Morning comes early in midsummer. Five o’clock on June 15 and the sun is beginning to rise over the long vista of sugar cane fields in St. Mary Parish on the way to Cypremort Point. The round disk of the sun is as red as a sliced beet, gorgeous against the pink and gold eastern sky.
But that’s not the direction Rodney Olander faces. He’s looking west, where Marsh Island rises like a floating cloud on the surface of Vermilion Bay. The motor of his 36-foot skiff throbs with a steady beat, not unlike the beat of his heart, while he prepares for another day of shrimping. Another day is what he asks for, each day, as he tries not to think about the threat of oil from the Deepwater Horizon riding in on the tide, fouling the waters of Vermilion Bay, where his family has earned its livelihood for four generations.
What would he do if the oil comes in? “I have no idea,” says Rodney. “If the oil comes here and we’re shut down, I really don’t know what we’re going to do. It’s a hard pill to swallow if you can’t get out on the water.”
Read more about Cypremort Point shrimping and the Olander family in “At Bay,” ABiz's July cover story.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
But that’s not the direction Rodney Olander faces. He’s looking west, where Marsh Island rises like a floating cloud on the surface of Vermilion Bay. The motor of his 36-foot skiff throbs with a steady beat, not unlike the beat of his heart, while he prepares for another day of shrimping. Another day is what he asks for, each day, as he tries not to think about the threat of oil from the Deepwater Horizon riding in on the tide, fouling the waters of Vermilion Bay, where his family has earned its livelihood for four generations.
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