Did You Know That There's an Airboat Tour in Des Allemands, Louisiana
A longform Yelp review of Lana Del Rey's husband's airboat tour
My parents were coming to town—town, longtime readers will know, being New Orleans—and my father told me that he’d never been on a swamp tour and would love to try one. I hadn’t either, swamp tours being the sort of thing like seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to brunch that decency encourages one to avoid when living in a city home to attractions. The stigma against tourist traps is silly—tourists by and large see certain things because life is short and things are worth seeing—but ironic detachment allows people my age to get away with a lot of things. Creative directors wear camouflage now, and ugly sunglasses are cool. This is, I guess, all for another post; the point is that I’m not sure I would have taken my father up with such enthusiasm if I hadn’t recently seen on Twitter that Lana Del Rey had begun dating, and then married, an alligator tour guide.
Monoculture might be dead, but our algorithmic silos have filled its void capably. I am the type of internet user for whom news that Lana Del Rey was rumored to be dating Jeremy Dufrene, a swamp tour guide, was inescapable over the last two months. The story delighted me: its Louisiana angle, Lana’s curt and unconvincing dismissal of the rumors, the way that it, like her dalliance with a police officer and my favorite musician who wants to be a police officer, felt inextricable from her artistic project. Lana simultaneously mines and aestheticizes Americana in its entirety, something I once turned my nose up at and now admire deeply; her dating a swamp tour guide was the most personally resonant gossip item since Jack Antonoff convinced Margaret Qualley to get married next to a teen nightclub at the Jersey Shore. I told my dad that I knew of a tour just outside of New Orleans that seemed like, well, the real deal, and before long I found myself in one of those unenviable lore-based conversations with a parent that I had previously assumed were the purview of the unemployed.
The Airboat Tour by Arthur’s experience begins with a phone call. Unlike their more polished, tamer (more on that soon) competitors, there is no option to book online; their website promises that’s coming soon. Your phone call will be answered by one of four representatives—the Matherne family matriarch, who prefers to stay behind the scenes and who runs the charming website due to the mens’ aversion to the internet, the eponymous Arthur, his son, Chad, or his nephew, Jeremy, who as best I could tell was on honeymoon with Lana Del Rey at the time of booking. Chad, who would be our guide for the afternoon, provided us with instructions. We were to call when we hit the road, and we were to use the website’s navigation instructions to find Des Allemand’s, because you can’t trust the maps (he was right). When my father asked if we could bring a cooler of drinks, Chad laughed and noted that he must not be from here.
Des Allemands is about a forty minute drive from New Orleans, in which drive you pass your standard array of personal injury lawyer and vodka billboards, cross one professionally and one dubiously-engineered bridge, and finally get in “the fast lane” so that you can make a U-turn past a small graveyard. Upon making the U-turn, you see a trailer hitch with a yellow sign reading “airboat tours,” a large stone alligator head sculpture, a larger signpost advertising airboat tours, and a small white arrow pointing in the direction of Arthur’s Air-Boat Tours (the stylization of the company’s name changes; it’s immaterial.) We parked in the gravel road that, about a week prior, served as the aisle for Lana Del Rey’s wedding. My maps app, which as promised proved useless, advised that we had arrived at Dufrene Pond.
Arthur’s HQ, for lack of a better word, is a humbly teal-slatted dockside home. Inside are a series of swamp-inflected live-laugh-loveisms (“I just want to be bayou,” “Why didn’t Noah swat the mosquitos?”), taxidermied Nutrias (large Louisiana rodents, a guy in New Orleans kept one as a pet and it became a minor political issue, they’re great), alligator claw backscratchers, two local restaurant menus, a bucket of bug spray, and a stack of liability waivers. As we—parents, girlfriend, two friends, and I—indemnified Arthur’s airboat tours, captain Chad pulled an airboat in.
The six-passenger airboat was something out of a maritime adaptation of Mad Max. Its hull was painted RealTree camo—unironic. Its benches were comfortably upholstered, in stark contrast to the boat another party boarded with captain Arthur, which was configured with seats seemingly bought from a series of Facebook Marketplace inquiries. Behind the sunglassed Chad was a massive propellor fan, which appeared almost like a bayou angel’s wings. In front of him sat four Californian middle-aged women shrieking in delight—happy customers returning to shore. The foursome wore matching pink shirts as if they were on a bachelorette party, but the shirts were fashioned in homage to a white cat, presumably one of their pets, perhaps deceased, our conversation ended up being more about captain Chad and the unfortunate fact of his being married than the cat, but it was hard not to notice the cat is all. The apparent leader promised us the time of our lives: “I held a baby dinosaur, and it bit me!”
As we loaded onto the boat in order of approximate size for safety purposes, Ms. Matherne began telling us about Chad. He’s got an eye for the family business one day, but he doesn’t like the internet, so she maintains the website and makes online orders for him. She shared a charming anecdote in which he asked her to order him Twisted Teas, which are not something I knew you could get online. My dad offered her a wine cooler, by which he meant a High Noon, and she politely demurred. Before handing us off to her son, she asked how we had heard about them. We—all of us—giggled a bit. I mean, obviously, we were here because of the Lana of it all, like my girlfriend had just taken a selfie in the women’s room that presumably was the women’s room at the wedding, we’d assumed it was so obvious that even its mention would be impolitic. Our compromise answer, not totally incorrect, was that we had heard about their tour on the internet.
The swirl of anxieties brewing within me was dispelled the moment captain Chad pushed us off, gave us a cursory safety lesson (in lieu of seatbelts, we had what he referred to as “oh shit” handles, which were available only to those sitting on the ends of the two benches), and began telling us about the history both of the company and the swamp we’d be exploring. Until that moment, I was at war with myself: were we being dicks? Had irony and celebrity intrigue so completely territorialized my mind that I had made the people nearest to me drive forty minutes so that we could say that we’d done this? Was I the personification of the paparazzi and Houma residents who flew drones over a humble Louisiana wedding to aggregate clicks? But the second we began cruising into the no wake zone, as captain Chad explained the physics behind airboat propulsion (you can drive over land, really, but not for too long, it’s a matter of friction, you need water to cool off the bottom of the boat is the long and short of it), the true purpose for our being there made itself clear. We were going to see some alligators.
Among the surprises of the Arthur’s experience, two stand particularly out. The first, which moved me to my core, was the level of care with which captain Chad treated the environment he inhabited—one we visited at first ironically, and then with real reverence. As he plowed through a seemingly solid layer of purple-flowered waterlilies while explaining that they were an invasive species threatening to choke out the bayou, or carefully taxonomized the flora and fauna around us, detailing food chains, migration patterns, and lifecycles, I felt as sharply as ever the difference between those who earn their camouflage sweatshirts and those who wear them to signal a sort of fried urbanity. Here was a man in symbiosis with the land he was born to, who had a stake in his environment more felt and visceral than I could ever dream of. I could increasingly see how someone who, say, was dedicated to documenting and embodying Americana in all its thorny contradictions could come here and fall in love.
The second surprise was just how fun, like pit-of-your-stomach fun, the tour experience was. The second we broke the no wake zone, Chad instructed us to don our protective headphones. After a series of thumbs up, Chad tested every bit of the boat’s 60 miles per hour capacity. We flew through the bayou at speeds literally inconceivable for a craft with no seatbelts. Chad seemed to go out of his way to ride over landmasses, just to show he could; at times, he would approach a solid bank at full speed just so that he could make a dramatic turn. Those of us who could used the oh shit handle early and often.
About five minutes into the speed demon portion of the ride, Chad slowed and brought our attention to the top of a pole. On it sat two bald eagles. Chad told us about how he grew up in a world where these magnificent birds were endangered; how over the past few years, they have repopulated in the swamp at an inconceivable rate. He told us that bald eagles are monogamous creatures of habit—they find a mate, they find a nest, and they return to both year after year until they die, no matter how far their off-season migration takes them. The symbolism—eternal love, a resurgent Americana—was almost too much to sit with.
Before entering the private swamp owned by his cousin—yes, that cousin—Chad spotted our first gator of the tour. Without breaking, the captain flipped our boat into a U-turn brought us nearly perpendicular to the swamp’s water, the type of turn that makes you wonder what you were thinking bringing a cooler of High Lifes on board. We retraced our steps for about five minutes before Chad determined that we’d scared the gator off. He promised we’d see many more, and we jetted back off and over the barge separating Dufrene Swamp from the public waterways. “Bet you didn’t expect some Dukes of Hazzard shit today,” he whooped.
What sets the Airboat Tour by Arthur’s experience apart from others, we learned, is that the Dufrene family owns a massive, private cypress swamp. Meaning you get exclusive access to a functionally unspoiled, breathtaking array of Spanish moss-draped cypress trees, intricate marshes, and roughly 8,000 alligators. Meaning, more importantly, that your captain is on a first name basis with multiple alligators and can kiss them on the lips while he feeds them raw chicken thighs.
Most swamp tours, you see, are what Chad calls “marshmallow tours.” The concept’s simple: you’re not supposed to feed wild alligators. Alligators are naturally afraid of humans—when they see us, their instinct is to flee underwater and to safety. Large-scale commercial tours attempt to coax gators out by throwing marshmallows into the water, which to a gator is something like one tenth of a Tic Tac. In Dufrene Swamp, however, the Matherne and Dufrene men keep their gators fed to the point that the alligators associate humans with food, the type of line you’d imagine hearing during the expository portion of a Jurassic Park sequel.
I should specify here that the Arthur’s Airboat friendship with the swamp’s gators appeared exclusive to the male gators. The female alligators are decidedly less friendly likely owing to the fact that we spent the first fifteen minutes in the swamp trying to abduct their children. Here, in essence, is the broad outline of your tour: five minutes idling through nature, ten minutes ripping through that nature, catching a baby alligator to feed and hold, then checking in with the big fellas. We struck out on our first pass at the babies—Chad took us to the spot he’d just raided, but he speculated that his father had scared the mother and her nest away. As he explained this, he walked barefoot on what he taught us was functionally floating marshland, which traversing requires something like the walk they do in Dune, insofar as you never know when your next step will have you plunging into the swamp full of mother gators who recognize you as the guy who steals their children so that people like me can hold them.
After moving on from our failed pursuit, we crawled through the mesmerizing swamp. We marveled at local birds, which reduce well in a gumbo and which can be more freely hunted than ducks due to their number and their general stupidity. We got momentarily stuck in one of those floating marshes, requiring us to wait it out until the marsh sank. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Chad spotted Pierre.
You can tell the size of an alligator by the length between the end of his nose and his eyes, every inch of distance being roughly one foot of size on the gator. Chad joked that men often overestimated the size of alligators, but I’d like to think something other than penis envy was at work when I say that Pierre seemed a lot bigger than 10 feet. Chad called Pierre closer and closer to the side of the boat that my mother and girlfriend occupied; “Mange, Pierre,” he drawled. Before long, Pierre had brought his front leg and his entire head onto our relatively small airboat as Chad dangled raw chicken over his snapping head.
The experience of Pierre on the boat is one that doesn’t really lend itself to words. You really have to try it for yourself—if I haven't yet made it abundantly clear, you really should go to Airboat Tours by Arthur if you find yourself in Louisiana, just don’t be weird about it. As Pierre, the gigantic alligator who associates humans with food, basically walked onto our boat, I was so impressed by the absurdity of the situation that I couldn’t really find fear to hold onto. My mother, who was pretty reluctant in the first place, sat in what I could only imagine was a state of paralysis. But the more Chad patted, pushed, and finally kissed Pierre’s snout, the more he started to resemble a smiling dog. Before long, he felt like a lifelong pet. I wanted to kiss him too.
With our post-Pierre buzz, we set off to find either Bubba or Brutus, 15-foot beasts who occupied neighboring territories. That’s how gators work, Chad told us: male gators stake out a territory, and if a competitor infringes upon it, they kill them, let the carcass soften up for about ten days while word gets out, and then feast on their body. Bubba, it appeared, had staked out a beautiful and historic neighborhood. Chad called for him — “Mange!”— as we waited with bated breath. Again, Chad blamed his father for having scared him off. He called Arthur, asked where he last saw the big man, and hung up with a jump: “We’ve got a pin on Bubba.” In a moment, we were traversing the massive lake where Bubba had last been sighted. We called for him like delighted children. As we sped, my girlfriend’s hat flew into the water. She reached in for it like only someone who now felt a friendship with the gators could.
As we pivoted from open water to marshland to hunt for the main attraction, we stumbled upon a nest of babies. Chad deftly reached in an extended prong and snatched one from the water. About 5 feet away, the gator’s mother reared her head and began hissing at us. Chad was unbothered by her aggression, beating her back with his extraction tool. We begged Chad to take us away from the protective mother, and he brought us, baby in tow, back to the open water. He remarked that for the baby we had in our hands, this was probably the closest thing to an alien abduction. We took turns passing around the gurgling baby, about three inches in length. It was unfathomable to me that one day he might become the type of beast that Chad would feed raw chicken. Chad tucked him into his shirt pocket for a photo opp; we thought we heard his mother’s hiss in the background. Two bald eagles soared in the background, and we were having the time of our lives.
After returning the baby to its nest, we cut our losses on Bubba—not to speak of Brutus—and headed back to shore. On our ride in, I felt emboldened enough to ask Chad about the other captains. All he volunteered was that he was one of three, but that he was having some availability issues at the moment. When we docked, Chad introduced us to a local airboat operator who had come by to say hello. Walking into the headquarters for a business card and some merchandise, I heard the operator ribbing Chad: “No Jeremy today?”
Chad shook his head amusedly. “Jeremy don’t need to work no more,” he laughed.