The Olivier House in St. Martinville...a plantation home

This gulf oil spill has been more traumatic than I thought, but I’m a Cajun. I love clear blue skies, fertile productive soil, and pure seas full of God’s unsullied bounty. I even love the challenge of a gathering hurricane, the test of ingenuity and resolve it carries in wind and fury. They’re all essential in my life…part of my being, really. Somehow, my lady knew it from the beginning and tried to shield me, a little desperately as the news got steadily worse. I love her for that…even though she failed.
She knows I can’t escape the world I was born into…except in my mind. When I’m troubled like this, I tend to look for happier places, and sometimes I find them in the past. The other night while I watched it on TV for the hundredth time, I found myself unconsciously clicking my reading light on and off. When it was on I was bathed in Edison’s garish light, but when it was off…when it was off, I sat there wishing there were candles, maybe lanterns in the room, friendlier light…like our ancestors had.
Looking to forebears can be tricky. Some of them did horrific things…but not mine. Not one of my ancestors exploited the land, stole from people…or owned slaves. After they were kicked out of Nova Scotia, they mostly worked their asses off right next to those pitiable Africans, only a hair’s breadth away from their lot. It was only by luck and God’s good grace that they weren’t whipped back to their quarters at night…and they knew it.

Cajun Farmhouse circa 1800

Cajuns are a friendly lot, even to black slaves, and they shared things, mostly recipes…for gumbo, grilled ribs, backbone stew…all the stuff massa wouldn’t eat…and most importantly perhaps, the secret of slow cooking on a dying fire. In the morning before leaving for the fields, they all lit roaring fires and put everything they needed into a covered pot, leaving it enveloped in flame. When they returned after a day’s drudgery, the food was cooked and waiting for them…and it was delicious. I know; I’ve done it that way.
Once when we were camping, I was preparing to cook a gumbo when a history professor wandered by and told me that story. It seems historians are everywhere…it’s weird…but it happens. He almost begged me to try it, but at first I considered the whole idea a little too off-the-wall. Still, he was so impassioned I thought I’d at least give it a try one time…and by far, it was the best gumbo I’ve ever eaten. Build a big fire, throw everything you need into a covered pot, put it on the blaze, and forget about it until the fire is only ashes. It’s amazing!
Like the charm of candlelight, that technique has been lost in history…like a lot of things, I suspect, but candlelight brings up a good question. What the hell do we want to see with such clarity after the sun goes down? That part of the day is for peace, and it should be a little indistinct, shadowy….and beautiful. Work is done, and sleep will come soon enough. Evening is for good food, relaxation and intimacy…and nothing says intimacy quite like firelight.
I’m a romatic at heart. I know that…hell, EVERYBODY who knows me knows that. They know I’d prefer to live in soft light, gentle company, peace, and a kinder world with my lady next to me and my dog at my feet. The question stuck in my mind is why we had to get rid of EVERYTHING after that horrible war, necessary though it was. Even bad people sometimes have good ideas. Maybe we should learn from them…while winnowing out the nightmare they clung to so tenaciously.
We gotta think of something; we’ll be running out of oil soon enough…and we’ve all seen the damage it can do. Nuclear power? France likes it, and it sounds good at first…but what do we do with all those radioactive leftovers? They’ll be lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, and they’ll accumulate a lot faster if we abandon oil…as perhaps we should. We could always bury it, I guess, but stuff we plant in Mother Earth has a funny way of popping back up to bite us in the ass.
If you really want to see things so precisely at night, if you insist on MURDERING the delight of evening, I vote for solar power, maybe with water-driven generators augmenting it. They’re free and clean, and the planet is overflowing with sunlight and liquid water. Actually, having watched waves crashing in many times, I’ve always wondered why we haven’t worked harder to harness the power of the open sea. It’s free, too…and clean until recently.
Huge banks of silicon cells might screw up the view in places. Those people in California won’t like it…you know how they are, but I suppose we could hide them if we were really serious. I’ll leave those decisions to people who think they know better than the rest of us…while I dream of soft nights, gentle breezes, good suppers, comfortable fatigue, feather beds, and those I love lying next to me in the dark. My requirements for happiness aren’t complex, or even difficult to achieve, but they always include love, warmth, shadows, and candles. I can’t help it…there’s just something wonderful about candlelight.

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