Journalists love to find the special places, such as going to France in our deepest South

Poor Man's Provence — Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana By Rheta Grimsley Johnson, New South Books, 2008, 221 pages, $23.95

Crawfish. Always the crawfish. And zydeco music, which is different from Cajun.
It's all special.
The language too, which is regionally accented English for us outsiders. Among the residents of 22 parishes — one-third of the state — however, the lingua franca really is Franca, except you'd hear the distinctive patois more often in similarly rural Provençal France than in urban Paris.
Cigarettes hang from lips like cantilevered bridges to Acadiana, named after the French Canadian exiles of the Maritime Provinces who settled this corner of the American South in the 18th century.
So much makes the cultural landscape so special. So much provokes fascination.
Along with the houseboats and pirogues. And gumbo, étoufée and boudin — that rice dressing stuffed in pork casings. And tiny, juicy little round satsumas that give oranges a good name.
And the lilting mon cher and mais oui that sound like a verbal two-step version of the breakfast dance steps we bravely tried after Bloody Maries, garnished with pickled green beans alongside early morning whisky shots for braver dancers in an antebellum cotton warehouse turned hotel turned cultural icon in downtown Breaux Bridge — "Crawfish Capital of the World" — which you'd call quaint except such trite adjectives sound too touristy and you'd rather project something better for this c'est la vie Brigadoon of lower Louisiana.
Down the road is the Tabasco-famous McIlhenny Island, actually a salt dome in the distinctive oil and mineral rich Louisiana coastline. Up the road is Angola, the infamous prison and site of a legendary inmate rodeo. And over yonder a piece, past the drive-thru margarita bars and truck stop casinos, is Lafayette, home of the possibly misnamed Ragin' Cajuns at a laid back university that works just enough to keep the music, language and cultural treasures on life support in America's bubbling social pot of jambalaya.
Just over the 20 miles of causeway on an Interstate west out of New Orleans and past Baton Rouge and through the visually lyrical Atchafalaya Swamp — pronounced "Ah-CHA-fah-lie-a"— which is the largest tract of forested wetland in the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain, is the heart of this most distinct of French outposts.
There lies Henderson, a town so truck-on-cinder-blocks homely that Rheta Grimsley Johnson finds it charming enough in reverse to make it a second home. She and her husband are Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia journalists, and her book of Cajun discovery actually is a collection of newspaper columns.
Frankly they are poorly gathered and edited for continuity and seamless reading compared to most narrative journalism. But she's a good and familiar Southern writer, introduced in a foreword by the NPR-famous storyteller Bailey White.
If the jammed-up collection is flawed, well, "What the hell!" would be the attitude down on the Bayou Teche. You oughta read this book to satisfy curiosity, they'd say on the levee, not for great literature. Get yourself another beer, Thibodeaux! Slice off a piece of that deep-fat-fried turducken, Boudreaux!
For me it's a matter of learning about this place our son recently moved to with his family, including our first grandbaby, to be embraced by warm-hearted folk with names right out of the original Provence.
Cajuns never meet an infant they don't love, turns out, calling them "cha" with a preciousness from the French cher.
That's enough to make me love their special place even without a Bloody Marie. Even without crawfish.