The white shimmer of the sea in the distance
After crossing the Mississippi River, the drive from the New Orleans Airport to the Grand Isle was in the darkness. The water and swamp that surrounded the narrow road was illuminated only by the dim streetlights. Sometimes, there was a white shimmer in the distance. Glimpses of the vast sea caused by the flashing lights of ferries, oil rigs and fishing boats. The orange glow of a large fire grabbed my attention. Two men seemed to be burning a pile of scrap wood, leisurely watching the flames from underneath a stilted house. I had only then realized that all the houses that we sped past were on stilts. We were in Grand Isle after all, and it had only been a year since Hurricane Ida violently hit its shores. Perhaps debris from the damage caused by the hurricane was fuelling the fire.
The next afternoon, I started reading Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, sitting lazily on the beach with my legs spread out in the sand. Chopin’s descriptions of the ‘soft’ and ‘languorous’ breeze, the intense glare of the sun, and the ‘seductive’ whispers of the sea reflected what I was experiencing with my senses. As I read about Edna Pontellier’s vacation at the Grand Isle, I felt the oppressive heat of the sun, and the continuous soft crashing of the waves. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was, quite literally, in the world of the novel.
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
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While Kate Chopin’s writing is dense with description, this description is not just a realistic account of the life and geography of Grand Isle. Edna’s mental state is embedded within the sea. Gazing at the horizon with the book open in my hands, I too drowsily drifted into these ‘mazes of inward contemplation,’ often getting lost in them for hours.
I contemplate my foreignness to Grand Isle. Edna, too, is an outsider – she is a presbyterian from Kentucky trying to assimilate into the French Creole world. Meanwhile, I am an international student from India, studying in Los Angeles, and visiting Louisiana for the first time through the Bookpacking class. The circumstances that brought me here couldn’t be more different, yet I felt an affinity with Edna’s position. Even though the environment encourages idle relaxation, I feel unsettled.
There is an intense sense of loss in Grand Isle. While the guesthouse we are living in has been repaired, the effects of the disaster are clearly visible throughout the town. When I step out of the guesthouse onto the main road, and stroll to Jo-Bob’s Gas and Grill or the Sureway Supermarket, I pass the remains of once-intact homes. The remnants of a house dismantled by the hurricane. It is unlivable, but still held up by its stilts. The destroyed house, enveloped in overgrown vegetation sits right beside a newly painted yellow two-story bungalow with a trimmed lawn and a neatly arranged row of trees. When we visited the western edge of the island (that is connected to the rest of Louisiana by a bridge) to take photos for this blog, I felt the absolute violence of the hurricane. Half of a jetty, painted green, was demolished. What seemingly used to be a pier was now just a chaotic collection of ruptured wooden stubs sticking out of the water.
A few years before The Awakening’s publication in 1899, the Chenière Caminada hurricane, in 1893, killing close to 2000 people in total. About half of these casualites was the entire working-class fishing community Chenière Caminada. Although The Awakening’s story is staged before this time, Kate Chopin seems to be reckoning with this disaster, as she preserves memories of the space in her novel, describing a jovial mass that the characters attend at Caminada. This blog post is, in a sense, my reckoning with Hurricane Ida and its effects that intertwine with my relaxing experience at Grand Isle.
These past two days have been filled with lethargy and leisure. I resonate with the French Creole culture in The Awakening of winding down and appreciating the delights of life, Yet, this is a partial story. As a visitor, I have the privilege to choose when to visit the Grand Isle. Were it in a state of complete disrepair, our group would not have been able to visit the place. On the other hand, the community living and working here is always preparing for the possibility of natural disaster. It is a grueling cycle of destruction and rebuilding. As a tourist, I am separated from this, in the same way the wealthy Creole families in The Awakening are separate from the people who died in the Chenière Caminada hurricane.
An endless stretch of sea and sand
“She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.
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I experienced something similar to Edna in the above quote when I set out to walk the entire stretch of the beach, parallel to the sea. I faced an endless stretch of sand in front of, and behind me, and to my left was the horizon of the sea. I felt calm and at peace. I was also a little terrified by the lack of visible boundaries.
Slowly treading deep into the endless sea, Edna drowns herself. She, too, experiences a brief terror. Reading Kate Chopin’s novel while on the beach awakened within me a morbid curiosity with death by the sea. I stared at and clicked photos of a catfish and half-eaten crab washed up on shore during the low tide. The corpses of a pair of sharks caught the attention of our group. Maggots were crawling over them and decomposing their flesh. While these might be regular, though gruesome, sights on a beach, Chopin’s writing drew my attention to death in nature.
At the entrance to the beach from our guesthouse, there is a cross made out of driftwood. I do not know why it is there. Someone jokingly suggested that it was an unmarked grave that haunted the beach. I like to see it as a recognition of the casualties of Hurricane Ida.
As I get ready to depart from Grand Isle these images of death and disaster stay in my memories. But, I will also not forget laying in the hammock on the balcony overlooking the ocean. Falling asleep to the gentle sound of waves and a warm sea-breeze. Throughout this blog I have emphasized that the locals of Grand Isle are dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. But, they also fish calmly on the rocks by the sea. They enjoy fried crawfish at the Starfish restaurant after a day of work. An appreciation for the pleasures of life still exists in the face of constant disaster. I hope to carry traces of this way of life with me as I continue my travels.
The mysterious cross on the beach