Posted July 9, 2026 by Bayou Beau · filed under le marais perdu · local press
delivered on time. the door was like that.
There is a little town paper out of Le Marais Perdu (The Marsh Chronicle, and I will keep linking it until one of us gets a cease and desist) that I have read faithfully for years, and I want you to go read it too, because it is the single richest primary source in this basin and it does not know it. This month alone, and I am not exaggerating any of this: an alligator has begun attending mass, and the church's response was to bless a pew. A classified ad seeks a night watchman for the icehouse whose only stated requirement, besides punctuality, is that he not count the coats on the hooks. The fishing column, the fishing column, casually warns readers off a slough where the fish bite too eagerly, on the reasoning that, quote, fish that eager are recruiting.
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Posted June 30, 2026 by Bayou Beau · filed under feu follet · the basin
the treeline, thursday
A letter, from a reader out past a landing I won't name:
“The lights used to keep to the treeline. Every night now they arrange a little closer to the camp. Last Thursday they made my initials. My cousin says swamp gas. Beau, swamp gas doesn't know my initials.”
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Posted June 14, 2026 by Bayou Beau · filed under blood drives · new orleans
sender unknown. postmark local.
There is a social club uptown (old name, older money) that has run a charity blood drive every year since anyone can remember, and here is a fact I have now confirmed with two separate drivers: the collection van does not go to the blood bank. It goes to a private courier depot on the river, and the manifest says catering.
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Posted May 27, 2026 by Bayou Beau · filed under the basin · men in windbreakers
survey stake, circle of dead equipment
There is a stretch of the Atchafalaya (I will not print the coordinates, and by the end of this post you will know why I don't have to) where a pipeline project quietly rerouted itself in 2019 at a cost of forty million dollars, and the official reason in the filing is, and I quote, “geotechnical considerations.”
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Posted May 3, 2026 by Bayou Beau · filed under 1610 AM · the basin
the stretch where it comes in clear. do not stop.
Licensed to nobody, broadcast from nowhere the FCC can triangulate (and yes, people have asked them), there is a station at the bottom of the AM dial that only comes in on the highway stretches between towns, and only well after midnight. A woman's voice, level as a phone operator, reading names. First, middle, last. Pause. Next name.
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