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Wednesday, January 4, 2017
The Last Permanent Resident, and so the story begins...
Born on the banks of the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, I grew hunting and fishing the swamps and marshlands of south Louisiana with my father. I have always lived on a bayou or been close to the water in one way or another and in retrospect, it is no big surprise to me now, that at the age of 30 years, I decided to get even closer by living without running water, electricity, television and telephone, build a houseboat and move into the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp.
Below is a photo of the Vermillion River south of Abbeville, where I lived for five years, right before I moved to the Atchafalaya Basin. The Atchafalaya is a river where my ancestors have lived off the land and the water for millenniums before Columbus was discovered on 'our' eastern shores. Columbus did not discover us because he was in fact lost and believed that he was in India and called us Indians! Before he ever embarked westward in search of slaves and gold other europeans and middle easterners came to the 'new' world and settled in the lands we now call north and south America. Before Columbus and the European 'white man' got here, American natives were running things, and there was no debt, taxes, laws or crime. There was plenty of fish, beaver, duck, deer, bison, fresh air, clean water, and women did all the work. Native man hunted and fished every day and had sex all night long. And then the white man shows up, claims the land 'in the name' of a king from a foreign land and thought he would come here and improve this? Let me tell you how my exodus from the confused white man's world began for me in 1986.
Once upon a time long, long, ago, I built a houseboat in a beautiful ecological and wildlife intensive animal kingdom called the Atchafalaya Basin and beknown to me at the time, I was to become the last permanent resident of the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp.
It was there at the age of 30 that I came face to face with my native American roots. I had built my houseboat on what was then called Charenton Beach Landing. It was a place I had fond memories of as a child when I went into the Basin to fish with my daddy on often a weekly basis. The Charenton boat landing and the native American shell mounds nearby are an ancient Native American village site of the Chitamacha Tribe, of which I am a descendant on my daddy's side.
But I am getting ahead of myself. This story actually begins with the 200th year celebration of Vermillionville, which is now known as Lafayette, Louisiana. Below is a photo of the boat I fished in with my daddy as a little boy in the basin and used in the boat parade in 1984. The boat parade was the high point of our community-wide celebration in spite of the fact that I took first place in the Vermillionville beard contest that week.
The year after that I played Theodule in a feature film movie called 'Belizaire The Cajun' which was filmed primarily at Acadian Village in Lafayette, and the Evangeline State Park, in St. Martinville.
Belizaire the Cajun was filmed at various locations around Acadiana, such as Cypress Island,
and Lake Martin.
What began with the boat parade in 1984 and became magnified in the production of Belizaire the Cajun in 1985, would result in me building my houseboat in the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp in 1986.
It was on the set of Belizaire The Cajun that I met Louis Choplin, a warm sweet old bearded man who was a genuine, for-real swamp man and a survivor of the invasion of Normandy Beach, on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
It was Louis Choplan who took me on the first swamp tour I ever did with a friend of mine named Monty Orr who was a photographer that had hired Louis as our guide...
It was the first of many thousands of swamp tours that would lead to me eventually becoming regarded as the worlds most famous Louisiana Swamp Tour guide.
Photo below copyrighted and compliments of Andre Comeaux 2004
I am Marcus de la Houssaye and I can be contacted by email at catahoula1@gmail.com
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