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It’s darker than she’d like it to be when the blonde-haired woman who should have been in graduate school gropes her way to the chicken house to gather eggs. She’s forgotten to supply her flashlight with fresh batteries. Through the mosquito-filled darkness, she arrives and feels nervous chickens flocking around her. Something’s in the hen house. Not a possum this time of year. Through the shadows, she barely makes out the glossy white throat of a chicken snake. It’s stuffed itself with eggs. Oh, well. They won’t have bread pudding for dessert tomorrow.

This was a tiny slice of Gwen Carpenter Roland’s back-to-nature life in the Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp in the ’70s. It started when family friend Calvin Voisin told her about his recent move deep into the basin. His goal was to do what his ancestors had done: fish, live off the land and come into town only when necessary. It sounded fascinating to Roland. Her ancestors were swamp dwellers, too. She’d been looking for interesting summer work, so she tagged along.

Their days were filled with back-breaking physical work, a feeling Roland quickly embraced. She picked up skills she’d never had, relished in the sounds and texture of her surroundings, slept hard and woke with the sunrise. When she was finally ready to leave the swamp, more than eight years had passed.

During their years living in the basin, Roland recorded their story. Excerpts from Swamp Gas Journal were published throughout the ’70s in Baton Rouge’s then alternative newspaper, Gris Gris and The Advocate’s Sunday Magazine. Photographs accompanied the articles, most shot by renowned photographer C.C. Lockwood, then a college student who’d stumbled across the couple during his first mission in the basin as a wildlife photographer.

Lockwood also published a spread in National Geographic about the basin, which included pictures of Gwen and Calvin engaged in daily life. Gwen’s journal and Lockwood’s photographs are compiled in her new memoir, Atcha- falaya Houseboat, My Years in the Louisiana Swamp, released this month by LSU Press.

Decades after leaving the swamp, Roland still embraces the rustic, simple life.

The momentum for the book project came a few years ago after Advocate columnist Ed Cullen wondered what had happened to the couple. Calvin, he discovered, still lived close by, though no longer in the wilderness. Gwen had long since married and was now an editor for a University of Georgia sustainable agriculture journal. Cullen’s story, published two years ago, immediately caught the attention of a generation of readers. Reaction was overwhelming. During the ’70s, men and women had been captivated by Gwen and Calvin’s photographs. Many sent letters, sought them out, even offered Gwen proposals of marriage. Cullen’s story rekindled interest in the couple and reminded readers what that period of time had meant in their own lives.

“Those stories made people remember what they were doing in the ’70s,” says Cullen. “Seeing them again stirred up a lot of emotions.”

Also that year, a photograph of Lockwood’s that was not included in the original National Geographic article was published in the magazine’s 100 Best Unpublished Pictures. It showed Gwen and Calvin lounging in bed as daybreak spills into their houseboat. She is wrapped only in a sheet. The shot was left out years earlier because the two weren’t married.

The renewed attention on Gwen and Calvin also caught the attention of the LSU Press. Reluctantly at first, Roland began a memoir.

Atchafalaya Houseboat is the concise tale of the years Gwen and Calvin spent in the swamp. Early on, they abandoned Calvin’s flood-prone home on the banks of the swamp and built a house on a steel barge he found in Houma. They drew plans using “a box of crayons and Brad Angier’s How to Build Your Home in the Woods,” writes Gwen. And without power tools, they completed a house that ultimately featured a brick fireplace, deck and walls full of original artwork.

The couple’s days were filled with fishing, setting crawfish nets, tending a year-round garden, canning fruits and vegetables and conducting ongoing repairs and maintenance. They were often cold—or hot. At night, they fell asleep instantly, their tan, lean bodies exhausted from chores conducted in primitive conditions. It was a fabulous time, says Gwen.

“We lived day-to-day,” she says. “I loved that feeling of hard work. I still do.”

Gwen’s writings from 30 years ago make up the bulk of Louisiana Houseboat, but they’re book-ended by new pieces. The writing is seamless. Edits to Swamp Gas Journal, she says, consisted only of removing the excessive use of adjectives. Otherwise, they read just as they did when she published them during the ’70s. Her descriptions are clear, peaceful and immediate. The writing is compelling, but not sentimentalized. Like the few old-time swamp dwellers she and Calvin had befriended, she is a born storyteller.

Today, Gwen and her husband, Preston Roland, live on 32 acres in the foothills of Georgia’s Pine Mountain. “Except for the water, I can still do all the things I did in the swamp,” she says. Sundays find her listening to music on her front porch and churning butter. Her gifts for friends and family always consist of homemade preserves, many produced from her bounty of muscadines and pears.

And she still keeps chickens.