PARADISE FOUND

It was an incredible American idyll, in one of the most fertile, wild quarters of the country, where they might go days without seeing another human. They had kerosene lamps, a propane refrigerator and all the time in the world.

Many years later, after the swamp lady had left Voisin and the swamp behind, married and moved to rural Georgia, documentary film producer Christina Hendrick Melton asked her: "What made you think you could survive out in the middle of nowhere with nothing and nobody nearby?"

Melton remembers the stunned look she got in response. "She looked at me like I was from Mars, and said, 'What makes you think you couldn't do that?' "

Gwen Carpenter Roland's eight-year tenure in the Atchafalaya Swamp is the subject of Melton's Louisiana Public Broadcasting special "Atchafalaya Houseboat," premiering tonight on public television stations around the country.

Past meets present

Roland's story bubbled onto the national radar as a result of a National Geographic photographer, C.C. Lockwood, who spent two years documenting Roland and Voisin's life in their watery Walden. Lockwood's photos show a couple of bronzed, long-haired youngsters casting nets, raising vegetables, piloting the johnboat or lounging in the honey-dipped morning sun in a swinging bed suspended from the ceiling.

His images, and stories that Roland wrote about her experiences for Mother Earth News and other publications, made the couple a kind of Louisiana legend.

Then, almost 30 years later, one of his unpublished photos popped up in a National Geographic retrospective. By this time Gwen and husband Preston Roland had lived another few lifetimes of adventure, on an Indian reservation in the Everglades, at a North Georgia square dancing resort, and, most recently, on a farm just outside Zebulon.

After they moved to Georgia and she became sensibly employed by the federal government to write about sustainable agriculture, Roland opened up an e-mail one day to see a photo of an unfamiliar young woman. In the photo the young lady is just waking up, her quilt slipping off her tanned body, her shiny brown hair lying over her bare shoulders, her arm draped casually over her partner's hand, the Atchafalaya Swamp looming in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

It took a while before the Gwen of 2004 recognized the girl as herself. In the same instant she realized this intimate moment was in a magazine that was, that very day, being sold on newsstands. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I'd better tell my boss! Oh my god, I'd better tell my husband!' "

Eventually Roland would produce a book combining her memories of that experience with some of Lockwood's photos and some of her own, and then collaborate with Melton to narrate the new documentary.

Living her beliefs

By that time her life had come full circle, in a way.

On a recent warm August day, she stepped outside her Pike County farmhouse and nudged past her three goats to demonstrate what living on the land means for the Gwen Roland of the 21st century.

"What is sustainable agriculture?" said Roland, 59, as she shoved Jolene, Fredette and Chopper away from her bucket of potato peelings, tomato cores and onion skins. "I don't know what it means, but it sure sounds like what I've been doing all my life." After throwing a few treats to the goats, she buried the mulch in a compost window running the length of one of her gardens, carefully troweling it under.

Certainly the role of agriculture journalist suited her better than the job she was just leaving, writing for a scuba magazine. "It was so hard for me to stay excited about people that pay $10,000 a week to dive with sharks and wear pink latex."

Roland doesn't look the latex type. On this day she's wearing pale pink overalls and white leather running shoes, and her graying hair is woven into a thick hawser hanging halfway down her back.

She serves a lunch of soup made from potatoes, parsley and onions from her garden, with side dishes including heirloom tomatoes and cornbread from locally ground meal.

Roland makes it clear that people interested in food should also be interested in agriculture. Beautiful food comes from thoughtful cultivation. Also, hard work certainly makes things taste better. Back in the swamp, with the extra tomatoes that sprang out of the black, fertile soil, she and Calvin made their own ketchup. They cooked their own jellies and fermented their own blackberry wine.

"We'd eat crawfish for breakfast with scrambled eggs, and fried catfish every day," she reminisced. "It was only because we were so young and worked so hard could we eat so much."

Out of the swamp

She is a hands-on type, who, she says, would rather work all day making her own canoe paddle than work for an hour and buy one. Being out in the swamp indulged that desire, along with a fear of the restrictions of civilization. "I have the frontier gene."

In 2006 Melton contacted Roland and Voisin, who still resides in Louisiana, and traveled with them back to the bayou where they'd made a home 30 years earlier. They discovered that floods, vegetation and time had erased almost every trace of their tenure, leaving no evidence they'd ever lived there.

Her documentary shows images of the communities that once thrived in the swamp, including ancestors of both Roland and Voisin.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood-control projects, which directed that the swamp be used as a spillway after the great flood of 1927, gradually drove most of the permanent residents away from the Atchafalaya, though Roland says "a couple of [Calvin's] cousins still make their living chasing frogs and alligators."

In 1980, with veterinary bills to pay for her whippet, Lemon Peel, Gwen and Calvin realized one of them was going to have to get an outside job. She ended up working as a cook on a riverboat, where she met and fell in love with Preston Roland, an engineer, and the two married their picaresque fortunes together.

These days Preston is retired from his role as an agricultural research assistant with the state's extension service, and Gwen commutes to Griffin several days a week to her office on the University of Georgia's Griffin campus.

The job suits her. "Thank goodness, in sustainable agriculture you don't have to shave your legs."

BACK TO THE FUTURE

When Gwen Roland was learning how to build her own house and grow her own crops, she depended on the famous do-it-yourself books from Rodale Press, from J.I. Rodale, one of the founders of the organic agriculture movement.

His son, Robert Rodale, lobbied the U.S. government to support organic farming, which led to the creation of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, an outfit funded by the USDA to advance farming techniques that are profitable and environmentally sound.

SARE stresses methods that are low-impact and food that is local. "Basically, it's what I went out to the swamp to do," said Roland, who writes about scientific results in agriculture research, but for a general audience.

It is a handy combination of her two loves, writing and farming. She might have been a ranger when she graduated from college, but "in the '70s women were not working in the national park system or as wildlife biologists," she said.

"There weren't too many jobs for women that didn't involve pantyhose."

In the '70s, small farmers who eschewed modern techniques were considered rebels or hippies.

"Now there are thousands of us," she said. "We're normal people now, we're not the lunatic fringe."

ON TV

> WHAT: "Atchafalaya Houseboat"

> WHEN: 10:30 tonight

> CHANNEL: PBS (GPB, Channel 8)