A Barge on the Bayou

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At that point, Calvin broke into my thoughts as if he'd been eavesdropping. "Instead of fighting the water, let's try to cooperate with it. What do you think about houseboats?"

"Not much," I returned, picturing the tiny, dark one—roomers—usually equipped with a single cot and a Coleman stove—used by many hunters and fisherfolk in southern Louisiana. Floating on empty oil drums or rickety homemade pontoons, they serve well enough for a weekend shelter but wouldn't inspire homing instincts in a pigeon. Undaunted by my lack of enthusiasm, Calvin charged ahead. "I mean a big house, built on one of the steel barges that the riverboats push . . . a full-sized home with a brick fireplace and lots of windows. It would let us simply rise and fall with the water level all year."

Well, since we had nothing, we had nothing to lose. Even our lack of immediately available money to buy a barge wasn't a drawback, because we weren't likely to find one for sale in a hurry anyway. Nevertheless, the word was put out—to old friends, casual acquaintances, checkout clerks, and complete strangers—that we were in the market for a barge . . . and that bit of information was met with incredulity and guffaws, which no doubt helped to spread the news even further. ("Have you heard about Calvin and Gwen's harebrained scheme... ?") And while we were confounding friends with our daydream, we also mentioned that we were looking for a traditional Louisiana cypress house to recycle.

Having "placed our order", then, we separated . . . to earn money in whatever ways we could. I worked at assorted jobs on the East Coast, while Calvin saw the country with a surveying team.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

More than a year later, on Christmas Eve in 1974, I was at work on a riverboat when Calvin sent word that an available barge had been located in Houma, Louisiana . . . a coastal town rich in marine equipment. The 26' X 103' monster was made of heavy riveted steel, but at 50 years old it was considered a commercial insurance risk and put up for sale as scrap metal. And if ever there was an omen that our dreams were in the right place, it was the price . . . a scant $950!

Then, immediately after the barge arrived at our building site on the Intracoastal Canal near the Bayou Sorrel Bridge, we heard that a nearby sugar plantation was selling of the houses that had been homes to generations of cane-field workers. Another $450 netted us a dwelling's worth of century-old cypress boards . . . some as long as 35 feet and others over two feet wide! The bargain also included three brick fireplaces, tongue-and-groove flooring, roofing tin, silvery aged clapboarding, lots of solid wooden doors, a massive fourposter bed, a bentwood chair, and an antique bureau!

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