Between the Starlight and the Water
kkiks_ (eon), CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a memory, surprisingly vivid after some 70 years, of a first duck hunt. It returns to the man as he watches his son and grandsons slide the pirogues into the trenasse which snakes its way to the duck ponds a half mile or so from the camp. Until last year, the year he turned 79, the man had often shared the pre-dawn ride in the pirogue with one of his grandsons, but after a particularly cold hunt a few days before Christmas—during which the wind had blown most of the water out of the marsh and turned the usually easy paddle back to the camp into a sucking slog though the methane smelling mud of Delacroix island—he’d known at last that this was no country for old men. The decision to give up duck hunting had seemed to bother his son and grandsons more than it bothered him. Perhaps it signaled to them the start of a final passage. “Grandpa if the wind blows all the water out of the marsh again you can just stay in the pirogue and we’ll pull you back to the camp,” his grandsons had said. “No, I’ll pull my weight or I won’t hunt.” There was both acceptance and honor in that sentiment and it put the man at ease with his decision.
And so, on this late December morning, watching the younger generations disappear down the trenasse without him, he sees himself on his own first hunt, paddling down that same trenasse, each paddle stroke striking a phosphorescent swirl from the water. The brilliant display of light at the first stroke of his paddle had stunned him, even scared him a bit. Water was not supposed to do that. “What is that, Papa?” “Bioluminescence,” his father had said. “There are tiny creatures in the water that give off a kind of light when disturbed.” And overhead an impossibly brilliant sky shone upon them as they paddled down the trenasse, the smell of pipe smoke trailing from the lead pirogue manned by his grandfather. With his grandfather were the burlap sacks filled with decoys, a battered Ithaca model 37 shotgun, and his grandfather’s Labrador retriever, which his grandfather only ever called “dog.” His grandfather did not go for sentimental things like naming a dog. The only sweetness about him came from his pipe smoke. Still the boy idolized him and somehow never feared him. And this morning, heading down the trenasse, he had a distinct feeling that he was at the beginning of something enduring and powerful, something which in revealing itself would never exhaust all its mystery.
As a child, he believed that the enduring and powerful thing was the world of hunting and the secrets the natural world would teach him. It was only much later that he would come to see this was not the case. For years he had a recurring dream of paddling down the trenasse with his father and grandfather, the starlight above and the swirling bioluminescence below. No one spoke. They never made it to the duck pond to hunt. They only paddled though the light of the heavens and the light of the water, wreathed in his unknowable grandfather’s pipe smoke. In the dream he was content, finally and absolutely, and he always awakened disappointed. And when he had dreamed the dream long enough he finally understood what it was trying to tell him, for age and the difficulties of life had made of him what it makes of all men touched by grace.
Through the dream he came to see ever anew that the created world is a very good place, with light pouring in from all directions and a sweetness beyond comprehension enveloping everything. While others were haunted by the problem of evil, he was haunted by beauty. He had known tragedy and suffering, but in their midst he had always had the starlit paddle through a glowing marsh, the father, the son, and the grandson poised between the cosmos and the luminous water. And he began to feel that there was only one sadness in the end: not to recognize the grace pressing imponderably upon all things.
Later that morning, as he watched his son and grandsons make their way back to the head of the trenasse in the clarifying morning light, their indistinct conversation and occasional laughter ringing out over the marsh, he sensed that something enduring and powerful had begun to reveal itself to them, too.
[This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2023 print issue of Joie de Vivre. To purchase this issue or or an annual subscription, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]
Guy St. Denis is a lifelong outdoorsman and denizen of South Louisiana’s water, woods, and marshes.
