The funny thing about travel is that a new place never feels like you expect. Touching down at MSY wasn’t some magical experience. It felt exactly like landing at LAX, or Newark, or any of the other array of beige American airports in which I’ve had the pleasure of spending time. It wasn’t until we all met up and stepped outside into the 92-degree Louisiana heat and humidity that I truly felt like I had left Los Angeles. After somehow fitting ten people, lots of very big suitcases (including mine), and an excessive amount of groceries into a white sprinter van reminiscent of every kidnapping movie I’ve ever seen, we were off to Grand Isle.
We drove through strips of marsh, swampland, and seemingly endless sugar fields. Cyprus trees were draped in swaths of Spanish moss, giving the entire scenery a distinctly eerie (albeit beautiful) air. I was once again struck by the desire to compare this drive to places I’ve been before. The swamps were like the road trips I had done from Vermont to the Maine coast, always keeping my eyes peeled for moose (though now it was alligators I was trying to find). The palm trees brought back Los Angeles and the Spanish moss a childhood trip to Florida. As we drove further and the trees began to become more sparse, the water more expansive, roads level with the marsh around us. Once again, I was reminded of somewhere else – driving through the Netherlands, a country where I’ve spent a significant amount of time, a flat expanse of canals and farmland. If not for the lack of windmills, southern Louisiana might as well have been the A4 highway.
This habit of comparing went on and on and on as the first day passed. Everywhere I turned in Grand Isle, I was reminded of areas in New England — Maine here, rural New Hampshire there, the town in Vermont in which I used to take violin lessons. It began to grate at my nerves. Why was everything a reminder of something else? I wanted to enjoy this experience, feel grounded in this place and time, yet everywhere I looked I was reminded of the past.
Time itself seems to move differently on a place like Grand Isle. It doesn’t run a straight path – it swells, stretches, and congeals again into a sticky haze. The first day bled into the second and the third, and most of my memories muddy together. I do remember, however, my first time on the beach. It was evening, which meant the humidity that had so intensely permeated the air before had lessened, replaced by a refreshing warm breeze coming off of the sea. It was picturesque by any definition, and yet once again I felt in the back of my mind something missing, a certain lack of satisfaction that comes from a completely new experience.
This changed, however, once I began to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Set in Grand Isle in the 1870s, the book describes the atmosphere of the island with the same reverence Chopin attributes to her characters.
“The sea was quiet now, and swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents.
”
Chopin describes the island as “a delicious picture I just wanted to sit and look at (pg 41).” If I had been reading this book from my apartment in LA, I would have pictured something completely different from the isle I was now on — clear skies, cerulean water, colonial-style beach houses lining the streets, cypress trees swaying in a cooling breeze. It was interesting to reconcile this mental image with what I was actually seeing: houses raised on stilts, buildings still wrecked from hurricane Ida, tractors and ATVs as common as cars, swampy mosquito-infested marshlands. Nor was this mental image similar to the original comparisons I’d made of the island, not to Maine, rural Vermont, or California beach towns. While reading the book, I went out to the porch of our house (nicknamed, for some inexplicable reason, ‘H2O Psycho’) and sat facing the waves. Every time I came to a description of the island, especially the ocean, I would look up and try to recognize Kate Chopin’s novel in my field of vision. While significantly slowing down my reading process, I found myself enjoying the experience of understanding a book this way. I was no longer seeing Grand Isle through my own eyes, through every place I’d ever seen before in my life. I was seeing through the eyes of Edna Pontellier, and the place I was seeing was the same one that changed her fundamentally, ‘woke her up.’ I began to sense the “seductive odor of the sea… the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky.” This wasn’t the past, or if it was, it certainly wasn’t my past. Reading through Edna’s eyes helped to ground me in the present moment, something I desperately craved after my chaotic last month in LA. Like Edna, I was here on this island at this moment. When I went swimming again in the sea, my arms outstretched in the direction of the horizon, I thought about Edna’s experience with the water in the book, the desire she has to go further and keep swimming, and then I thought about my own. I felt the warm water, the sand underneath my feet, and finally, I felt like I was truly there.
