July 2010. A time capsule, deep-fried.

Southwest, down from Baton Rouge, between the bound titan of the Mississippi River system and the meandering green pools of the Atchafalaya Basin, the land keeps slipping under the water. The only high grounds are chenieres and bluffs that poke from the verdant swamps like veins on the hand of some sleeping and ancient thing. Traveling those winding ridges through all that emerald-slicked water reminds us what an intimate relationship people down here have with the ever-present water. It is unlike anywhere else, it is littoral, it is an in-between place, it is hot and fecund and its shaded places are fully mysterious.

People made a go of it down here for generations before the arrival of conditioned air or refrigerated food. They trapped and hunted and logged, they cut back the living swamp and built their houses high out of the floodwaters. It was not a rural idyll; it was wastingly hard. Precious little of that life remains. Chester’s Cypress Inn is one such relic.

The building started life as a grocery store for loggers felling the primordial cypress trees to feed the mills in what was then called Outer Donner. It was a place where men with rough and strong handshakes came to buy whiskey and chewing tobacco and bacon by the rasher. The great-great grandfather of the present operators learned to fry chicken sometime around 1939 when the big trees were starting to get played out. Chester’s slowly transformed from a provisioner to the logging camps, into a place where people gathered in the bare-bulb lighted night and talked and ate while mosquitoes beat themselves against screened galleries and ceiling fans moved air as thick as paint.

Later the state of Louisiana moved the highway a few hundred yards from Chester’s front door, so these men who had made the swamp theirs with axes and mules picked up the building and moved it to the edge of the new blacktop strip of LA 20. By then Chester’s had become known for two things, fried chicken and fried frog’s legs and, from the wear on the bar top, one imagines also for cold beer.

The place feels like a Louisiana that is almost gone but also the sort of place that has permanently shaped our modern ways. One imagines Jack Burden and Sugarboy and Boss Willie Stark from All The King’s Men out on one of their night drives to handle some political calamity stopping here to eat in a corner while they schemed and dictated the habits of power. One imagines men from another time, in work-wrinkled suits flying off into a night lit only by yellow headlights.

Maybe you have to be tragically in love with Louisiana for a paper plate of fried chicken served under a crackling, neon, Dixie Beer sign to shake this sort of nostalgic reaction out of you, but I do not think so. For one, it is remarkably good chicken. For another, Chester’s is a message in a bottle from our work-bowed and thick-armed forebears. Those men relaxing against an ancient Ford truck, all smoking in the summer heat, all in jackets and heavy leather boots in the black and white photographs taken between the wars, Chester’s is the sort of place where they danced and loved and swore and fought. And it was a damn good time too.

The next time the sun is setting orange and purple over the sugar cane fields, the next time you feel like taking a few hours to remember those singular and driven people that wandered out into the swamp and tried to posses it, or the next time you just feel like a drive and a meal take the Chacahoula exit off of US 90 and head south toward Chester’s Cypress Inn. You will find it there under a canopy of red oaks, its sides, milky-green clapboard, between the bayou and the rail siding, a place of fern choked reminiscence. They are not making them like this anymore.

Details. Details. Details.

Chester's Cypress Inn
1995 Highway 20
Schriever, La
(985) 446-6821

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