visit to Big Rigolette in 2024 showed this all fundamentally and generationally different. The top of the levee is now paved, the levee shoulders neatly mowed, the stilted houses either painted or gone, and licensed 4 x 4 trucks are lined up while hitched to neat commercial fishing boats. It seems that high school education got put to some use and some bending to social pressures has shaped the denizens of Big Rigolette over the last 50 years. It seems the local cultures of South Carolina’s Gulla people, East Texas’ Redbones, and the hill people of Arkansas’ Ouachita mountains all got TV, Internet, and used Honda Civics to go to town and become just like the rest of us. I still like to think their spirit was retained in some socially permissible way.
