My mother and father were born in St. Martin Parish, as were all four of my grandparents. I grew up in Catahoula, spent many hours either barefoot, on a boat, in the woods, or in the water . . . and yet there was still so much of the parish I’d never seen, so many places I’d never even heard of.

To be fair, there’s a lot of ground to cover. St. Martin Parish stretches all the way from the same latitude as Baton Rouge down to where Lower St. Martin meets Morgan City, mere miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Fausse Pointe State Park is 6,000 acres of open water and wetlands. The Indian Bayou Area, straddling St. Martin and St. Landry, is 28,000 acres of forest wilderness.

And then there’s the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river-swamp in the country, not to mention the countless waterways too small to have a name. It wasn’t until earlier this year when the St. Martin Parish Tourism Commission asked me to help create a website dedicated to showcasing the parish’s natural beauty that I began to appreciate the full range of my native parish. It was like unlocking a series of mysterious doors.

The key was the kayak. It’s light enough that I can pick it up, throw it in the back of my truck, and when I’m on the water, I can thread through the flooded forests with ease, exploring the shallow areas where a bigger boat would get stuck. It was like driving on only highways in a car versus riding a bike through the neighborhood streets. Between January 2022 and August 2022, I went on over fifty kayak excursions, driving my truck all up and down the levee from Butte La Rose to Bayou Benoit and beyond.

My goal was to capture the natural beauty of the parish as simply and as straightforwardly as possible, working only with daylight and avoiding the use of filters—who could improve on Mother Nature anyway?—and having seen it from one end to the other, I can honestly say that in terms of raw natural beauty, the parish can hold its own beside any exotic location around the world. I think we can all agree, at least, that there’s no place on Earth quite like it.

Jude Theriot

email: jude@peacefulhabits.com

twitter: @yourdailybayou

St. Martin Native