Sunday, March 25, 2012

Today began around 7:30 AM when our lovely chaperones did wake-up rounds. After dressing, eating breakfast, and packing our brownbag lunches, we piled into our signature tourist vans and set off on the hour-long drive to Zam’s Swamp Tours, a wonderful place in rural Southern Louisiana-Thibodeax. We began the tour at Zam’s by witnessing a gigantic caravan of bikers making their way to the gift shop of the site. The woman who first showed us around, Diana, brought out three different snakes: a baby one, a middle-sized one, and a huge-beyond-huge yellow snake that wrapped its body around us all. While some in the group were a bit nervous to interact with the reptiles at first, by the end we were all handling them like pros.

  The next section of our tour consisted of getting onto a barge-like wooden and metal boat and taking a tour of the Bayou, led by a 15-year-old giant named Zee. Never in my entire life have I seen a boy so big. He had long blond hair tucked into his camouflage hat and rolled-up jean shorts with a super tight red t-shirt. He sported rubber boots that came up to his knees. Along with his two tour guide companions, Zee gave us a brief history of the Bayou, a history which we strained to understand, as Zee had a thick Cajun accent. If you have ever seen the show Swamp People, then you can imagine what Zee was like. It had been barely five minutes in the water when, all of a sudden, Barry (Laila’s husband) spotted something moving in the water. “A gator,” he exclaimed. Our boat drove slowly over to the alligator as we all ran to the back of the boat to see the reptile. Zee casually opened the rear of the boat and lay down on his stomach. “He’s stuck to the branch,” Zee explained to us. Zee reached into the water with his bare hands and wrestled the four-foot-long alligator onto the boat. He swiftly brought it up on the boat and it was clear that a trap line had wrapped around the belly of the gator.  Bob, the older gentleman leading the tour, used his large pocket knife to cut the line.  Zee then brought the gator to the front of the boat and began to wrap a washcloth and rope around the gator’s mouth so it would not bite anyone. He tied it up to the front of the boat and it sat there for the next hour and a half. Zee’s plan was to bring the alligator back to Zam’s to nurse it back to health; the  fishing line had cut into the flesh and it injured its nose on a branch.
      I must be honest for a second: seeing the alligator writhing at the front of the boat while we leisurely continued our Bayou tour was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. While we recognized that Zee and his crew were trying to help the alligator, it was blatantly obvious that the alligator would have preferred to be back in the water.
      After saving the alligator, we continued on through the swamps and saw a Confederate flag and more alligators, this time babies. Zee took another stroll into the water and picked up a baby, about eight inches long. He brought it onto the boat and we took turns holding it. Its bites were like little nibbles on our fingers. Zee was going to keep the alligator to measure its health, his organization has a permit for this otherwise illegal activity.
      When we finished our boat tour, we took a second tour, this time of  Zam’s farm. We passed by adorable baby goats and bunnies, which we all held and bottle-fed, as well as caged raccoons and chickens. We saw a 13-foot alligator that weighed about 800 pounds. It hissed and snapped at us, trying to defend its personal territory. It was true nature at its best. We then met an 110-120 year old gigantic snapping turtle. We learned that while snapping turtles don’t have teeth, the pressure their jaws exert when they snap closed is enough to cleanly slice off someone’s arm. Yikes.
       Next we ate lunch at the picnic tables and enjoyed listening to some fine Cajun accents. Finally, we bid farewell to our new friends at Zam’s and drove away with our next tour guide, Gary, to a sugarcane plantation that was in use in the mid-1800s. The houses belonging to the slaves were still intact. It was surreal to see buildings that had housed slaves only 150 years ago. Gary then took us to the campus of Nicholls College (at which he is a marine biology professor). He gave us a quick lesson about the geography of Louisiana, as well as the geography of Massachusetts (sadly, not one of us drew our home state correctly). During our lesson, we learned that the water at the edge of Southern Louisiana is moving inland at a rate of one acre per 45 minutes, if you can imagine that speed. We also learned that the Mississippi River changes courses every few thousand years.
       Our last stop of the day was to a swampy area of the plantation. We drove in the bed of Gary’s white pickup, literally sitting on barrels of hay. We arrived at the swamp and took a walk in which we found many meaty spiders and tiny little ants. We saw bald eagles flying overhead and heard frogs singing from the swamp. Gary took us to a small shack on the edge of the swamp in which an owl lived. Gary, Barry, and Josh collected the owl’s pellets (NOT POOP, DON’T WORRY) and the skulls of dead mice. We looked at both outside. Finally, we drove to our vans and continued back to the now-familiar Marquette House in what now seems like bustling New Orleans.
      I think that the two biggest takeaways from today were learned at Zam’s. For the first time, I really appreciated the education to which we have access in Boston. While the people with whom we talked weren’t uneducated, they certainly lived a life filled with a different type of education (namely, how to catch an alligator). They were very knowledgeable in their fields, and while I admired this knowledge, I felt very fortunate to be learning my eight subjects at Gann. The second thing I took away from today was that there really are people who live their lives doing the things that they love and that make them genuinely satisfied. So often we go through life trying to fulfill some impossible or trivial goal instead of fighting for the things that make us happy. Zee, our 15-year-old tour guide, moved out of his parents’ house at age 12 to live on his own boathouse (a house that floats in the middle of the water). While his parents weren’t thrilled with this decision, he left home to pursue his love of alligators and the Bayous. This type of courage and pursuit of happiness is a kind that we can only hope to achieve in our own lives.
       I cannot wait to see what the rest of NOLA 2012 has to offer us.

-Ellie Deresiewicz, Aaron Benjamin, and Alana Windmueller