Living in Bayou Mode

Living in Bayou Mode

Cajun lyric: “We like tah move slow like dah bayou does”

David W. Perkins

Blue Ridge Writers, Summer 2021

Volume 3, Number 2, pages 68-72

“Bayou.” That word makes all those tight rubber bands in my psyche lose their stretch. My body just wants to lie down on the bayou bank. I decelerate. “Bayou”—can you feel it? See soft breezes wrinkling a bayou’s face. Smell her pungent, moist aroma, reminiscent of chopped, fresh mushrooms. Hear a turtle breaking the surface for air. Feel her warm, silky water enveloping your feet as you dangle them from a pier.

You can call her by name. She’s a living thing. My favorite bayou located in Monroe, Louisiana, Bayou DeSiard, is “Mama Girl” to me. She extends southern hospitality. She will buoy you up in your canoe. She offers you bream and bass and catfish if you will bring a line and bait and spend time with her. You can even build a house or cabin on her shoulder. You can refresh yourself in the breezes that ripple the surface and try the trees. You can cool you body on a sweltering day by diving in. You can slowly ponder her constantly changing face and listen deeply to her easy, gentle symphony and to the voices of the critters who frequent the water and the trees along the bank. You can savor those rich aromas of warm water and falling leaves, that unique blend of the scent of fresh mushrooms and wet, molding leaves.

By the way, a bayou (French corruption of a Choctaw word for river, “bayuk”) is a slow moving stream in flat country or a marshy finger of a lake or river.

It’s partly the bayou’s fault that I became an Episcopal lay person after thirty years of Baptist ministry. After all, she allowed those folks to relocate St. Thomas’ Church on her bank, and that’s where the Spirit called me with the simple word “stay” the second time I worshipped there and watched Mama Girl through the windows of the nave.

One September Sunday in 2015, after an absence of thirteen years, I returned to St. Thomas’ to thank them for receiving me as a new Episcopalian and for nurturing me into that expression of faith. Later on, when the call to priesthood came, with total surprise, they had walked with me and hosted the ordination to the diaconate in October 1997 under the hand of Bishop Robert Hargrove. Eight months later a number of them made the 90-mile trek to Good Shepherd, Vidalia, Louisiana, for the ordination to priesthood.

Before that Sunday service in 2015, Karen, my friend and host—the person who first invited me to St. Thomas twenty years before—asked, “Would you like to see the pavilion?”

“Sure.”

She led the way across the patio and down a path to a spot on Mama Girl’s shaded bank hosting a stately, elevated open beamed pavilion on a slab, with several picnic tables underneath and ceiling fans, and a stone fireplace and chimney. It was the most elegant such structure I’d ever seen, built for parishioners and for the wider community.

I once had lived on that slab. It had been the foundation of a cabin—two large rooms, one a great room with living and dining areas and kitchen; the other a large bedroom with bath and utility rooms opening off of it. The ceiling was open with beams. An enclosed porch ran the length of the building on the bayou side; the upper half of the wall was plexiglass.

Folks called it primitive. I called it quaint. True, it was unpainted stained wood, a plain rectangle with a plastic bubble on the bayou side. True the air conditioners protruded out three windows like thumbs through a balloon. True, though it was not leaning, it appeared in process of collapsing on its inhabitants. True, the drain for the washer ran through the wall and out onto the ground. True, the sewerage field line had a break in it and you had to look into the toilet before sitting in case a frog might be looking back at you. True, the unpainted wood exterior walls, canopied in thick shade, looked decapoged with streaks of algae and fungus. But, that cabin offered a quiet, secluded, refuge; it was quaint and the bayou found me there.

St. Thomas’ had offered the cabin rent-free because I was assisting with the ministry to college students and assisting the bishop in lay ministry. My son, Ben, a college sophomore, shared the space with me from August 1997-November 1998, and my daughter, Katie, in high school, went between her mother and us. Ben’s and my beds were in the expansive bedroom and Katie had a day bed on the porch. When she was not there, I slept on the porch.

Standing there that Sunday, memories flooded back and the thought came, “Would I EVER like to repeat that 15 months. It went by too fast.” So, I resolved to write this piece, and the line from that Cajun song came to me in that moment, “We like tah move slow like dah bayou duz.” But, I felt puzzled about the source of that deep desire for a do over. Where did THAT come from? I was on the way to a writers’ retreat in Mississippi and had planned to work on a new draft of previous work; but, I felt compelled to write this piece for the retreat, not knowing where it would take me.

I started by rereading the journal kept during those months and stumbled onto an epiphany, perhaps like Moses when the burning bush intrigued him (Exodus 3). Revisiting those long-neglected entries stunned me about just how fully present I had been, how deeply I had engaged with that context and how painfully sad I had felt when forced to leave to increase income with two kids in college by taking a staff position in a larger congregation in the Atlanta area. Mama Girl had captured my attention. I was in her arms and in the moment and had decelerated into bayou mode. The boundary between cabin and bayou and me got more and more fuzzy. Life slowed to a bayou crawl. Deep looking and listening and smelling filled each day and night. I rollicked in sensual experience like a dog in a pile of leaves. Where did Mama Girl begin and I end? Sometimes tough to discern.

Slowing me down had been quite a feat for Mama Girl. Wanderlust had been the driving energy in my psyche. And, I did not dawdle; I wandered with haste. I could hurry through a popsicle. My incessant brain, tumbling and rumbling, not unlike a nuclear reactor in critical phase, kept pulling me forward into new adventures. It was like I could constantly juggle past, present, and future and lean toward tomorrow without being fully present anywhere. And, I could hurry through any experience or any place or any job to get to the next one. I was a living interstate with no speed limit.

Then came Mama Girl. Her beauty and serenity prompted me to journal regularly, attempting to describe what my senses experienced and the impact on my soul. Consider these journal entries, quoted verbatim.

09/17/98. Cloudy, breezy morning. Bayou crawling south because the north wind's being pushy.

09/22/98. Bayou’s Complexity. The bayou goes to bed with serene, silent complexity each evening. Seed for a reflection. That complexity I spoke of regarding the bayou applies to mornings, too.

Early this morning, pink and lavender clouds lay on the bayou's surface, dull reflections of brighter, more distinct cousins in the western sky. The tree tops reached almost all the way to my shore and cushioning them from bumping the bank, those pink/lavender puffs.

Their eastern cousins, though closer to the sun's glory, were duller. Those cushions lingered for a spell. I stepped out for a closer look. Suddenly, the wind shifted out of the north, rattled the surface and the cushions were gone. A stark, damp, cool, pungency filled my nostrils--the wind had lifted the bayou's muggy surface odor to land and thrust it directly into my face.

Showers were racing in, gray and pale blue replaced the pinks and lavenders.

Complexity. Yep. Morning and evening varieties.

o9/25/09. Bayou mist. God has mixed clear varnish with a hint of silver and brushed it over the bayou and trees this morning. The surface wears that mysterious gray cover quietly, barely a tremble noticeable from her.

09/30/98. What a Morning: Incredible!! Grey blue sky. That clear varnish of a mist, with a touch of gray, is back. God's putting on a second coat. The trees across the way have stretched almost all the way to my bank, affectionately extending themselves on the bayou's face. She is barely trembling in response, like a lover in the early moments of orgasm. I wish I could tread lightly upon her and stand in the middle of that glory!!

Of course, having tried to walk on water many times over the years only to get my hair wet, I think I can restrain myself. Finally gave up my grandiosity about that. I can only manage a super-surface stroll once or twice a year now and it's not the right date on the calendar.

Jewish and Christian faiths privilege movement/forward motion. Moses led the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Jesus was a peripatetic rabbi, always on the move and calling others to follow along. People of faith believe we are headed toward the Reign of God’s fulfillment. Tomorrow will be richer than today and we are taught to look for it and lean toward it. My incessantly turning brain had overeaten on those aspects of faith and fasted from the “be still and know” passages, like I might leave beets not unnoticed but untouched on a dinner plate.

Yet, Jesus never seemed to be anything less than fully present. I doubt that Zacchaeus thought Jesus was in a hurry to end dining at his house (Luke 19). In my interstate mode, I might have been whispering, “Jesus, if we leave now, we can make a few miles before dark.” The woman at the well in Samaria never would have thought Jesus had somewhere else he’d rather be (John 4). No one Jesus healed got the idea he did not have time for them. Had I been there in my old mode, when Jesus headed out of the village with the deaf and dumb man, I might have whispered, “If you take him into this alley, it’s quiet, and it’ll save some time.” (Mark 8). Jesus may have been peripatetic and may have taught us to live toward tomorrow, to lean toward the coming light, but he never seems to be in a hurry in the Gospel accounts.

The demand for pilgrim presence creates a persistent tension —being a person on the move, seeing every spot as a campsite, and yet, treasuring each campsite and being fully present there, not leaning so toward tomorrow that we can’t relax into today. Was that what Roethke tried to express in his poem “The Motion” with the words “By striding I remain.”?

Those fifteen months were invaluable. Now, I see with greater clarity what it feels like to engage more completely a moment, a person, or a place, while knowing that the sojourn will take me elsewhere soon. But I still have to practice, to tether roving Perkins-brain. How about making coffee without rushing the espresso pot? How about taking a shower without feeling frantic because of work pressures, taking time to thank God for water and soap and for those who bring them to me, actually enjoying the feel of water and sponge and the aroma of the soap? How about having a conversation without patting my foot for the other person to stop talking so I can start? How about savoring the sights, smells, and sounds in the surroundings of a three mile walk without talking on the phone or feeling distracted by thoughts of work? How about being present to a retreat and to each participant without rushing back to work in my mind or on the laptop? Practice! Practice! Practice!

It’s Mama Girl’s fault that I can’t live in a suburb or even in a village anymore. It’s her fault that I prefer back roads to interstates. It’s on her that I prefer sunrise on my remote rural Virginia mountain-side porch to an evening prowling Manhattan. Not that I can’t relish a Manhattan frolic, but only because I know it’s temporary and High Peak Mountain in Virginia awaits. Staring at Mama Girl’s becalmed surface with its sketches of the trees and houses on either side softly floating there had synched me with stillness. The symphonic, rhythmic pelting of rain drops on the roof and their splashing on her surface had echoed within me and calmed every busy room within. The whispered swaying of the oaks and cypresses as the wind tried them had hushed the noisy inner voices. Recalling those musty, complex scents of fresh rain in the air and damp leaves and stilled water makes me salivate, almost like I’m in a favorite French Creole restaurant in New Orleans, catching the aromas wafting in from the kitchen.

On the porch of that rustic, little cabin, the God of the bayou came calling, over and over, the God whose life flows in those waters and trees and animals. (Note to the reader: An agnostic friend conceives of the world as infused with energy currents. One could reframe the bayou world in that way. A faith perspective is not required to have one’s life conformed to the unique energies of a landscape setting.) That unseen nuclear reaction fueling my rumbling brain got slowed by the control rods getting pushed farther into the reactor. The God of the bayou stilled me, decelerated me, and spread peace and silence within as calm as Mama Girl on a breezeless moonlit night.

Pour it on, Mama Girl!