Down the Bayou in New Orleans (SUPing Story)

Bayou St. John in New Orleans is a beautiful, mysterious, and murky length of water that runs through the city to Lake Pontchartrain. Its milky green color hides what lurks beneath, and when I navigate down it, I stay perched above the warm, swampy liquid on my stand-up paddleboard. Plunging my paddle into the water. Watching my blade disappear into the murk and then return to the air. Moving myself on the surface of the water.

Gliding through that swampy world, I sometimes forget I‘m in the Crescent City as it buzzes around me. On the land, streetcars, bicycles, buses, cars, trucks, and people move through my adopted city, but on the water, it’s just me and the wild, natural world that calls the bayou home.

Oak, willow, palm, and cypress trees loom with outstretched limbs and their roots climb into the muddy water. Turtles’ heads pop up and I watch them quickly dive back to the depths. Ducks, herons, and egrets land and then return to the sky over the houses and buildings on the banks, and when a bass leaps out of the water into the air in front of me, I shudder but keep my balance.

I won’t fall in. Ghosts and gators live down in that green water.

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I’ve lived in this magical, musical, decadent, dirty, broken, and beautiful city for seven years. It’s a city that dances to a backbeat groove fed by horns and pounding bass drums. Words flow from the shotgun houses with haunted poetry. Stories and lyrics hang off the trees like Spanish moss.

Built on a swamp, it is a city constantly threatened by hurricanes that is sinking into the sea. A place where we dance to celebrate the dead. A place rich with fantastical phantoms, second lines, brass bands, parades for all occasions, crawfish boils, and costume balls. Do whatcha wanna is fully embraced here, and New Orleanians play and party with the many multi-colored personalities of the past and the present.

Some are called to this place and I’m one of them. The spirits of New Orleans drew me here and I dance with them in the streets and on the water.

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Paddling on the water through New Orleans reminds me of the interplay between life and death, nature and the city, and how there is often little boundary between them. It reminds me how fragile and fleeting life is, and how life may not end when death comes.

When I drift down the bayou, I hear many sounds from the past merge with the cicadas singing all around me.

Buddy Bolden, the godfather of jazz, blows his cornet across the top of the water from the potter’s field where he’s buried in Mid City. A clatter of mad typing echoes in the trees from Tennessee Williams’ phantom fingers working on a play in some French Quarter apartment. The sounds of scantily-clad working ladies giggling in Storyville mingle with the wind. And pianist maestro James Booker’s left hand blends with his right as he plays a mean boogie while herons bob their heads to it.

All specters of the city’s past. Decades descending on themselves.

Then a breeze comes up and wipes it all away. The eerie silence reminds me that I’m in an ancient ecosystem where the Chitimacha lived. The Indigenous people who hunted, fished, and worshipped here in the land known as the Bulbancha.

The spirits continue to call.

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I’ve been a surfer for many years and I took up stand-up paddleboarding (SUPing) when I lived on the beach in Mexico’s Yucatán. It’s good that I did because even though New Orleans is the city I love and live in, what’s missing here are waves. Being on the bayou may not be the beach, but it offers the calm and connectedness a water person like me needs.

So, I load my old, white Toyota Tacoma truck with my board and paddle, drive ten minutes from my home in the Gentilly neighborhood to Wisner Boulevard, and park under the trees just off City Park. When I climb out of my truck, the air smells thick with marsh and murk, and my SUP ritual begins.

I start by sliding on a pair of surf booties to protect my feet because I don’t want to endanger my toes to what’s down in the deep. It’s a watery world filled with drunkenly discarded bottles and the flotsam and jetsam of many hurricanes and storms.

After that, I pull out my board and paddle, lock up my truck, and carry everything to the grassy edge of the bayou. The pea soup water is warm when I put my bootied feet in and slowly crawl into the water, careful not to slip on the moss-covered rocks, and I lay my board down in a place deep enough not to break my fin. Then I push off, stand up, and stroke forward until I’m out into the center of the bayou under billowy clouds and sky. The water still and smooth.

Numerous low bridges bisect the bayou with multi-colored graffiti covering the sides and a bridge arrives quickly. Before it, I stop paddling and float forward slowly, admiring the spray-painted tags. I avoid the fishing line cast by a fisherman on the bridge, crouch down, and climb like a troll underneath.

Crawling and maneuvering myself in the cool shadow. Under the bridge, I get a reprieve from the sun, but it’s still thick with heat and humidity. On the other side, I emerge back out in the sunlight, stand up, and continue.

I float the length of the bayou this way and I’m usually not disturbed by human beings.

Except for twice this May. And they were both reminders that life is fragile and death is always nearby in NOLA and on Bayou St. John.

One morning late in the month, I was on the water near Pan American Stadium. A line of ducklings was following their mother just as I got close to the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. To my left, a thin, middle-aged woman with dark coffee-colored skin and short-cropped hair was standing on the bank in a dark blue business suit quietly smoking a cigarette.

The woman looked at me, blew out a stream of smoke, then nonchalantly called out, “They gators in that wattah, ya know!”

I knew. As a surfer knows there are sharks below the waves, I knew there were gators in the bayou. But I liked to forget.

Cooly, I called back, “Yeah, but they take ’em out if they get bigger than five feet!”

The woman said nothing more, put out her cigarette, and walked off the bank. She was too far away to see her eyes roll, but I knew that’s what they did.

Sitting on my surfboard out in the ocean, I’d gotten sharked out. A term that defined what it was like when a surfer started thinking too much about sharks. And although I may have been calm and cool when I responded to the smoking woman, that day I started getting gatored out.

As I paddled on, I believed that large alligators were removed from the bayou, but I also knew many big gators had been spotted swimming in it. I started scanning the water, paranoid that every floating log was an aquatic beast. Every large rock was the head of a sinister-looking reptile with a southern smile.

Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon and thunder was deeply rumbling in the distance. That meant lightning was coming, so I convinced myself to quickly paddle back to the safety of my Toyota Tacoma under the trees.

I never saw the gators my imagination concocted, but I knew they could have been there.

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Once I was back on land, I stopped being gatored out, and a few days later, I was back on the water.

It was a Tuesday. I had paddled down from the Hellenic Center a little after noon, and I’d gotten past the bridge at Fillmore. Some fresh graffiti art on the low bridge was scrawled beautifully in crimson red: WOMYN HAVE THE POWER.

I crouched down and moved myself under the bridge. It was dark and cool as the dense heat of summer beckoned. As usual, there had been no one else on the water, but there was an eerie quality as if I wasn’t alone.

On the other side of the bridge, I stood back up and gave a strong stroke forward. The bayou narrowed some but it was still wide and I maneuvered to the center enjoying the broad expanse of water.

Ahead, I saw a lot of activity at the Mirabeau bridge.

Boats were in the water and people were moving all over the bridge and the banks. As I got closer, I saw the boats were filled with police and dogs with their canine noses extended over the prows of both watercraft. Just in front of the boats, divers were in the water, preparing to submerge.

More than curious, I paddled as close as I could get. The bridge had a net over it hanging down into the water and the top of the bridge was covered in cop cars and trucks. A flurry of people were talking on their mobile phones.

I was thirty feet from the bridge when a man wearing street clothes in one of the boats waved his hand in the air at me.

He said, “Can’t go further. No way through today. Gotta turn around.”

His staccato tone was serious, so I released one hand from my paddle and gave him a thumbs-up. I took one last look at the chaotic activity, back-paddled until I was turned 180 degrees the other way, and started back from where I came.

My board and paddle returned me to the shore where my truck was waiting. I loaded up and drove the short distance home.

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Later that day, I checked the local TV news. WDSU was showing scenes from Bayou St. John right where I’d been standing on my SUP a few hours before.

A jawless skull padlocked to a dumbbell had been found inside a blanket by a couple of fishermen, and the police were looking for a body when I paddled up to them. CBS News picked up the story several days later.

But the body was never found.

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You might say a gator got there before the police did. Or you might say the city took the body deep down into its beating heart. Both explanations are possible. Deep in the muck and mud of the swamp. Under New Orleanian feet. Where the foundations of the city meet with its spirits.

Along with millions of Mardi Gras beads, the carcasses of costumes, and shoes too full of holes to dance in anymore, the bayou is a good place to get rid of a body.

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I live in the northernmost Caribbean city. A place of above-ground cemeteries, voodoo, and thousands of stories. A place where the tales I tell are never as strange as the mysteries that have never been solved.

Here in New Orleans, life is too fragile not to live fully and dance freely. If I ever forget, I paddle down the bayou among the gators and the ghosts to remind me.