Frogger

It was a long way from Catahoula to the Acadiana Mall in 1985. Today, according to my phone, I can drive there in fifty-one minutes. Today Ambassador Caffery goes all the way to St. Martin Parish. But in 1985 it was an odyssey, our silver Crown Victoria clairvoyancing through long stretches of sugarcane farmland in vertical stages of growth, all of us piled into the plush gray back seat, or sometimes I was small enough to sneak up front and sit in the middle, negotiating Catahoula Highway, listening to Madonna, over Bayou Teche, over Bayou Tortue, and finally over Bayou Vermilion, each an incantation, listening to Chaka Khan, in daylight or at night, our child shaped bundles of energy in our own vertical stages of growth, arriving at the Acadiana Mall ready to blow the joint of that old Crown Vic. I’m not trying to sound overly ghostly about it, I’m just telling you what happened. I’m telling you the story of how we were literally transported.

In the mid-1930s a massive protection levee carved St. Martin Parish in half from top to bottom, and Catahoula Lake, once a deep and oddly crystalline tentacle of the old Atchafalaya, was carved from its swampy motherland, and the oddly narrow lake, the oddly blue-crab filled freshwater lake, muscadine-draped where it forked at its southern end, was left behind as one of a handful of so-called remnant lakes. I have heard them called orphan lakes, too.

When you think of the swamp you think of bald cypresses and Spanish moss, and that’s a big part of it, but a swamp’s even more elemental than that. I like to think of the Atchafalaya as a vast living organism, a sprawling liquid creature with a skeleton of networking waterways, a vasculature of braided waterways, and sprawling liquid tentacles forming, lakes and bays and bayous. The difference between a marsh and a swamp is that swamps have trees, which is another way of saying that swamps are flooded forests, and the seasonal cycles of flood and drought form the pulse of this liquid beast, and while, theoretically, any haunting should be purely incidental, ghosts inevitably arise from the marrow of such places.

Both of my dad’s parents were born in the Atchafalaya, and were at home in, on and around water and land their whole lives, essentially semi-aquatic. When they moved to Catahoula Lake in the early 1920s, the lake was still in the swamp, then when the levee came through, even though they hadn’t moved anywhere, they were expelled from the garden, and newly islanded, because when the levees came carving through, they came carving through with canals of water running alongside them.

Mamom would ferry my dad, barefoot, along with some subset of his eight siblings, each of them also barefoot, in her flat-bottomed barge of a boat across Catahoula Lake to the mainland every day, where they would walk half a mile to Catahoula Elementary. The island was the kind of wild place where you could be bitten by a snake, and in fact my dad was bitten by a cottonmouth while catching crawfish in the coulée with his brother one morning. His leg turned hard as a stone and deep purple for several weeks before making a miraculous recovery.

Eventually, my dad moved across the lake to the mainland, built a house there, and that’s where I grew up. That’s where I live today. Growing up the son of a farmer, who was also the son of a farmer, in a place where whatever water touches grows something green, there’s always something being planted. Three live oak trees span the length of the lot, each purposefully planted. The largest one was planted by my grandfather ninety years ago from a seedling he plucked from the hollowed-out stump of an old giant cypress in the Catahoula Swamp. There’s a smaller live oak my Aunt Sis planted sixty years ago when she lived there with her family. And my father planted a third live oak forty years ago to mark the passing of my sister, Nicole.

And there have been three houses on that land. The first, a small shotgun, its only trace now a hazy sepia photograph taken by Aunt Sis when she lived there. The second, the one I was born into but can no longer recollect, which now lives across the lake on the island, where it’s occupied by my cousin Jun, still housing the same pink toilet our family used in 1975. The third, a brick house between and beneath the two largest oaks.

And there have been three children buried on that narrow parcel of land. One, a girl who was to be named Margaret, buried under the second oldest oak without a marker. Mamom, darkly veiled, wore a blue mourning dress for weeks, according to Aunt Sis, in devotion to the Blessed Virgin, whom she adored so deeply her only dying request was to be buried in a long white dress tied with a bright blue sash, her clasped hands aiming heavenward.

Under that same oak was where my mom would take our pictures on the first day of school. Even into the 1980s, before a state law forbade it, my brother and I went to school barefoot. Not because we didn’t have shoes, but because when the weather was nice, why not? There’s a photograph of us on the first day of school in August 1980. I’m sitting on a bike with a brown-and-yellow seat, a mop of brown hair and barefoot.

All of which is to say that I had one foot in this barefoot Catahoula world of the old swamp and one foot, wearing Reeboks, or at one point carnation-pink Converse high tops, in the world of the Acadiana Mall, playing Frogger in Aladdin’s Castle near the mall’s main entrance, frozen yogurt next door, directly across from the movie theater, which seemed so outrageous at the time. Frozen yogurt! Bangs strategically hairsprayed. Eyeglasses too big for my face.

I remember the day I got my first pair. We stopped at Gammy’s on the way back from New Iberia, and Tante Gird was there visiting. I told them I had just picked up my new glasses. More likely it was my mom who told them, me standing by her side and slightly behind her. The twinkle in Tante Gird’s eye, looking back I see it so clearly, meant that she surely must have known how delicate the moment was. She cocked her head sideways and took a long look at my face through her own pair of eyeglasses, and even though she was seventy years older than I was, we were exactly the same height, but she was much more knowing in the weight of her words, when she told me they were very becoming. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that one small compliment can’t make a lifetime of difference. I made a meal of that word becoming and bounced out of Gammy’s house with a new spring in my Reeboks.

Picture the young boy reading a giant book titled Laughs, Jokes and Riddles. I found a copy on eBay listed as a vintage paperback, published in 1970. Does that mean that I’m vintage too? It must have been handed down from my older sisters. “There are enough jokes here to keep you laughing forever,” says a blurb on the back of it, which sounds, now that I think about it, more like a curse than anything. I ate it up. Carried it around with my color-coded binder system, this big pulpy block of a book sitting on top of my Trapper Keeper, and on top of the big book, a plastic blue fold-out pencil case, which revealed in the final compartment, when you opened it up and fully unrolled it, inevitably a piece of candy or a pack of fruity chewing gum. I’d hold the stack of objects in front of me with two hands all the way to school.

The Acadiana Mall wasn’t around the block or down the street. It was a small odyssey to get there. A short rocket ride to the moon. And stepping out into the parking lot was like stepping out onto the lunar surface, the looming mall opening outward into far-reaching and miraculous vistas, even before cable TV had arrived in Catahoula, opening up that former swampland to the music, for example, of Boy George and David Bowie, and no store captured that Wonderland quality more than Waldenbooks. The very length of that word! It was the first bookstore I remember. You could find me in the puzzle books or the comic books, and especially in the cookbooks.

Nanny Liz would usually give me a Waldenbooks gift certificate for Christmas. Do you know how thrilling that was? I remember searching for the perfect combination of books that would get me as close to the total as possible without going over. I found a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook in one aisle, the first page of which I wrote my name on as soon as I got home, and to this cookbook I added from the next aisle over one of those slender puzzle books that came with magic wand markers that revealed the invisibly printed material when you passed its orange nub over the bubbles.

One foot in what’s left of the old Atchafalaya, a world where it was not at all unusual to eat the legs of a frog that a cousin, who was a frogger, had recently pulled from the swamp, and one foot in a world where there was such a thing as an enchilada. My first enchilada was at Taco Casa in the Acadiana Mall. I remember scanning the menu of mostly unfamiliar words, words like burrito and tostada, returning to the tostada again and again after discovering the delight in it. There was a yellow sheet of wax paper under the tostada, and when it was removed dramatically from the mouth of the yawning oven, the square wax sheet was translucent in places from the grease of the bubbling cheese. I did eat every last bit of it.

Only sitting down to write this story did I realize how many firsts happened for me at the Acadiana Mall: my first Mexican food, my first bookstore, my first video arcade game, my first live puppet show, my first cologne, watching too many movies to name, wearing a sweaty Swatch watch. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I didn’t buy my first music there. (My first cassette, at least the first one that I chose and bought myself, was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was less than twenty years old at the time. I bought it on sale at K-Mart. My first vinyl came later: Prince’s Around the World in a Day, purchased with coupons that I earned from my orthodontist for good retainer hygiene.) But I do remember buying a three-pack of blank audio cassettes at the Record Bar in the Acadiana Mall. I used them to record hourlong lists of spelling words, strictly alphabetical, leaving gaps in between each word so that I could spell the words back to myself when I played that orange-ribboned cassette over and over and over.

The Atchafalaya is silting up, and Catahoula Lake had to be dredged a few years ago because it was silting up, too, drying up enough that frogs are getting harder to find. Frogger was one of the few video arcade games that didn’t involve killing or shooting or exploding things. It was about inhabiting, until the quarters ran out, the character of a small frog who kept trying, against all odds, to cross over to the other side, hopping judiciously across a multi-lane freeway, hopping on floating logs. The traffic was relentless, and if you missed a passing log the frog would die by drowning. You could try to land safely on the back of a snapping alligator, but if you landed on its snout it would devour you. I liked that. I liked playing the game of avoiding being killed much more than I liked doing the killing. Run over my bundle of being. Resurrect me. Make me a bright green frog. Make me a sizzling tostada. Tell me a corny joke. Who goes to malls anymore?