From Tom Cooper, the ultimate post-Katrina novel, The Marauders

From a very spicy novel set post-Katrina on a Louisiana bayou, with a bunch of salty, laconic, generations-long people who've stayed in the mostly destroyed city of Jeannette (where most men shrimp for a living, work for BP, who has just ruined their livelihood and the ecosystem for hundreds of miles both in breadth and depth), each character somehow more cracked, more grievous, more eccentric than the last, here's a wonderful characterization of one particular place:

From The Marauders, by Tom Cooper:

'For better or for worse, the Barataria was his home.  Whatever that meant.  Home was the peaty odor of Spanish moss in the first spring rain.  Home was the briny sweetness of fresh oysters thirty seconds out of the water.  The termite swarms of early May.  The cacophony of swamp frogs in the summer.  The locusts in the day.  The crickets at night.  The lashing five-minute thunderstorms of late July.  The sugarcane trucks rumbling through town in the autumn.  The carnival giddinesss of Mardi Gras.  The blessing of the fleet.  The petit bateaux clustered in the bay.  The pinpricks points of their pilot lamps like yuletide lights on the horizon.  The strange green glow, supernaturally vivid, of cypress trees in spring gloaming.  The earthy smell of crawfish boils.  The pecan pralines and boudin and gumbo.  The alligators and herons and redfish and shrimp.  The Cajun voices, briny and gnarled.  The old wrinkled faces as strange as thumbprints.'

Lagniappe.