Yes, people live (somewhat primitively) in the heart of the swamp. Or at least keep fishing cabins - and lots of mosquito repellant - there

In the movie, "The Big Easy," set in the historic and romantic old city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the hero and heroine at one point are running for their lives. They race from a French Quarter neighborhood, full of old street lamps and wrought-iron balconies, directly into a swamp to hide.

For this to happen in real life, the characters would have a long run, indeed. Louisiana's swamp country - Cajun country - is off by itself, 160 or so kilometers (100 or so miles) away in the southwest part of the state.

This scene at City Park, and a swamp created at the Audubon Aquarium of America, are as close to swampland as you'll find right in New Orleans. Most deep swamps are over in Southwest Louisiana.

Fifty years ago and more, before the big interstate highway brought many tourists with cameras into their midst, Acadian - or Cajun - families, descended from French-speaking Catholics expelled from Canada in the 1700s, moved into these secluded wetlands. They found a way of life - fishing, scooping up tasty little crustaceans called crawfish, and trapping mink, otter, beaver, and muskrat.

Once mostly solitary and suspicious, many Cajuns have come to enjoy visits by curious strangers, and some have carved out a good living giving tours of the eerie cypress swamps, in which stumps from trees that were once wantonly harvested for shipment to Europe remain as underwater obstacles.

The guides seem to know every landmark among the stumps and dangling Spanish moss. They even know, or pretend to know, every alligator by name.

This is more like it: French Lake in Concordia Parish. All you need is a hoot owl to give you the eerie feeling of a Louisiana swamp at night.

It's easy to get lost in this primordial, misty, mysterious place.

One can only imagine how scary it would be at night, with owls hooting, water snakes sliding past in the dark, the moon passing behind the silhouettes of trees, and that spooky story about voodoo rituals that you read the night before seeming all too real.

crustacean: any creature with a soft body that is divided into sections, and a hard outer shell. Most crustaceans live in water. Crabs,lobsters and shrimps are all crustaceans. 甲殼綱動(dòng)物（如螃蟹、龍蝦和褐蝦）

crawfish: 小龍蝦

mink: a small wild animal with thick shiny fur, a long body and short legs.Mink are often kept on farms for their fur（水貂）

otter: a small animal that has four webbed feet (= feet with skin between the toes), a flat tail and thick brown fur. Otters live in rivers and eat fish（水獺）

beaver: an animal with a wide flat tail and strong teeth.Beavers live in water and on land and can build dams(= barriers across rivers), made of pieces of wood and mud（河貍；海貍）

muskrat: a N American water animal that has a strong smell and is hunted for its fur 麝鼠（北美洲半水棲鼠，有麝香味，毛皮可作商品）

cypress: a tall straight evergreen tree（柏樹(shù)）

alligator: a large reptile of the crocodile family, with a long tail, hard skin and very big jaws, that lives in rivers and lakes in America and China 鈍吻鱷（見(jiàn)于美洲和中國(guó)的江河湖泊中）

primordial: existing at or from the beginning of the world（原生的；原始的）

hoot: when an owl hoots, it makes a long calling sound （貓頭鷹）鳴叫

silhouette: the dark outline or shape of a person or an object that you see against a light background （淺色背景襯托出的）暗色輪廓

spooky: strange and frightening（怪異嚇人的；陰森可怖的）

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（來(lái)源：VOA 編輯：陳丹妮）