SWEET TEA Storm blew along worn, valued path

— You haven't heard Cocodrie pronounced until you have heard it off the tongue of someone who grew up there.

And most people haven't.

Until Hurricane Gustav blew into the little south Louisiana burg, I'm guessing that many outside Louisiana hadn't even heard of the place. (Say it KOK-a-dree.)

Out of the mouths of the men and women on the shrimp boats, Cocodrie sounds exotic, and some of the nearby towns sound foreign - Montegut and Dulac, where you can "do lac" you want to.

Pappy Rivers, my wife's grandfather, lived in Houma a couple of years to be close to his daughter - my motherin-law.

That's how I know about Cocodrie. We sometimes launched his little fishing boat at the Gulf lake down there, baited the shad rigs with minnows, and caught red fish two at a time.

Pappy called Cocodrie the end of the world.

My in-laws lived out of town on Highway 56, which is the only road into Cocodrie.

Cocodrie smelled of saltwater and dead fish.

Sometimes we explored the dirt roads that split off from the town. Sometimes we saw beauty. Sometimes we found poverty, barefoot children running in front of houses you could see through standing on lots of dirt and white shells.

Sometimes we would go northeast toward Montegut, and in the canals we would tie chicken necks to strings and coax crabs into our nets.

Some days, we'd start out before light, and Pappy always drove his little outboard motor full steam, whether or not he could see where he was going.

On one of those days, in the maze of bayous, my wife's brother Larry, who was riding the bow of the boat and knew the bayous like the veins on the back of his hands, saved us from disaster when he flashed his light on a stump Pappy didn't know was there.

Pappy was a native of Alabama who spent much of his life in north Louisiana. But in the short time he lived in south Louisiana, he immersed himself. He played guitar with a Cajun family band, he ate the food.

And he fished, and he knew Highway 56.

We'd ride down the highway, sometimes just Pappy and me, sometimes Pappy, me and Larry, his grandson, or me and Scott Nalley, another grandson-in law, always with the windows in his old Jeep wagon down, Pappy laughing loudly, throwing back his head, and swerving and scaring us.

Out on the lake out of Cocodrie, dolphins would swim near the boat, and pelicans would sit on the pipes and piers.

Cocodrie and Highway 56 are on my mind now, and so is Pappy, because 56 is the highway Gustav took into Houma.

In a way, Highway 56 is an asphalt strip of grace in our family because that's the highway my wife's folks took out of south Louisiana in December 1985. And after Katrina and Rita, they moved to Arkansas. We didn't have to worry what was happening to them.

We don't know yet what became of their house, which sits just 100 yards off 56, but my brother-in-law and my father-in-law both thought they saw news video on television that showed Gustav knocking down his shop, which sat between the highway and Bayou Blue.

And just down the road, there is Cocodrie, which for now really is the end of the world.

Arkansas, Pages 9 on 09/04/2008

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