Full Interview with Sassafras LA - 5

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CG: [My favorite thing] is the food, I’m not going to lie.  I travel everywhere in the United States, and it’s just, it’s always bland compared to what you eat down here.  I’m, I’m all about that food man, and, and the people, the, the soul, the just general feeling you get from living down here.  We’ve always said that people here are connected to this way, connected to the land in a different way than if I’d just be living in Oklahoma, you know what I mean, it’s a great place to live, a place like no other. 

OB: Other than the food, because the food’s always the best part, you know, you go to your grandma’s house saying I don’t want to, I don’t feel like picking up McDonald’s or Burger King, “Hey grandma, you want to see what you’ve got in that refrigerator.”  “Oh, mon cher, I’ve got some gumbo.” You know.  All of the above.

RC: Some sauce piquante.

OB: Some sauce piquante.  Some fricasse.

AN: Or in Ronnie’s case, some oysters.

OB: But, there’s no other place, that I know of, that you can just go, and be like, “Hey guys, what’s up today?  You know, how are you all? Oh, you want to come over?” And then you’ve got like forty people at a house in one afternoon because it’s your best friends.

CG: Tell them what you call that.  You call that making the veille.  Making the veille.

OB: Making the veille. And you just hanging out.  And just, “Oh let’s go make the veille.”

AN: And you always eating, too.    

CG: You always eating and you always making the veille.

OB: Yeah.  You always eat.  But when, like especially when something bad will happen or something good will happen, you’ll have people from the community, your close friends and your family but just people in the community itself will just support everybody, and you can’t find that other places, I mean, other than little towns.  And then “Oh, what you all want to do this Saturday?” “Oh, we could go to the movies or we could go hydrosliding or wakeboarding or riding the boat –“

RC: Or fishing [laughs].

OB: You know, it’s different.  It’s homey and everybody’s together and it’s nice.  You can’t really get lost on our 3 roads.

CG: No, and what we always tease about is, we don’t really have directions it’s kind of –

AN: Up the bayou --

CG: Up the bayou, down the bayou, or –

OB: Across the bayou –

CG: Or by this bridge, across the bayou –

AN: And we shorten it to UTB and DTB for expert –

CG: DTB, yeah. 

AN: For down the bayou, or UTB: up the bayou.  And actually, I’ll kind of close off.  They stole all of mine.  But, just to sum up, it’s just the way of life, the culture. When I went to Alaska, I thought wouldn’t, I’d starve, but I was actually surprised, they actually fed us really well.  They lacked some seasoning, so I brought some Tony Chachere’s and some Louisiana Hot Sauce and stuff, but just the food first of all, we love to get a vent [used to mean a big stomach], youknow, a stomach, from eating and stuff, and the culture, the people, it’s just, it’s like no other.  I know a lot of people say they live in amazing places, but we will have to have a contest one day to see just how amazing –

CG: We know we’d win.

AN: And people come down, we want to, we don’t want to keep it to ourselves.  We love visitors, we love to show them, you know, so if they are thinking of a trip, definitely come down, contact and we’ll help anyway we can.

RC: I mean, there’s always something to do.  I mean, there’s fishing, hunting, frogging, hunting alligator, bullfrogs [lots of laughter] --

OB: Okay, it may not be the, the normal stuff to do.

RC: Hydrosliding, water –

AN: We’re very creative –

RC: There’s mud riding, I mean.

OB: Yeah, because we don’t have like a movie theater or anything like that –

CG: No.

OB: So we have fun the good old Cajun way.

AN: The best part that I see, that we live on the water.  Let me explain it: I live right next to the corner of a levee, so I can walk you know about maybe a tenth of a mile across the canal, over the levee, I’m in the marsh.  It’s not many places you can do that.  And another thing is, we’re very vulnerable, I should say.  It’s a love-hate relationship, that’s how someone explained it to me, kind of like how she said, but we love our environment, we couldn’t live any other way, with the levees, but we also, it, you know, we have to worry about in any great, I mean, the way it works is, with the estuary, we have all these, we flourish things, we have these risks too, we deal with the hurricanes because we know that if we move away, then what would, where would we be.  There’s all these rewards but there’s also, you know, these costs added, but we couldn’t live, I know I couldn’t live where there’s tornadoes and stuff.  Here we can prepare and take them.  We hope we don’t flood, basically, we have to worry about that, but that’s just, we live with it.

OB: That’s why we have levees.

AN: Exactly.  And a lot of times, those levees, they do scare you, you know because, when the hurricane come in you’re this little piece of land and the water’s right here and it wants to come over –

CG: All around you.

AN: Yeah, so it’s you have to have a tough gut to live here, you know.

CG: I like that, you know, the girls aren’t afraid to get –

OB: Dirty. We’re not, like we’re girly, but we’re not –

CG: My favorite childhood memory is checking the crab traps, pulling up the rope in the murky water, getting the mud, what do you call the mud?

AN: The boo-poo-dee. 

CG: Yeah, the boo-poo-dee all over your hand.

AN: The stinky mud. 

RC: Or as the narrator from “Swamp People” says, the “boo-poo-dee.” [with dramatic emphasis]

CG: The “boo-poo-dee” all over our hands. We just, we have a good relationship with the land and water.