Local author loves and lives by the bayou

Photo: Rusty Costanza

By Diana Pinckley
Times-Picayune

New Orleans author Constance Adler knows exactly where she belongs. And it's right on the banks of Bayou St. John. In her first book, an evocative memoir titled "My Bayou: New Orleans Through the Eyes of a Lover, " her subjects range from voodoo to pelicans, from the sweet mud of the bayou to the cracked dirt that paved the city in 2005, from loyal and personable dogs to somewhat-less-trustworthy humans.

As a blogger devoted to the work of Emily Dickinson, and a contributor to national magazines, Adler has a sharp eye for detail and a poetic voice. Here's how she responds when two pelicans sail over the bayou while she is cleaning up litter:

They float low in the air, gliding on their huge wingspans just inches above the water's surface. It's a great gravity-defying trick of aero-engineering that still looks like pure magic to me. The pelicans make the ducks and herons and cormorants look like they are still practicing flight. These local birds, who appear just as harried and spent as the people, seem to belong here, pecking and paddling around in this citified waterbed while the pelicans make great sky circles with their wings... The pelicans offered an invitation to descend into this place. To deepen my relationship to my bayou and the city it flowed through.

Adler grew up on the water in southern New Jersey, so the flow of the Crescent City feels right. "If I close my eyes and just listen and sniff, the humid air along Bayou Saint John stirs me in a place that can't be mapped. I may spend the whole of my life navigating the borders where water laps against my thoughts."

Adler first moved to New Orleans in 1995, after she tired of the freelance writing life in Manhattan. She went away for a year of graduate school, and returned to a house on Bayou St. John, where she's been ever since. "I had gone looking for a new life, and I found it. In addition to offering her many delights, this city also taught me that anything at all might rise up from the chthonic (stet) ground of being. New Orleans makes no guarantee of sweet dreams only."

While the book begins well before Hurricane Katrina, more than half of it is devoted to evacuation and homecoming. Adler memorably chronicles those dire days, as she and her family sleep in many beds offered by sympathetic hosts across the country, watching TV coverage of their beloved and drowning city as tears roll down their cheeks.

When she returns to the "honeymoon cottage, " the sweet odor of wet dirt around the bayou segues into the powerful smell left by Katrina mud.

"The scent summoned an instant visceral distaste, marbled with panic, as if I were being smothered in despair, nailed into a coffin before my time. Katrina smelled like wet dirt and mildew, mixed with human dust that has been cooking in late summer heat, a strangely florid and fertile smell that suggested unwholesome life forms brewing in it. ... a smell that signaled penetrating decay, sadness, destruction, loss."

Like her favorite body of water, Adler will recover from trauma, helped by Lance ("a muddy trickle of a dog") and her own distinctive points of view. "My Bayou" reflects a life open to experience, inspired by a beloved place.

NOW, see the movie - filmed by local photo/videographer Jackson Hill.

Read another review in "Blackbird."

She also hosts writers' workshops: Bayou Writing Workshop

St. John Court in Bayou St. John

At the center of St. John Court in Mid-City is a triangular-shaped park where various colorful, children’s playthings are generally strewn across the grass and a toddler’s swing hangs from a tree. Henry Breen, 3, whips around the park on his tricycle; it’s perfectly safe because a car rarely comes through. The boy’s birthday was recently celebrated on the court and everyone invited for hot dogs off an umbrella cart.

“It’s just like an old New Orleans neighborhood,” said resident Steve Breen, Henry’s dad.

Diane Badeaux remembers the neighborhood 50 years ago was full of families. Her relatives were the first owners of three houses built along the narrow alley abutting Bayou St. John. As a kid, she visited her cousins and played on the water in a pirogue. Now, families with young children have returned, attracted to its enviable proximity to the bayou and City Park. Neighbors held a New Year’s Eve party in the tiny park and occasionally throw a crawfish boil.

“It’s kind of come full circle,” Badeaux said.
Denny Le Boeuf, a capital defense attorney, bought a house on St. John Court 10 years ago after residing in the French Quarter and other parts of the city. “As I’ve lived here, it’s become the most supportive neighborhood that developed post-Katrina,” Le Boeuf said. “People know you by name and stop to visit.”

St. John Court sits on a parcel of land so well hidden from main roads that residents drew maps for police and fire fighters to be able find it. Yet those who live there describe it as a peaceful oasis.

“It’s a little fairyland,” Le Boeuf commented.

The area west of Bayou St. John was historically a swampy cypress forest until mechanical pumps, invented in the early 1900s, drained the low-lying land. The area’s development was also stalled by a record-setting, 60-year lawsuit over the estate of the American Consul, Daniel Clark, which was not resolved until 1891.

Real estate developer J.F. Lafont acquired the property and built the quaint subdivision on a cul-de-sac in 1917 for workers at the nearby American Can Company. He numbered the houses A through P.

The 16 bungalows had identical floor plans, including front porches and double sets of French doors and transoms, pine floors and coal-burning fireplaces. Though only 900-square-feet, the cottages were designed to accommodate two families each with two sets of baths and kitchens. Most current owners have removed the walls to create single units, but the living spaces are still quite small.

A cozy space can have a lot of appeal, however. Badeaux wanted to downsize from her suburban home after her children were grown. In 1992, she completely renovated her mother’s house, so now her bedroom, living and dining rooms are all one bright, open area.

Le Boeuf also wanted a smaller home. “I like the simpler life and I don’t have a yen for a lot of possessions,” she said. She places more importance on being close to the bayou, surrounded by nature.

After Henry was born, Steve and Karen Breen put on an addition. “It gets tight in the smaller house,” he said. The couple has lived there eight years. If they needed a larger home, they would move with regret. “It’s definitely special here,” Steve Breen said.

In the 1950s, St. John Court was a blue-collar neighborhood. Badeaux recalls her uncles working shifts at the can factory. As a child, she would bike to Parkway Bakery to get French bread for sandwiches, which they’d take to work along with thermoses of coffee in big, black metal lunch boxes.

The children walked over the bridge to Saint Rosary Academy on the east side of the bayou and families attended mass at Our Lady of the Rosary Church. Families bought groceries at Terranova’s Supermarket on Esplanade Avenue.

“I don’t think my mother and her friends could ever have foreseen what’s happened,” Badeaux said. Now, her neighbors are all professionals – including a college professor, an attorney, a mediator, a musician and a writer.

The surrounding neighborhoods are full of activity. The Mardi Gras Indians annually gather on the banks of the bayou for the Super Sunday parade and thousands of runners in the Crescent City Classic will pass close by.

The bayou is a vital part of residents’ quality of life. “I see people reading the paper or having a glass of wine on the bank,” Badeaux said. Couples have even been married on Magnolia Bridge, she said.

“It is its own ecosystem with pelicans, turtles and ducks,” Le Boeuf said. “I fell in love with living on the bayou.”

Canoeing on Bayou St. John

 New Orleans Times-Picayune
By Mary Rickard, Contributing writer

Claire Triplett stood on the bank of Bayou St. John and gave a short orientation on canoeing techniques to 15 Girl Scout Brownies from Troop 1368.

"I'll show you the two strokes and they're super-simple," Triplett told the girls. Then she demonstrated how they could safely get in and out of the boats. "Keep your weight in the middle," she cautioned.

Wearing Brownie vests underneath their orange life preservers and carrying pink Barbie lunch boxes along with paddles, the girls waited anxiously to board. The third- and fourth-graders from Lake Forest Charter Elementary School in eastern New Orleans were taking part in the New Orleans Recreation Department's new Wilderness Program.

The new outdoor activities for children include a water awareness program to teach swimming, water safety and lifeguard skills in the summer months; and hiking, backpacking, camping, outdoor survival skills and education about local plants and animals during the winter months. Children also learn about ways to protect the environment, including basics of reducing waste and recycling.

Triplett, the program's director, grew up canoeing, camping and hiking in her home state of Indiana. She taught canoeing with the Louisiana Outdoors Outreach Program five years ago, before starting the New Orleans program in April.

The recent canoe trip was the first one where parents came along. Kayla August was accompanied by her sister, Trinity, and mother, Clairessa Smith. The only other watercraft Smith had been on before was a cruise ship. "This is the first time we are going to experience this here," Smith said. "The Girl Scout teacher, she really takes them on adventures."

Two weeks before the canoe trip, Sabrina Taylor, a gifted resources teacher and Girl Scout leader at Lake Forest, took the troop to Audubon Zoo for overnight camping. She plans for the girls to go horseback riding in January. "It's great to introduce them to the outdoors at an early age," Taylor said.

On Bayou St. John, three lifeguard-trained Wilderness Program staff members paired experienced paddlers with novices, helping everyone into the canoes, which launched from Moss Street near Orleans Avenue. Triplett gave boaters final instructions: "When you go under the bridges, don't lean to the side."


  Nine new red canoes were added this year to the two green boats used by the city's Outdoor Program, which was discontinued several years ago. The colorful fleet set out from the shoreline, several traveling in circles for a time or bumping into each other, before finally settling on a northerly course.

Raymond Watson and his daughter, Annise, 9, sped ahead of the pack. Annise was experienced, her father explained, having already gone white-water rafting on the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains.

The group's voyage took them past antebellum mansions, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the bronze equestrian statue of General P.G.T. Beauregard, a floating purple foam sculpture of an alligator, St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, and under three low bridges to the LSU School of Dentistry for a picnic lunch.

Parents appeared to have had at least as much fun as the children. "This is one for the bucket list, so I am crossing it off," said Rosalind Woodfox, a mother of four and parent liaison at Lake Forest Charter School. "This is really priceless."

Though several other events were taking place the same day, none of the participants showed any regret for missing them.

"The Mirliton Festival can't touch this experience," said Jean Wooten, a Lake Forest social studies teacher.

For more information about the Wilderness Program, e-mail cmtriplett@cityofno.com or call 504.382.3386.