Well Bottom Blues

This is not wilderness, this curated forest arboretum: planted by the WPA then left undeveloped until Couturie Forest Arboretum was created. The boles are not blazed for lost wanderers, thankfully neglected by knife-wielding lovers in heated search of soft-yielding bowers. There are occasional labels on posts naming the trees as if a native son practiced in walking threading their way through  boles and knees doesn’t know oak from sycamore from cypress.

They clear cut rather than thin the native elderberry (aggressive, not invasive) creating thickets of rag weed and wire weed, now the wildest part of this not a wilderness. The west side trail follows a lagoon, excavated by the WPA,
the aspirational hill at the center in flat Louisiana the spoil of that excavation

Across that lagoon is the regimented green of a golf course which encloses Couturie Forest north, east and west in eye blight and fenced, untended rough. The south end is too close
to Harrison Avenue’s intermittent growl and whir. Still, if you tread the rough the concentric circles of the trails its a scrolling Victorian panorama of foliaceous green, the only sound birdsong and, at dusk, frog and cicada.

The trail is muddy from our regularly scheduled afternoon thunderstorms, full of roots and bits of brick and rip rap from no one knows where. There are large concrete boulders and what looks like old pillars, but in my 68 years of memory nothing built was back there. Perhaps it was once a dump from the fancy parts of the park as those were developed and redeveloped.

Imperfect only if you expected true wilderness ten minutes from home. Thinly visited enough to be mostly alone, deep into green, tonic to the concrete suburbs just over the Bayou St. John and the Orleans Canal; wild enough to quiet the mind by letting the eyes and ears follow their own thoughtless course.