Rampikes

When I think about home, I’m seven again. I’m in Golden Meadow, playing outside with Uncle Kurt and Blaine at Ma-ma and Pa-pa’s house. Kurt is smoking a cigarette, leaning on the railing that leads to the side-door of the house, telling us between drags which of the stray cats it’s okay to love and warning us when we get too close to the feral ones we shouldn’t.

Mom and Dad are inside visiting with my great grandparents in the humid house with the yellow carpets and the red chunky curtains. Dad’s skin isn’t wrinkled yet and Momma doesn’t have any gray hair. I know Uncle Kurt is special because everyone says he is. “He can play any song on any instrument by ear,” they say, which seems special even though I’m not sure yet what that means.

Outside with him and Blaine, the world seems so big, beautiful. The sun is warm on my skin and nothing bad has ever happened to me.

Now, as we drive past flooded shrimp sheds and FEMA trailers that line the drowning marshlands, I find myself questioning if the beauty of this place was ever real. Traveling with an outsider who is seeing it for the first time, I am imagining what the ruin and decay must look like to him. How do I explain not only that Buddy’s Bar was just torn down after sitting in shreds since Hurricane Ida, but that even before the hurricane, it sat empty, closed because of the decreasing population and economic devastation that also swept through the area. Buddy drinks a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon every night for dinner at the same table in the restaurant across the street from where the bar once stood, watching the landscape that holds everything he ever loved vanishing now, too. How do you explain who these people are: the individual versus the whole? What we hold? How it feels? Why they stay?

When asked if there was a word for the people who remain in these vanishing bayou communities, ‘resilient’ was my answer, the first thing that came to mind. Montegut residents, R.J. and Dino laugh at the question and say “Coonass”. After looking at the landscape and comparing its history to the experience of its residents, I think of ‘rampike’ and the ghost forests that line the roads. Rampikes, dead or dying trees undone by saline inundation, remain standing, warnings of the invading salt waters and rising sea levels. The beautiful oak trees, firmly planted in the ground are now bleached and bare of leaves but remain steadfast symbols of what happens when systems fail, and habits refuse to change. A rampike - scarred, beaten, weathered, and eroded - doesn’t see the option to leave. It exists now because of how deep its roots took hold.

You may think it is different for the people occupying this land, but Buddy, despite the geographic trauma this place holds, would beg to differ.

“Leave? This is my home, mon cher. Where else would I go?”

Dad now carries the deep wrinkles in his forehead and neck that are trademarks of the family. Ma-ma and Pa-pa both passed within a year of that visit, the last time I ever saw Uncle Kurt. He moved to California where he lived on the street and got high and played his guitar for fun and probably for cash. We know now that he was most likely autistic, “or schizophrenic” Uncle Tracy jokes, and definitely addicted to drugs. He died and donated his sun-scared body to science. My brother got his guitar.

Grandma has the most scars, but if you ask, she’ll tell you she has none. I often wonder if you can see dark clouds in my eyes like you can in hers. Nonetheless, she hides them well. Like a house that looks cozy and welcoming from the street, and only when you approach and enter, ignoring the no trespassing sign lying on the porch, you learn that the whole back half of the house is inaccessible. A tree fell through the ceiling and had never been removed. The owners just abandoned it and moved on to better, but still the tree fell and now the house sits vacant.

She repeats to me the same stories of loss in the car every time we travel to Houma to pick up Pawpaw’s medication from the VA.

“That’s the apartments where that man’s family was murdered, remember? They locked his wife and kids in and then burned it to the ground while he was at work. They pulled out their little bodies still in their pajamas. It just looked like they were still sleeping.”

“Remember my best friend, Carol? We used to shop there. She would put the whole store in her basket then only buy one thing. ‘Be good, stay out of trouble, don’t curse,’ she would say. That’s where I got it from.”

“Turn left by the old Ford garage. That used to be a bar on the side there. That’s where Slim killed a man. He didn’t mean to. It was just a senseless bar fight.”

She says this all in a matter-of-fact tone. Like the stories are separated from herself. But sometimes, I can see her eyes start to water before she turns cold again. The creased skin on her hands feel this way, too: shockingly cold when you’re expecting something warmer.

We met T-Ran on a whim, having stopped the car to photograph a concrete lot filled with abandoned crab traps on the side of the road. He and his wife Tabitha (they jumped the broom but never officially got married) walked from their flooded yard across the street to see what we were up to.

“Y’all want some crab traps?”

“They’re not from here, Ran. They don’t want no crab traps.”

The traps had been sitting, left behind since Hurricane Ida washed away the business they belonged to. T-Ran tells us of all the ways he has been abandoned, too. He shows us the ‘FRESH ONLY’ tattoo that expands across both of his hands, and when I ask to photograph the vines on his neck, he opens his shirt to show us the rampike and the ravens scarred into his skin with black ink.

“That’s that tree right there,” he explains as he points past the traps and the bayou to a single dead oak sitting in the marsh. The roots of the tattoo twist and turn around his stomach, spelling his name.

“I wake up and look at that tree every day. I watched it take on the hurricane. It used to be beautiful. Oak trees are special, y’all know? The government wants to pay me $6,500 for all my land. They want me to leave. Isn’t that crazy? I’m staying. If that tree is staying, I’m staying. I’m down now, my minds not right, but I’ll get up. I just got to get my mind right.”

Pawpaw has had a hard time getting his mind right, too, ever since the war. He’ll only talk about Vietnam to a select few, and I’m lucky to be one of them. He talks a lot about having to accept death, knowing in his heart that he would never make it home alive. “If you make peace with it, it won’t be scary. I made peace with it in my heart, and that got me through…..You make peace with death then it won’t be scary and there won’t be any pain.”

I use this tactic when I’m scared. When Pawpaw collapsed in the middle of the night, when bears came out of the woods, when the storms come through and sound like they are washing the world away and when sometimes they do.

Is this what the rampikes are feeling, too? Does the land know it’s vanishing? Do the oak trees have natural instincts that shield their hearts from the rough world around them? When they feel themselves going, the salt wearing their bodies down, how do they react?

If a rampike were a person, would they try to drown themselves with whiskey to forget? Would they ignore the harsh realities they are living through as a coping mechanism? Or are they aware of the fact that they are struggling, drowning? Do they think it’ll pass, like T-Ran does? Are they also still holding onto impossible realities?

They, too, hold the scars that tell their stories on their bodies. Like the skin that makes trenches on Papaw’s arm or the coarse hairs resembling dead kudzu vines on Momma. We are rampikes. We display our scars for the world to see but remain steadfast, roots deep in the place we call home. “I’m down now, my minds not right, but I’ll get up.” Dad, Mom, Blaine, Grandma, Pawpaw, Buddy, Kurt, T-Ran, Tabitha, Ma-ma, Pa-pa, R.J. and Dino: we are rampikes. We stay because... where else would we go?