“Let’s go,” Chase said as I came out of my decadent thoughts and helped him stow the rest of the stuff. Settling into the passenger seat, I watched as he unmoored the plane and cast us off. He opened his door and hopped inside. After going through his pre-flight checks, he taxied away from the dock and out into the channel.
“Slick as snake spit,” I said with a grin. Something we’d say when we’d gotten away with something during our teenage years. He laughed and all the memories of the past came back at me with the power of a Mack truck. I swallowed hard and looked out the window.
“This plane handles like heaven in the air and on the water. Fast in and out. Ideal for my purposes.”
The land fell away below us as we ascended into the cloudless blue sky. The bayou stretched out with canebrakes and copses of trees, skipping over fingers of Bayou Berangere, plantations, shacks and ribbons of rivers and lakes as the countryside grew wilder with every second. Masses of green for as far as the eye could see, trees crowding what land there was, shoulder to shoulder, massive crowns so dense, leaving the floor below them veiled in darkness. The banks were thick with patches of yellow and flame braided together along the edge like embroidery, the shallows thick with spider lilies and water lettuce.
The Atchafalaya was a place where it seemed the world was still forming, ever-changing, metamorphosing and yet always true to itself. Something I found was happening to me because of a beautiful, outspoken and sassy woman. We passed over a shadowy corridor of trees where no land was visible at all, solidifying the constant battle between water and earth.
“Will you teach me how to fly?” I asked and Chase glanced at me, the satisfaction and the hope all mixed up in his eyes so like mine, another visible sign of our kinship.
He nodded. “I’ve been flying for eight years, almost nine and it never gets old. Won’t take you long before you’re doing this on your own.”
I was eager to try. “You go down to the Gulf often?”
“Yes, every week to fish for customer orders. It’s great and as long as the weather permits, pleasant. I love what I do.”
“I can see that you do and that’s good, Chase.” I cleared my throat. “Do you have any interest in the orchard? Ideas?”
“Is this why you showed up?” His eyes narrowed and his voice grew hard.
“No. It’s not about the orchard. It’s about…us and how we can deal with this animosity between us,” I said, honestly, my tone wistful.
His features softened and his shoulders relaxed. “Oh, okay. I’m not the one with the animosity, Jake.”
“Right. I’m the asshole.”
“Well, yeah, you are.”
Suddenly we both laughed. We flew over the Grand Isle Bridge and Chase pointed out where the Army Corps of Engineers had blockaded the MR-GO which was short for Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal. He came into a smooth landing at Hopedale’s Breton Sound Marina. “I keep boats down in Venice for charters.”
“TheAmy? That was…nice naming it after Momma.”
He nodded. “I missed her. I can show it to you if you’d like to see it. I’ve got an extra set of keys.”
“Sure, if we have time, but the reds are waiting.”
We unloaded the gear and got a canoe. He grinned and lobbed a paddle at me. “You did some rowing in school, right?”
I laughed and clutching the paddle, stepped into the canoe. Chase nodded in approval. “Okay, the boy has his sea legs.” He sat down and maneuvered us away from the dock. “The MR-GO is no more than four hundred yards down that way.”
I spied a rock dam maybe three hundred yards away, rising about seven feet above the surface.
“This blockade is a result of the terrible toll of Hurricane Katrina, finally getting the nation to begin repairing the damage the canal had caused. When it had been dug in the 1960s, it put a vital wetlands ecosystem on a fast path to collapse and increased the threat of hurricane storm surge to nearby communities,” he said.
There were already a number of boats anchored there. “A happy circumstance for us,” I said. “Fishermen, of course, knew that putting rocks in this water would also have another benefit. It would create an artificial reef, which would concentrate fish in one spot.”
He nodded. “The dam was part of a project to halt wetlands loss and it’s worked well.” He paddled some more in silence. “Hunting reds is all about stealth.” We took the run down the river hopping wakes and riding swells to wrap around the tip of rocks on the western end of the pass. We curled back up, and the line of rocks buffeted the rollers being pushed along the Gulf by the southeast winds.
Chase and I worked our way to the north, and stopped at an area where the rocks had washed away, letting the water move back and forth with the tides.
“This is a perfect ambush point. The river is low and slow. The last two days the winds have been light and allowed the water to settle. It’s much prettier here than Audubon Park. Look at that,” he said peering into the water. “Visibility is four feet.”
When we reached the southwest rocks, Chase said, “Go slow now. Large pulses through the water can be detected by the fish.” We paddled a bit more, then Chase said, “Stop here.”
We threw our lines in and it was almost non-stop reds between eighteen to twenty-two inches, filling up the first cooler and some of the second. The sun was beginning to dip lower in the sky. “We’d better get going,” he said. “Would you like to come over and we can grill some of this catch?”
It was Thursday and my planned Lafayette dinner with Sky, but knowing her I suspected she would enjoy this more. “Yeah, can I…uh…bring someone?”
