C.C. Lockwood - STV: 18

Marc sits down with renowned photographer C.C. Lockwood, whose decades of work have captured the beauty, complexity, and fragility of Louisiana’s landscapes and beyond. From the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf Coast, and from the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the depths of the Grand Canyon, C.C. shares stories from a lifetime of exploration—filled with adventure, insight, and a deep respect for the natural world. This conversation offers a fascinating glimpse into the experiences behind the images, and the passion that has shaped one of Louisiana’s most celebrated visual storytellers.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to Steve the Bill. I have a wonderful guest today, a renowned photographer who has several books, and we're going to talk about many of them today. Mr. Cece Lockwood, who is a St. Francisville resident, and his lovely wife has lived here for several years, and I'm so glad you could take the time to be here today.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Mark, it certainly is a pleasure. I've watched or listened to a couple of your podcasts, and you do an excellent job.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Well, I knew your work before I knew you because I was going to sit in the mag and I I just thought they were pretty thick because I didn't know that you were these artists that even at the time they didn't realize that you were around the corner in the galaxy. And I remember just always being so impressed and recognizing uh one of the stamps which I thought was so interesting.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Yeah, that was a further mic to get the buttons in your postage tab.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

That really was. I have a sheet of that frame from uh those days my dad used to do that for.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

That's great.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

He actually and you just showed me one of your books, and I didn't I I really didn't realize that's you said your first book, correct?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Yeah, and we have that in our library in our parents' library, they had that book. You brought uh several books today featuring different aspects of your work, and you said we could talk about uh birds or dangerous animals or we just exciting thing or two or four happened on every book that uh you know most people don't get to don't get to do, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

They might have a dream trip, an eight-day raft trip with their family down the Grand Canyon. But I went down 37 times, camped at the bottom of the canyon over 300 days. And in that time period, I got some adventures that most Will you share some of them with us? I'll sh I could share the best adventure from each of my books.

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Oh please. Right here we have the Gulf Coast, and this is we've got a beautiful photograph of uh cranes on the cover. Please tell us about it.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Well, this is my second book, and uh I did the Atchafalaya first, and the Chafalaya, of course, runs into the Gulf of Mexico. So I said, well, let's see what the rest of the Gulf of Mexico is. And I uh covered from Brownsville, Texas to Key West, Florida over a two-year period. And uh one of the things that stands out, especially when I got to the west coast of Florida, of how crowded all the beaches were. I mean, this something was everywhere. You know, that was 1985. Just look at it now. Yes. I thought it was crowded then.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

There were homes and now they're complexes and condo skyscrapers now.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

That's right. And uh you know, like swimming with the manatees in Crystal River, Florida. Uh just crystal water, thus its name the Crystal River. And in the winter the manatees come up there because it's warmer than their summer habitat. And to be down with a manatee two feet longer than me, swimming nose and nose with it in this clear water was just And they're friendly, aren't they? They're friendly. They uh uh just eat vegetation, you know, water lettuce and water highs and different uh uh aquatic plants.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Do you know if it's a fallacy or a fiction that the mermaids that we have today were really because Spanish explorers encountered the manatees and they kind of romanticized them into mermaids?

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Well, I I could guess after two months of crossing the Atlantic Ocean and seeing something swimming in the water. And I don't think there was ever many women on these boats. Right. So maybe that is true.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

That's what I heard, and I didn't know whether that you know, so many things are can be fiction. I was just wondering because I thought it was believable, you know, that you you know, people will take something and say, oh, look, and it doesn't look anything like it, but you can realize how it evolved into something like that. But anyway, tell us about the Gulf Coast, your book.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Well, it's you know, like I said, it evolved from the Echapala to the Gulf, and all my books kind of lead into another or are sometimes a suggestion to somebody I uh respect. But the the Gulf, I really learned what an ecotone is. I was kind of getting that in the echapala. I always loved nature and always spent time in it growing up and took a lot of wildlife management courses. But to see how the hardwood bottom lands run into the cypress swamps, into the marsh, the bays, and the islands, you know, like Grand Isle and Last Island along the coast. And all those blend together. Uh, animals such as the river otter, which is my favorite mammal because they they're so efficient hunters that they have plenty of time to play. And we all like to play. Oh, yeah, they're wonderful. So uh, but the otter can live in all those habitats. It's adapted. And it's it's just amazing. That's why Louisiana is so productive in fisheries to have so many water-related habitats that all blend together with the Gulf of Mexico. So I my education really started, and that's that book is probably my most researched one. Researched one.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

And uh Are you talking about this or the atchafalaya?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Uh this one. Okay. The Chafalaya. The first one, I just I left LSU and I went out west, and I thought I'd be a wildlife photographer and look for bears and elk and moose and mule deer and wolverines. And uh after about two years going to Yellowstone and Glacier and Rocky Mountains, it started getting crowded. I mean, there was a photographer on each elbow, and I came home, you know, always got my mail in Baton Rouge, and uh went out in the Chapalaya. Said, there's nobody out here taking pictures. So and then I just stayed for eight years. It's just beautiful and so important, and they were about to channelize it and ruin it. And so that book I kind of got into environmentalism and helping save.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

So, what do you mean channelized it and ruin it? What happened?

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Well, they, you know, as you see down at the ferry ramp here in St. Francisville, eight out of the last twelve years, we've had water up almost at the Catholic Church Hill. Yes. Uh, the river fills up in the spring from snow melt and rain, and it floods. 27 flood, for example, was disastrous. So the chafalaya was made an outlet, uh, the old river control structure, and in 73 the concrete was shaken, so much water was trying to go through because that was as high as 2011 was here. Uh so they wanted to triple the depth of the Chapalaya to run the water when it was flood year out to the Gulf quicker. But back then there wasn't many flood years. And so the environmentalists wanted to stop that because in most years it would drain the whole 18-mile-wide basin. And then, ah, the landowners say, I might as well build a farm, I might as well build a church, I might as well build a town, a school. And then 20 years later, when the flood came again, they say, You can't flood us to save New Orleans. I mean, we're we're here. So we succeeded in stopping that channel.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Oh, well, that's wonderful. I didn't realize you had succeeded in stopping it. So that's good, that's great to hear. Um The flood of uh 1927, which finally put the death knell on Bayusera uh was devastating. Up in and that's where uh lanterns on the levee from the delta is from, too. This how much of the river was affected by that?

SPEAKER_01 7:56

I mean it was hundreds of miles wide at Markans in northern Mississippi, and you know, they they'd have guards on the levee on one side and the other side of the river because if you blew the levee on the west side, you'd water to go over there and save the people on the east side. And it uh I mean it started the Flood Control Act and the levy system. I mean they there was local levies, but the Corps of Engineers took over and did the the whole levy system.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

So that's I don't want to get off track with your uh book, though because you have several and we want to go through them. But uh one last question. I understand now, because I've heard this and I don't maybe maybe you can explain it, that a lot of property owners right now, especially around here, are very angry with the Army Corps of Engineers because of some things that they've done or not done. Can you tell me what that is?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Well they all the sediments is contained between the levees now, and so the river is filling up and they dredged enough deep enough during low water for the barges to get through. So they're complaining that they need to get that sediment moving down river quicker. And that's what built the whole coast of Louisiana is the sediment as the Mississippi snaked around before the levees. So it's caused a lot of problems. And like I say in one of my my Louisiana Nature Guide, nature did it best. I mean, when the river wiggled around, it had plenty of room to flood, and the you know, the people that moved to New Orleans moved on the highest spot first. Baton Rouge, Red Stick was the highest spot there.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

So Well, I grew up in New Orleans, and it's interesting, people say, oh, it flooded. And what a lot of people don't realize is that the city was drained in the late 19th and early 20th century, and so the city's not really flooding. The water's just going back to where it always was. Right. And the places that don't flood are on the river ridge. Um the French Quarter doesn't flood because it's on the river. Uptown uh doesn't flood usually because anything between St. Charles and the river is on the river ridge, whereas anything on the other side of that does really get licked.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, you could just a great example is Pierpart. Pierpart, Louisiana, has a grand bayou that snaked around and everybody lived on the bayou. The highest land is next to the rivers and the bayous because when the flood first floods, the heavy sediment drops, and then the lighter sediment goes out in the swamps. And now you can see the highway to uh Morgan City from Baton Rouge going like a straight era through this winding bayou, and now all the development is along the highway. Uh and that's nature did it best. They're surviving down there with levees and everything, but it's all different.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

That's why the the soil on either side of the river was so rich, especially for the plantations, because of all of that alluvial soil that was deposited on both sides over thousands of years.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Big agriculture industry all along the Mississippi.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

And another thing which I found interesting was I learned that the river below Baton Rouge in its path is newer than the pyramids because it has gone between the Atchavalae Basin and and almost to Biloxi, depending on where it was emptying at one point or another into the Gulf, and that it really wants to empty through the Atchavali Basin again.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, and that has been big news since the floods of 73 and 4. Uh but you know, it's not it wouldn't be an instant thing. Like New Orleans would be high and dry in two years. And actually the core could maintain the shipping channels with dredges, and it would take a hundred years or so for it to get 80% down the Chaffa Line, 20% down the Mississippi, something like that. But it does. And it's had five major deltas and that's what spread the sediment over the whole coast. Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Believe it or not, where I learned that was in the the New Orleans World's Fair in 1984, I was on the Louisiana pavilions part, and I learned all of that because it was the theme was the Mississippi. That's where I learned all of what I've been spewing. Let's spew about you though. Tell me about this your adventures.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

The uh you know, the Chapel I was first, the Gulf Coast was second, and then you know, I went to LSU, I came from Arkansas, and all my friends from at LSU from Munroe and Rustin and all the towns three port said, well, we got some cool stuff up there. So I third book was Discovering Louisiana. And I really learned how diverse are beyond the Ickotones of the marsh and swamps and the hardwood bottomlands, North Louisiana. I mean the bogs and the long leaf forest and the uh you know, a couple of waterfalls, and it just was really fun to to go up Everback Road in Louisiana.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

How far up the river have you explored?

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Well, that comes down to about my eighth book, The Mississippi River. I started at Lake Atasca and did 2,400 miles in 90 days in a boat down the entire Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. And I was gonna go from the tip of Southwest Pass to Grand All and have two buddies from college join me, but one of them had the flu, so I I went back up to Empire, I mean to uh Venice, dismantled my Grand Canyon pontoon raft, of which I went down. But the Mississippi's, I mean, it's the mother river of the country. It's just fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

And uh to get off topic, I'm a big fan of Judy Garland, and she was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. And so I took it on my own to go and decorate her birthplace home, which is in Grand Rapids. But when I was there, they said, Well, you're from Louisiana, would you like to see the river up here? I couldn't believe it. It was just this little thing. It was amazing because you know I'm so used to seeing it from New Orleans about in Rougea here, and you see where it starts, and it's really confounding that it can grow into such a huge It's I mean you could step over at Lake Atosca.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yes. It comes out of Lake Atosca. And I went in the winter first before I did the raft trip, and it was five degrees in Minneapolis and zero in Lake Atosca, four feet of snow that was about a mile walk trudging through fresh snow to see the iced over the source of the Mississippi, and not a soul, not a park range, or nobody, just me. Then that summer when I was coming down in my canoe the first part, uh, 4th of July, there was 800 people around it, a barbershop quartet singing, by the way, kids playing in it, and uh it was just fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

To think kids playing in the river, that sounds like something that's impossible to do because we were used to it down here.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

But I put a canoe in there and went uh 350 miles to Minneapolis because there's seven dams that didn't have locks that I couldn't get my 37-foot raft through. Uh and so that took 19 days. And one of the f fondest memories of that, I'm a I'm a breakfast, lunch, and dinner guy. I rarely miss a meal. And paddling that canoe 350 miles in 19 days. This was where you know I'd stop and hike up, take pictures, and no, no, no. I pulled up to a bridge and decided I just didn't want to make a peanut butter sandwich. And I said, you know, this highway was gonna hit something. So I walked a mile and a half down the road and there was a cafe. I ordered a chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans and rolls and ate it, and the lady came up and says, Can I get your check? I said, make me another one of those first. I was so hungry.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

That's a great story. I love that. Nothing like a good chicken fried steak.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

So uh, but then I switched to this 37-foot Grand Canyon pontoon raft that takes uh the tourists through the Grand Canyon. And I just finished my Grand Canyon book and the company loaned me the boat because people had been down in kayaks, rowboats, speed boats. Dale Brown, the basketball coach, even went from Memphis to Baton Rouge in a jet ski. Really? And I said, I was gonna go by canoe. I love canoeing. I said, it's been done hundreds of times by canoe. So nobody's ever gone in a Grand Canyon raft that holds 14 people in the Grand Canyon. So I had this whole boat to myself. I could carry food to last me three weeks and a big ice chest. It was and it was easy to meet people. People would come out in boats. What is that?

SPEAKER_02 17:27

And what year did you do that?

SPEAKER_01 17:29

97, 1997.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

And what is that book called?

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Uh Around the Bin, because you know you cross the Oh, I see, yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

And just so you know, some of these books are out of print, but all of them are available in your library. So just remember that, folks. Some of these are still in print, and you just check it by CC Lockwood, but otherwise you check CC Lockwood at your local library and you'll be able to find these. They're really beautiful books. It's something about the page, but if you can't get to a library, you can actually see them online.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

And I assume AI is going to scan them all. And uh so you might be able just to read the whole book. That's not even a book on tape yet.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

And Sisi also has a gallery in St. Francisville. Uh, do you have to make an appointment? Uh how does that work?

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Uh I just have a sign-up. If I'm not there, you go to the bookstore down around the corner. But I'm if I'm not out on an adventure, I'm in there three or four hours a day. I'm just I when I was younger, the gallery was open from nine to five, no matter what.

SPEAKER_02 18:36

And that bookstore is called the conundrum, and it's on Ferdinand Street, and it's really a wonderful bookstore.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

It's a real bookstore. You know, we that's what I started out in my my uh my first book, The Chafel Eye. They had a bookstore at uh across from the backpack of there on Jefferson Highway in that little mall. And the guy had gumbo and a three-piece cajing band, and there were people out the door about 50 deep waiting to get in and get a book signed. And then later on, all those little ones disappeared, and all you had was Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble with a college student manager that uh didn't even know who he was.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

But if it wasn't in the computer, that was just too bad. Yeah, I know. It's unfortunate. That's what makes the conundrum so nice, is that it's a true bookstore with people who are intellectually involved with what they do and they understand their stock, which is really nice.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

And Missy Kuig knows every book in there. Missy's Fab. And there's more of those all around the country starting up, and I hope they're all successful.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

So let's get into some of your books. So show me what you were going to show me, and we can describe it to the folks.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Well, since we just talked about that Grand Canyon boat in the Mississippi, uh, the previous book was Beneath the Rim. And you know, there's hundreds of books on the Grand Canyon, but most of them are from the top. So I did a raft trip and said, this is so beautiful. So I did a book from the bottom.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Oh, so you were looking up.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Looking up and the excitement of the rafteds and the camping and the hikes up to arches and pinnacles and waterfalls. And then I decided to write about the early photographers. And uh my friend Josh Paillette, that has a gallery for fine photography in New Orleans, uh, and I taught at LSU one semester back in the 70s. Same course, beginning photography. He taught the history of photography, and I taught landscape and wildlife. And they both of them learned how to process their film. But anyway, so I I researched all the first photographers uh back at the Grand Canyon, and it was just fascinating of having these glass plates and have to mix your chemicals and build a tent and make it dark-proof.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

I just imagine. I mean, I read about Curtis and his trips across the country. That was a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

I mean, they were real men. And uh there were two brothers, uh Emory Cobe and uh Ellsworth Cobe that had a studio on the rim of the South Rim, and they uh they did a raft trip, maybe the seventh or eighth raft trip down the Grand Canyon, and got some great pictures there. But their studio was right where the mules take the people down to Phantom Ranch at the bottom. And every day when the root mules went by, Emory would take a picture of each horse or mule. And so when I was six years old, my brothers were three and two, we went to the Grand Canyon and I saw that mules.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

I said, Dad, let's go, let's go. He says, We'll be back sometime.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Your brothers are too young, you can do it. And I think six was probably young. So when I researched the coves, they didn't miss a person for like 1920 until when he died around the 60s sometime.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

Really?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

And so if I would have gone down on a mule in 1955, my picture would have been in the Cove collection. And along with William Chennings Bryant, Teddy Roosevelt, all kinds of famous people that did that. Or, you know, I got to look at those pictures when I was researching the book. So you win some, you lose some. But they were as fascinating in that early work.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

In all of your photography and all of your travels, can I add people sometimes don't like this question, but I love to ask it. What is your favorite or what were you most impressed with? If you can remember a real certain memory of something that just blew you away.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

And he invited me every year to come. And finally I drive in Thukanab, Utah, and he says, I'm I'm training some guides tomorrow. The season's over. You're going with us. We'll have to drag you. And I, you know, it's a big deck. It holds 14 people, and we had three trainees. I stood up, except from the major rapids, and took 77 rolls of film.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

I mean, it's just beautiful. I mean, you on a full moon night at the bottom of the canyon, you can read a book. The skies are skies are so clear, the moonlight will light up your page. But I really like the kind of adventures. My wife Sue and I went to the Grand Canyon in the first few months of our relationship, and we hiked down 27 miles to meet Mike on a rowing trip in Dory's. And we rode down to the first camp. We were going to just be with him two days to the first campsite. And soon I go down the beach and just you don't need a tent, there's no mosquitoes. And we're laying on the beach, sleep. And about two in the morning, I feel something wet and dragging over my face. And I look up, and a beaver had cut a willow tree and was dragging it to the water, and he he walked over my leg, but the branch went over my face.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

And a bug got in my ear. And that just makes you lose your balance. And I was sitting here. And since we hiked in, I didn't even have a flashlight. So I made my way back to the kitchen table, and they had a fire starter for the stove, and I held that up to my ear, and the butt flew out. That's pretty funny.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Um, so how many bear did you encounter, and how close was it?

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Bear? I've been in uh Alaska for the grizzly the brown bear, which is big bear.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

And there's a lottery on the McNeil River for photographers can come, and I got it like my eighth year try. And I went up there, and in one day, there's a biologist that goes every year and just makes sure you don't get killed by the bear. There were 64 brown bears, in my view, from this little 64, and one of them was a thousand pounds. And they were sitting there just slapping those salmon out of the stream.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

That's amazing. What a sight, what a sight to see.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

It was fantastic. But I've seen bears in Yellowstone and Colorado. In fact, a black bear knocked my beehive over on Firetower Road.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Yeah, I was with one in the backyard and I thought he was so cute until the sheriff started saying, get out of there, he could kill you. And I didn't even realize how big he was until he stood up. He was taller than I am. And I'm six feet tall, so that could give me a thought.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

But there. Aren't you afraid of snakes and alligators and sharks and bears? And I said, it's the waves, the weather, the mosquitoes that I'm most worried about. I know when to step back if I'm near an alligator or a bear. So uh if you just use a little intelligence and don't act stupid like some of the families up at Yellowstone, go ahead, Sonny. Back up a little closer to that thousand-pound buffalo.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

On moose. Crazy. Let me ask you something. Um, in your travels on the root on the Mississippi River, uh, were you ever near where the New Madrid earthquake was?

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Passed right by there. Passed by everything.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

I understand that there are actually still scars on the land from that. From that, by the way, people Google that and look at it. It's a real it's a phenomenon that was remarkable in the mid-19th century. And uh it's it's almost unbelievable when you read accounts of it.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, the the Mississippi flowed backwards for a little bit after that. And uh I think real foot lake is real near there. And they have a bateau-like fishing boat there with oars that break like a hinge in the middle, and you stand up, and I've always wanted one of those boats.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

So let's look at those. And what is Still Waters about?

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Still Waters was my contribution to the Millennium, came out in 2000, and uh so I picked my favorite photographs between 1971 when I started taking professional photos, to 2000. And uh that was uh a fun, fun job going through my files to pick those out.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

And when I see you have the alligator book.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

The uh the bookseller at Godshaw's, the long-departed department store. Oh, it was so fabulous. Yes. They sold more of my first Shafala book than probably all the other bookstores together. And Claudette Price was a master bookseller from she's from West Virginia and moved here. And she told me to do one on the Mississippi River, and it was long past her days there that I finally did that. And alligators shouldn't need to do one on alligators. I did that. The other one was a cookbook, and I hadn't done that yet, but a cookbook.

SPEAKER_02 28:56

Well, you bet you could do that.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

I I enjoy eating and I used to be able to cook pretty good. I like it. So Marsh Mission is uh is that about Louisiana or that's about the the sinking marsh to what we were talking about earlier about the Mississippi nuts moving around anymore. So uh Delane Emert, uh Mark Emmert's wife, got Ray Gary and I together, and she was reading about the subsiding coast and said, you two ought to get together and Ray U paint and CCU photograph. So uh I decided that Sue and I'd live on a houseboat for a year and just live out there, and that was this fascinating and interesting story. After a year, Sue, she was ready to go go home. And after six months, can we go back to the boat?

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Oh, really? Isn't that funny?

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Because it I mean to wake up every morning looking at sunrise and sunset at night, just be on the water listening to the animals.

SPEAKER_02 30:05

And I I see another book of yours which is titled A Chafali. Was that a a uh reprint of the first book?

SPEAKER_01 30:12

No, it was uh 25 years after my first one came out, and I wanted to do it to Chafala Revisited, and the press has the rights to name it whatever they want, so they called it C C Lockwoods at Chafala. So it's not my Chafala, it's everybody's a Chafala. But I went back to a lot of the same spots and interviewed some old people that I met back then and helped, and it was uh that was very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

And then Louisiana Wild is your last book that you've done?

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Louisiana Wild is uh the nature conservancy's properties in Louisiana, and they have about every habitat. You know, they own or manage 300,000 acres. And uh I worked with their 1520-something scientist and biologist and got to see some stuff I would never find. They got one biologist that's studying this one dragonfly on 25 acres up south of Ruston. It was really hard to get to in just beautiful clear springs with salamanders and this dragonfly.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

And I see the Yucatan Peninsula, was is that the only book outside of the country that you did?

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Um yep. And that was that was the fourth book after discovering Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. And so, what happens to the water that comes in all, goes out all these rivers? It goes across the Gulf to the Yucatan. But Terry and Nigel called her, uh, Terry's great artist, I met at arts festivals downtown Baton Rouge, and her husband and her built a 37-foot catch. They even chopped down a pine tree to make their own mast.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

And I took their maiden voyage from Manderville to the Yucatan.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

That was what was that like? Gosh.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

It was fascinating. And in the dead center of the Gulf, 12,000 feet of water, it's ice, I mean, water skiing slick calm. Not a breath of wind. And five sperm whales come swimming up. And I you know, I had my Nikonus underwater camera. So I slid off the edge of the boat like molasses going down so quietly. And I took a picture and they'd already just taken off. And I got like just a fuzzy piece of the tail. But we watched them before I went in, and they were spouting water.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

What's the temperature out there? The water.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Oh, it was uh perfectly swimming, you know. And I learned a lot because you know he had to make it five hundred miles across the Gulf and uh didn't quite have all this GPSs and all the things he got now. But the Gulf Stream has about a two-not difference than the so on on the way down, you wanted to be outside of it. On the way back, you were in it. You'd gain two miles, two knots. So but the Yucatan was unbelievable. I I learned to I was a big scuba diver and it had been all over the Caribbean and under the oil rigs, which are a fish paradise.

SPEAKER_03 33:39

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

And they talked me into going into a cave. And these are old limestone caves, you know, there was uh when the sea level was way down, uh we went in one cave like forty feet underwater. It's a little room, and still the remnants of a campfire underwater that was like about a half mile swim through all these channels, and here's a room that people used to cook in.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

It was so clear that you couldn't tell they were underwater when I took a picture of a diver. Really? It just looked like somebody just floating in the air there.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Have you been to the Amazon?

SPEAKER_01 34:28

No, I I should have gone to the Amazon, but I hadn't, and uh hadn't been to Africa either. And my best friend in high school was a wallet filmmaker, spent nine months in Africa. Well, I was a senior at LSU and he had gone to Arkansas, was a year older, and just had, you know, stayed with the Sawyer Company making an advertising film for him. This fantastic time. I said, Well, I'm not going until I could go down there for six or nine months, get me a Land Rover, get me a home-based apartment rented somewhere where I could go out the rainy season, the dry season, and it never set the time aside. So sadly.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Well, this there could still be a time for, you know, Africa. I have friends that have gone. Well, look, Brandon just went once and he goes back every year now. Africa has a tick for some people. They go and then they have to keep going back. I have a friend myself who uh she loved it so much she started a safari company and uh she sells diamonds in New York and takes people on trips to Africa. She loves it. I should put you two together. Let me ask you something. Um I've been told that the Mississippi River and the Chafalaya and other areas really were kind of like a the yin and yang of the Amazon, that we had our own Amazon up here, which was uh, and it was all Cypress, and that was just destroyed. Is that true?

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Well, there I get people all the time telling me I saw an ivory bill woodpecker, which they're gone. And I, you know, I have the biggest cypress. I just wish I could go back to 1899 and be in a cypress swamp before it was cut. And uh and then after the Nature Conservancy book, A Longleaf Pine Forest, too, they were huge. But they cut down, I mean, there's this remnant's a hollow one that's, you know, like the big tree we have here, is 1300, 1400 years old. But it's not a not a good saw log.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Well, you can see when people pull out of the bottom these pieces of cypresses, and they're like, they look like prehistoric bones. I mean, it's remarkable.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Very huge and uh very valuable. But the uh it's just a shame they didn't leave one bit. And you know, the spotted owl, I don't know if you remember that up in Washington, Oregon, uh lives in the old growth forest. And I think the environment's made a mistake there putting up the lumberjacks and the lumber industry against an owl. I mean, the owl's very important. But they should have said these three, four, five hundred-year-old trees that are big as a room. Uh put that up against you know, we got to s say five and I think there's five percent of the redwoods left. That's there's no percent of virgin cypress left. Just a lone tree here and there. And I wish they were smart enough in the 1910s to say, let's set aside five percent of these trees.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

You know, when you look at some of the old houses in town that were moved up from Bayusara and you look at the grain on the wood, it is like a book. It's so tight. And you think of the lumber you see today, which is just you can tell it's like three years old max. It's amazing. It's really something else.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Well the uh the old growth cypress lasts forever. Growing on a good site where it grows fast, it's still really good wood, but it's not like the old growth.

SPEAKER_02 38:20

Not the old stuff. Well, nothing's like the old stuff. You and I both know that we're the old stuff. Well, Cece, I want to thank you for coming today, and I want to also tell you that I have plans to do this on uh video at some point. And when when I do, I would love for you to come back so we could actually show some of these remarkable images you have in these fabulous books. And by the way, y'all, they're uh they're they look to all be LSU pressed. And uh you can see them uh in your library. Uh just you can go online to your library and and pull these up, or you can come to the conuldrum or check your favorite Louisiana bookstore for Cece's books. That's CeCe Lockwood. Thank you so much for coming today, Cece.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Okay. And this this weekend at the Magnolia, there's three artists gonna be showing from who are the three artists? Lynn Wood and uh Dennis Hardgroder. And 12 to 5 or so, right in one area by the Magnolia Cafe. Great place to eat.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

I saw Lynn, my little house she bought and she moved it to her property and she used it as a studio. And Dennis was so kind, he actually did a portrait of it. So I have a little connection with all I'll have to come by and look at that. So that's at the Magnolia this weekend. So thank you so much. And I look forward to hearing hearing talking to you all again on Caville. Thank you for checking in. And don't forget my tour, the Ghost of Body Sarah. Thank you so much.