For Jon Bunn, the Sabine River swamp is indelible. He hasn’t wandered the wetlands in half a century, but he can still describe the sounds, the smells, the winds, the water, and the wildlife.
Those descriptions fill his novel The West Bluff, based on his youthful days of hunting, fishing, and catching snakes along the river.
“The people who lived on the West Bluff seemed to have gotten there by instinct, if not by accident of birth. It was a spit of land that formed on the bend of the Sabine River, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, from the debris of driftwood, sand and silt, and clay mud sediments that got caught in the jams in the river, slowing its flow to the Gulf and beyond. Many of its inhabitants came from the backwaters and sloughs from ancestors who were trappers, runaway slaves, Indians, Acadians, and outlaws. Driven to this high spot that formed the Bluff were people who had been washed out of their villages and camps by high water from floods, storms, and hurricanes. They knew to seek high ground,” reads a description on Page 3.
The self-published book was released earlier this year. This Saturday, October 6, Bunn will have a book sale and signing at the Orange Train Depot on Green Avenue. The hours will be from 11 a.m. “until I run out of books,” he said. If the books sell out, he’ll take orders and then mail them.
Bunn grew up in Orange and Little Cypress. His father was a linotype operator at the Orange Leader daily newspaper and his mother was a proofreader. Though the family lived in town on Fourth Street, his father bought a lot and they built a place on stilts to stay on the river at West Bluff. The writer-reporter Ralph Ramos also had a place there, he said.
He would spend weekends and summers on West Bluff. “As a kid I spent a lot of time in the swamp,” he said. He hunted and fished, like the people who were his neighbors.
His stories come alive in the novel, which is set in Orange after World War II and goes through the late 1950s, including 1957’s Hurricane Audrey. The main character is called Dick Jackson, inspired by a real man with the same name.
Dick Jackson in the novel, and in real life, lived in a houseboat on the river. When the river flooded, he would hoist the houseboat on land or move the ties. He trapped, hunted, and fished. Sometimes, he would work at one of the shipyards. In the novel, Dick Jackson’s girlfriend Penny is Cajun.
Bunn’s stories are inspired by real life, but with “artistic license.” Names have changed, but some may remember the businesses and places. One is the “Abrigo’s Sack & Save” on the furthest north part of Highway 87. The store sold lots of “ice” on Sundays, a day when beer and liquor could not be sold legally.
Abrigo’s Ice House in the book sells “ice in bulk, block, or ground. All you did was bring your cooler to the platform, where the help took your container and went inside the ice house and filled it up and brought it back out. You would then go inside and pay for it.
Workers at the ice house would hide a six-pack or two of beer in the coolers behind closed doors. The “Baptists and teetotalers” never knew.
Bunn also uses the tale of a local man with a wooden leg who would hunt giant “loggerhead” turtles by using the leg to poke for their hidden holes in the river.
The novel moves around a swamp mystery. Dick Jackson’s traps are being tripped and moved in strange ways. The swamp man can’t figure out what is happening. He gets an old friend who has moved to Georgia to come home on a hunting trip. The friend brings three of his friends.
The action of a night in the swamp moves quickly and becomes deadly. One never knows what is in the swamp.
Bunn would have graduated in 1966 from Stark High School, but he left Orange in the middle of his junior year. He finished high school in Indiana and then went to college. He has a degree in speech and theater and became a teacher. His varied work includes a stage hand for a major opera company. Eventually he earned a doctorate degree, even though his school counselors in Orange told him he should work with his hands.
He hasn’t been back to West Bluff in years and hasn’t decided whether or not to drive there on Saturday when he returns to Orange. He knows it has changed, like the rest of the town.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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