Bob Sanders: Rheta writes circles around us

You know Rheta Grimsley Johnson. She’s been a regular here as a reporter and/or columnist since Gutenberg invented printing.

She’s been everywhere, interviewed everybody, written thousands of pieces ... and now, she’s written a book. Oh, it’s not her first one (she wrote one, for example, about Charles Schultz of “Peanuts”), but it is a particularly lovely book.

As she has often mentioned in her columns, she and her husband, Don, have a little house down in Cajun country, by the unpronounceable swamp just east of Lafayette, La., in the town of Henderson. Her first impression of Henderson was, to be gentle, not favorable. Yet, by the time she gets through with the book, she has almost convinced me to pack up everything and move down there, or at least take a closer look at some family Yellow Creek swampland.

What a writer. We’ve always known that. She makes us hack scribblers want to stomp on the word processor and never write another word.

She discovered Henderson when she was on assignment to cover a wild hog hunt, and after that first impression (maybe “the homeliest town in America”), she gradually fell in love with it. She first bought an old houseboat, then a house, ne’mind that she had/has a perfectly good house up in the northeastern corner of Mississippi. So it’s back and forth (open house at both places for any stray dog or writer).

She was immediately “adopted” by a neighboring couple, Johnelle and Jeanette, who helped her get settled and do the right things. There was a brief time of being an outsider, but, as anybody who knows her would testify, she wouldn’t be an outsider in Mongolia for long.

She’s a fine reporter (you will remember those meticulously written reports on city council meetings) as well as a gifted writer. The sentences flow by effortlessly, never an awkward moment, as we get deeper and deeper into the Cajun culture and environment.

Love the title: “Poor Man’s Provence, Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana.” Atchafalaya is the name of her river/swamp. That’s the river experts say will some day become the main channel of the mighty Mississippi if the Old Man ever succeeds in changing course, which it’s been trying to do for decades. Then what? Also, there’s the continual ominous threat of “Development” hanging over the enchanted place, with subdivisions creeping closer and closer.

I hadn’t realized ‘til I got out the atlas that, my goodness, we’ve been within ten miles of Henderson, streaking down I-10 over the bridge across the swamp, the bridge that stretches on and on... And we’ve been to Lafayette and St. Martinsville (the Evangeline tree) and New Iberia and Avery Island (Tabasco) and Breaux Bridge. Be we were only skirting the edges of real Cajun Country. Johnson dives head fo’mus into it, the real thing.

Read the book and live there vicariously, but don’t actually move there. No, no. Don’t spoil it.

She’s supposed to be in Auburn Wednesday and Thursday, promoting her book, autographing and partying. And I’m sure local bookstores will have an ample supple of “Poor Man’s Provence.”

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.