The sights and sounds of progress

Our backyard is perched, for the moment, on Baton Rouge’s physical frontier.

We live at the outer edge of the kind of cookie-cutter subdivision I used to scoff at when I lived in the city, but that now provides a home I can’t imagine loving any more.

The backyard slopes toward a small canal, and on the opposite bank stands a row of trees. In winter they bracket the horizon in brittle brown lines, but come spring they erupt into a lush green wall that stretches up 50 feet or more. Beyond that scrim of trees sugarcane fields stretch for a solid mile before the first paved interruption.

You can stand on the bank of the canal and it’s like pressing your back against Baton Rouge’s unstoppable suburban march. You can feel its irresistible power even as it pauses, if only briefly, before its inevitable unfurling to consume the fields beyond.

From the sky our neighborhood looks like a computer chip, the houses like tidy squares arrayed along soldered white lines. It’s all so calculated and vast.

You only really see the neighborhood’s life and drama at eye-level. With spring in full bloom, nature’s vigor dwarfs civilization’s.

Close your eyes at night and you’d think you’re in a jungle. You’re hit with a wall of sound, a cacophony of belching bullfrogs, whooping tree frogs, buzzing crickets, whining mosquitoes, hooting owls, gnawing nutria and who knows what other unseen critters.

This spring, our yard even became a regular stop for one those odd muscovy ducks you see at University Lake. We watched her lead 12 little ducklings on tentative, instructive forays into their world. As pock-marked as the mother is, her babies are fluffy and irresistible.

Our 5-year-old daughter has taken to throwing them crumbs, gradually earning their trust. Under the watchful eye and twitching tail of the mother, the ducklings now gather around our daughter and chase thrown crumbs to her endless squeals of delight.

“One little guy just took the whole rest of my muffin!” she laughs in wide-eyed delight.

The ducklings have grown with remarkable speed, although not all of them have survived. There are now only nine, the others victim to roaming dogs or slithering water moccasins.

Gazing this morning out the open window I hear the distant sound of the approaching city in the whine of tires on tarmac. But for now it’s only background noise in our little green paradise, which throbs with morning chirps and whistles of birds, the incessant summer buzz of insects in the grass, and the sound of a little girl giggling, cross-legged on the grass, and utterly oblivious to everything except the fluffy little friends to whom she’s feeding too much of her breakfast.

“I see the ducks!” she says to one in particular. “Well, not all of the ducks.”