Bewitched by the Bayou

Keith Carter, a world-renowned photographer, artist, and soon-to-be retired educator, has lived in Beaumont since age 3. But it was not until his early 30s that he began to see his native environs as a subject worthy of his eye. He credits the stories of his late wife, Pat, a fellow Southeast Texas native, and his discovery of Wharton-born playwright Horton Foote for the change. A Texas Medal of the Arts recipient, Carter’s most recent book, Ghostlight, was published in 2023. keithcarterphotographs.com

Carter: “Horton Foote’s concept of belonging to a place really made me look at the Southeast Texas environment with new eyes. Nothing fixes our landscapes in a grand or iconic way, but the swamplands are a mystical, dark, strangely ecclesiastical kind of place. Every square foot of the land has a bazillion things going on.

We’re right on the Louisiana border, which has been a no-man’s-land since the colonial era. Between the folklore and the history, it seemed like a fertile visual ground to search for ghosts, you know?

Then, when I had the pleasure of traveling to other places and other countries, I’d come back to Southeast Texas, and I realized this was a whole wonderland. You just had to look harder. It was every bit as extraordinary as any topography I’d visited.

If you’re looking for clear blue waters and mountainous landscapes, we’re not the place to look. If you’re looking for microcosms of the universe and quiet beauty and densely layered miracles, this is an extraordinary region.

I live in a place with four out of the nation’s five carnivorous plants surrounding me, where vestiges of thought-to-be-extinct animals and birds are occasionally spotted, in a place where you hear phrases straight out of the King James Bible, mixed with all kinds of ribald idioms. It’s just a peculiar place.”

At dawn, Shannon Tompkins backs his fishing boat into the lower Trinity River, where the water nears its meandering end and spreads into a maze of marshes, swamps, bayous, canals, old river channels, and hidden lakes.

“We’re on the edge of the coastal marsh, probably a few miles from Trinity Bay, but we’re going up the river to the largest cypress swamp remaining in Texas,” says Tompkins, a prominent nature writer. “We’ll do some fishing and see what we can see.”

Alligators lazily make way for Tompkins’ boat as he courses beneath Interstate 10, a mere 40 miles east of Houston. The coastal marshes quickly give way to bald cypresses, their knobby knees defining the river’s edge.

“Within a hundred miles of us are 7 million people,” he says. “Thank God there’s a place that is this beautiful and this quiet.”

This corner of the Lower Trinity has been Tompkins’ refuge since his father brought him here in the 1960s, back when sulfur barges still traversed its waters. An Army Corps of Engineers plan to create a reservoir on the Lower Trinity, inundating the swamp, was opposed for decades. Finally, it came undone when the nest of a bald eagle, then endangered, was discovered in one of the river’s cypress trees.

“The river is lucky to still be here,” Tompkins says.

Once described by celebrated Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright as a “college-educated swamp creature,” Tompkins spent four decades covering wildlife and conservation, mostly for the Houston Chronicle. Prior to his retirement, he earned numerous state and national awards for thoughtful work that was informed by great literature but was never highfalutin. He wrote about everything from turtle trappers and the vanishing red wolf to paddle trips on the Devils and other rivers.

While he has covered all corners of Texas, his first love has always been his native Southeast Texas. A seventh-generation Texan, Tompkins grew up on the coast in Baytown and now lives in Porter. He explored tannin-stained creeks and baygalls and tromped through stands of longleaf pine when visiting his grandparents near the Big Thicket, the famously dense forest at the juncture of the Piney Woods and Coastal Plains that is now partially protected as the Big Thicket National Preserve.

“I think any writer will tell you that sense of place plays into who you are, if you’re lucky enough to have a sense of place,” he says. “When you grow up in an environment where the woods are closed in like this, in a Gothic landscape where the culture is so close-knit, you look inward.”

Tompkins says his ashes will be scattered in his favorite bald cypress swamp on the Lower Trinity, a spiritual spot to him. He is struck by the ephemerality of this natural world, from the whiffs of wild jasmine to the spiky spring blooms of the lizard’s tail plants, which congregate in shady spots on the water’s edge.

“In the spring, when everything else is dead, you first see these little, almost electric-white blooms of the mayhaws back in the woods. So, you get out a piece of paper and draw a map so you can come back and get the fruit in May,” he says.

The mayhaw blooms are followed by dogwoods and redbuds. The tallest trees come later. By then, the bayou is transformed.

“When the cypresses start getting green again, the world turns into this glowing chartreuse back in here, and it deepens in the summer,” Tompkins says. “It’s a beauty that’s not going to knock you to your knees. It’s more subtle, and it’s always changing.”

On a bright, hot afternoon at the Cattail Marsh, 900 acres of public wetlands on the swampy outskirts of Beaumont, Cathy Spence bumps into fellow photographer Kenyan Guidry.

“What’s happened to the eagles since the tree died?” Spence asks.

For 15 years, a family of bald eagles made its winter home in a nest atop a lone pine tree on the edge of the marsh. The pine, now brown and bare, didn’t survive the summer drought.

“The nest is still there,” assures Guidry, who works double duty as the nature tourism coordinator at the marsh and as a photographer for the Beaumont Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We plan on the eagles coming right back here,” he says. “If they want to start a new nest, we’ll just have to find it.”

A Beaumont native, Spence primarily makes portraits, dreamlike visions variously in black-and-white and color that have been shown in fine art galleries around the state. But she stumbled onto a new subject during frequent walks at the Cattail Marsh over the last several years.

“As it got hotter, I’d go earlier and earlier,” she says. “At the crack of dawn, there’s so much atmosphere. The same spot will look completely different.”

The wind might blow all the water hyacinth to one side of the swamp or break the invasive plants into a smattering of tiny islands. The light is always shifting. New flocks of birds arrive and depart, sometimes by the tens of thousands.

“My new work is very minimal,” Spence says. “I’m trying to capture the transitions of night and day, or the times right between fall and winter or winter and spring, or the light changing across the fog. It’s almost like this fight they’re having to illuminate and then to hide.”

Some days, Spence says, the marsh looks and feels so different, it doesn’t even seem like Southeast Texas.

“It could seem more tropical?” Guidry asks.

“Exactly,” Spence replies. “It could start looking like an Old World countryside.”

Spence’s resulting landscape project, Liminal, reveals a spellbinding world of fog, marsh, earth, and sky, where the horizon is long and thin, but the air is thick and heavy—all on the precipice of change. The exhibition is on display at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos through July 6.

Guidry, a wildlife photographer, also has an instinct for decisive moments. In his work, he has captured a bee before it lands on a white flower petal, for example, and a northern mockingbird the instant the bird cocks its head and stares at the camera.

“I try to get that frozen moment of life that’s impossible to duplicate,” he says.

Guidry grew up down the street from the Cattail Marsh, which was built in 1993 as a natural way to reclaim treated wastewater from the City of Beaumont. “As a kid, I was always in nature in the woods somewhere,” he says. “I got to watch this grow up to be what it is today.”

In 2013, while studying graphic design at nearby Lamar University, Guidry was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in the walls of his digestive system. Between bouts of chemotherapy, he found refuge among the cattails, weedy plants with corny dog heads. Using an old cellphone—he’s since upgraded to a Nikon—Guidry took photos of them that he posted on social media. They caught the attention of his future employer, the Beaumont Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Guidry is not a traditional wildlife photographer. Working with a palette of moody earth tones and silky slate grays and blues, his images are surprisingly intimate. They often capture hawks, spoonbills, and other birds the instant they meet the viewer eye to eye.

On special mornings, birds blanket the sky, enormous flocks ascending and alighting, swooping and doubling back, following innate choreography that spellbinds Guidry and Spence.

“As a kid,” Spence says, “I never really considered our area beautiful. Coming out here is when I really started understanding that it’s very lovely. I think you have to immerse yourself in this place before you can really see it.” cathyspencefineartphotographs.com; instagram.com/capturedbyken

Ed Poullard is widely regarded as one of the most significant fiddlers and accordionists playing traditional Creole music. He also builds 10-note diatonic accordions by hand at his shop about a mile down the highway from Spindletop, the nation’s first oil gusher, in a marsh south of Beaumont. He plays in a traditional Cajun-Creole acoustic jam session the first and third Thursday of each month at the American Legion Post 922 in Nederland.

Poullard: “This area all the way from here to Houston is a carbon copy of Southwestern Louisiana, from the marshes and low-lying areas to the culture and food, because so many people migrated here from Louisiana during the oil-boom days. My whole family moved here from Eunice, Louisiana, when I was 9 months old.

I learned to play the accordion from my dad, but he taught me you don’t play music for a living. You get a job; you get benefits. I worked at the same plant for 30 years. I’m not an adventurous kind of guy exploring the outdoors, but I’ve probably fished every watering hole around here. I’d get off a graveyard shift at the plant and go straight to the water.

The Cajuns and Creoles were primarily sharecropping people. They lived in farming communities on the prairie. They’d work long hours during the week, and their means of relaxation was to play music in little groups thrown together at somebody’s house. Later, it would be church dances.

Keep in mind, these were in remote areas. You wouldn’t travel too far through the swamps and marshes. I think that isolation helped us preserve the culture.

I wasn’t really exposed to those conditions, but I learned the music from people who were. You’re not just learning the mandolin, the fiddle, whatever it is you’re playing; you’re also learning the atmosphere and their way of life. And that includes the geography they live in. It gives you a more heartfelt delivery.”

Whenever they can get away, married couple John and Monica Cobb leave the flat, coastal marshlands of Beaumont and head to slightly higher ground. About an hour north, the Cobb family cabin overlooks a small, spring-fed lake tucked into the forest.

John, a portrait painter and guitarist, prefers to recreate landscapes when he’s visiting the cabin. He often sets up his easel on the back porch, which offers a picturesque view of the lake framed by tall pines and native magnolias.

“I’m not trying to tell a story so much as express a peaceful and meditative place that you want to absorb and enjoy,” he says while painting one afternoon. A tranquil scene takes shape with each brushstroke. As the sun falls toward the trees on the opposite edge, the lake begins to shimmer. John quickly dots his own sparkles.

“I’ve done some paintings of marshes and old rice fields too,” he says. “There’s something wonderful about the geometry of farmland, then a row of trees way in the back, and the sky—they kind of look like a [Mark] Rothko painting.”

John grew up in Beaumont, where his father was a federal judge. His parents bought the land and built the cabin when he was a young boy. With so much comfort and connection in this place, he considers it his home woods.

“My roots are the same as these trees’,” he says. “I want to share this because it makes me happy.”

Monica is a chef who emphasizes farm-to-table ingredients at her restaurant Monica’s, which offers dining and curbside meals in Beaumont. She also has ties to the little lake in the woods. Long before she met John, her parents brought her swimming here.

Monica grew up on a homestead in the nearby town of Kirbyville, where her family had a garden and raised cattle and pigs. Her mom taught her to cook “all the country food” like fresh peas and cornbread. Her grandmother foraged for roots and other plants to make salves and restorative teas.

“I still, in my dreams, go to the woods,” she says.

In her early 20s, Monica moved to Los Angeles to study culinary arts. She received a kitchen “baptism” as a line cook at chef Wolfgang Puck’s heralded restaurant Spago Hollywood. After a while, she retreated home to Southeast Texas.

“I love the swamps and prairies,” she says. “Then you drive over the Neches River, and the landscape immediately changes to cypress bayous.”

In 2011, Monica’s interest in hunter-gatherer traditions inspired her to create a pop-up called Renegade Dinners. Held weekly in secret locations, she served fish and wild game that had been hunted or foraged.

As John puts the finishing touches on his painting on the back porch, Monica slips inside the cabin to craft her own works of art: first, foie gras topped with wild blueberry preserves, then an herbaceous rabbit dish reminiscent of a fricassee with splashes of Dijon, molasses, and soy. She serves it all with heirloom sweet potatoes and carrots, along with wilted arugula spiked with crumbled blue cheese.

“We’ve come a long way from killing rabbits in the woods,” she jokes.

After dinner, they retire to the back porch, where a starry sky reflects across the lake.

“I’ve traveled the world, but I’m back to my humble beginnings. That’s a God-given blessing and a value I want to pass down to my children,” Monica says. “Even the hurricanes are a thrill. We’re survivors—you can have a secret spot in the woods that you escape to.” johncobb.net; monicas-restaurant.com