Friday, February 10th, 2006 - Acadian Historical Sites, Louisiana.

We awakened to the songs of the birds trilling in the underbrush, which was very pleasant and something we had not heard for a couple of weeks. The ecology of Louisiana was quite distinct from Texas. The trees, for one thing, were much bigger and more diverse than they had been in Texas. Having all those trees around felt more comfortable, probably because we were basically re-entering the eastern woodland zone where we have lived most of our life.

After two pretty solid days of towing the trailer, I was bound and determined that we were going to do as little driving as possible for the next couple of days. As we had breakfast we started to hear the pitter patter of raindrops on the roof, so we relaxed a bit by working on the computers before we hit the road to see some of the local museums, which we thought would be just the ticket for a rainy day.

That turned out to be a good strategy because although it stayed cloudy all day the rain held off until we were safely back in the trailer that evening. Our first stop that morning was to visit the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park on the southern edge of Lafayette, a hop, skip, and jump from our campground. There we enjoyed a 30-minute movie about the history of the Acadians and another shorter film about the Atchafalaya Swamp and the folks who used to live and work smack dab in the center of it. A curious life that must have been, too, since there were no roads in the area and all transportation was by small boats of one type or another.

The park Visitor Center had a nice museum with very interesting exhibits, some of which reminded me of the exhibits we had seen in Louisiana the previous year during Wanderung 8. Still, the history of the Acadians is complex enough that seeing it twice helped me keep the bare outline of their story clear. The early emigration to New France followed by the forced relocation by the British and eventual relocation in the southern part of Louisiana was vividly depicted. The suffering due to this ethnic cleansing and mortality rates approaching 50% due to starvation, disease, and despair were truly heartrending, but that was only the first part of the story.

The Acadian's adaptation to their new homes after their odyssey was a rather hopeful tale of determination, perseverance, and cooperation. Their ability to preserve their culture despite a Diaspora and then reunite to settle a distant land reminded me of the survival of the Jewish culture and resettlement of Israel in the 20th Century. I think in both cultures the central role of religion and the strong familial and inter-familial ties were critical to that survival, but I certainly might be missing other important factors like a shared unique language, music, and so forth.

One somewhat unique aspect of the Acadian culture that emerged from the film and the exhibits was simply their ability to have fun, to celebrate life in all its various aspects. Mardis Gras is one rather distorted example, but the Saturday night dance parties out in the bayous are much more typical examples of that aspect of the Acadian culture. The Acadians were never rich in a material sense, but my goodness how full of life and good cheer they seemed to be. Or, as my Mother used to put it when talking about our family, "We didn't have much but we had a lot of laughs!", which is a sentiment I think most Cajuns would agree with.

After a quick lunch we continued over to St. Martinsville where we visited the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site. The site was created in honor of Longfellow's mythical Acadian heroine and of course also recounted the saga of the Acadians in North America. However, that site also presented a lot of information about the French Creole folks who settled Louisiana while it was still a French colony. The Creole folks tended to be the upper-class landowners who were very influential in Louisiana politics and economics even after it was handed over to the Spanish, and their culture and life style was completely different from the Acadians.

In part, the Creole culture was much more intellectually oriented to Europe. The saga of the Olivier family was recounted, in part because one member of the Olivier family helped the Acadians settle in the region and in part because the original circa 1802 "cottage" of the Olivier family was still on the site and preserved in its original condition. The term "cottage" we thought was quite misleading because what we saw was really an upper-class Creole plantation house from the early 19th Century. Since the house had been completely furnished with period antiques, we were able to visualize at least to some extent how the Olivier family would have lived there.

The interior of the house was both roomy and quite airy, and the galleries (verandas?) gave an excellent view of the front and back yards. We were told that the cypress logs used to build the house were at least 90 percent intact, which after two centuries of weathering and insect attacks was quite impressive. The walls of the basement were made of bricks fired on site and stacked at least three layers deep. Those massively thick masonry walls helped cool the basement and first floor of the house, which I expect was crucially important in Louisiana in the summer!

The dining room table was not only set for dinner with period pieces, but also had one of the slave-powered fans above the table to keep the air flowing! The master bedroom had a nice period bed in it and looked quite comfortable even to my modern eyes. The life style looked very comfortable, but it was based on slavery and came to a crashing halt during the Civil War when Union troops marched in and freed the slaves.

On the way back to camp we stopped by "Evangeline's Oak" in St. Martinsville. The big, gnarly old oak commemorates the travails of the Acadiennes as memorialized by Longfellow's poem and was situated in a park beside the bayou. We walked along the bayou for a bit and enjoyed the antics of the local waterfowl before jumping back into the truck.

Circling back to Lafayette and our campground, we worked on our computers for the tag end of the afternoon. Monika was converting Wanderung 10 to HTML and picking pictures for it while I was, as usual, working on our daily journal before I forgot everything! At the shank end of the evening we finished Perry's "The Silent Cry", another corker of a Victorian yarn spun by a master storyteller, and turned in for the night.