We didn't exactly know where Robert's Cove was located, but figured we would find it somewhere between Rayne and Crowley. As we exited from the interstate, a bright yellow sign was posted for the 10th Annual German Fest with an arrow pointing to a side road. Kathy wondered if the title was ever abbreviated as the "Germ Fest," which would probably catch a lot of attention. We' had heard about this annual festival for years, but this was our first outing to it. Kathy had been to a dance supply shop once behind someone's house in Robert's Cove. I had recently met the owner of a Bed & Breakfast located there, and recalled that one of my Board member's had been raised in the area. That was pretty much all we knew about the community.
As we rounded the curve of the tree-lined rural road, the German Fest grounds came into sight. Hundreds of cars were already lined up in rows in the field behind the town hall. We turned into the entry gate, which was framed by a specially constructed archway decorated with traditional German flower pattern designs around a "Wilkommen" greeting. Three teenage girls wearing peasant blouses, plaid skirts and aprons greeted us, took the entry fee, and handed us our 2-day festival event schedules. This was a big weekend in Robert's Cove.
A team of plow horses, several tractors, and some old-time machinery displays surrounded the outer edges of the small festival area. Two blacksmiths were hard at work forming small metal objects. We talked about the primitive oil drilling exhibit and how happy that farmer a few miles down the road must have been some happy several decades ago to learn that oil was found on his land.
Choir music floated out of the gigantic white tent. About 30 people dressed in traditional German costumes were on the stage singing "The Sound of Music" in near perfect harmony. Several songs featured the choir director yodeling her solos, which generated a lot of applause. I reminisced about my third grade teacher, Miss Warren, who I recall had learned to yodel from her grandfather. She would yodel for us as a special reward on Fridays if we had been well-behaved that week in class. I was awestruck by her performances time after time. Being a teacher herself, Kathy suggested that I locate Miss Warren to let her know now how much I had enjoyed that yodeling 35 years ago and how I fondly remember her doing that for the class. What an interesting idea, tracking down a teacher from 35 years ago to let her know she had a big impact on my sense of music appreciation and my German Fest experience.
Food smells floated through the air, luring us toward the ticket booth. Scanning the hardy German food menu posted there, we debated the ingredients and made some selections. My goal was to have a totally carbohydrate meal, which was easy since that was basically all that was offered. No shrimp-on-a-stick at this gig. This was an event staffed by happy local volunteers and the cooks at the food tent were more than happy to show us their creations before we tested them. I chose potato stew. Kathy decided on a bratwurst sandwich. Beef stew, hot pretzels, sweet potato twists, and sauer kraut were also on the menu. We agreed to wait until after noon to have beers and desserts.
We found some chairs under the small tent where a food demonstration was just beginning. The interviewer on the stage was explaining the Zaunbrecher family geneology of the two men at her side. According to her story, there were just eleven founding families of German heritage that first settled in Robert's Cove, and according to the statue plaque on the festival grounds, they produced thousands of descendants. The demonstrators talked about their family tradition of preparing sausage and proceeded to show how it was made. It was kind of disgusting. The older man held the microphone and told about the cuts of meat bought from Prejean's wholesaler in Carencro. It was seasoned with a special mix including red, white and black pepper with a touch of salt and nutmeg. He had prepared about twelve hundred pounds for the festival. The younger man wearing a large cowboy hat stuffed some meats into a silver grinder bowl, attached it to the grinder, and started the hand-turned grinding process. He turned the handle for several minutes as the facts about cooking times and the use of synthetic versus real intestinal casings were reviewed. My sausage-free potato stew was satisfying me just fine through all of this discussion, so I skipped the samples of sausage on a toothpick that were being passed around the tent.
The logical question to start the small talk here was, "Are you German?" Everyone we talked to could find some connection to German heritage. If not through bloodlines, then they could certainly find a connection through a next door neighbor, in-law, co-worker, travel or their love of beer. My connections are strong on both sides of my parents' families, I was proud to explain. Mom's parents were Bremer and Mohler, very German names, and Dad's parents were Kleiman and Solis, German and Polish. The Polish part was always a lot of fun to joke about growing up but today was about German, so German I was.
On the way to the crafts shop we met a lady wearing a button pinned to her German Festival t-shirt that said "Lucky me, I married a German." Her husband wore a matching t-shirt and a traditional style black felt German hat with a feather stuck in the decorative band. The lady had been the boudin sausage-maker at Rowena's store in Sunset for 17 years before changing deli careers. Kathy knew her from shopping there years ago before the store closed. The discussion turned to language. Collectively we knew how to count to five in German, and I knew the three daytime greetings of "Guten morgen, Guten tag, and Guten abend," but that was all of the language we could muster up to support our heritage. We calculated that 9 words of German learned in my two semesters of college had cost me roughly a thousand dollars of tuition. Expensive words. We decided to drink to that.
Our next stop was the crafts tent. Christmas displays were set up on various tables along with decorative ceramic beer steins, metal crosses, dried flower headbands and festival memorabilia. Hand-made, laminated German Prayer books for children had phoenetic pronunciations in parenthesis under each line of text. I finally chose a red and green glitter-covered collector's ornament of a jester frog playing a fiddle. It was one of those "Ohhhhh, look how cuuuuuute" must-have holiday gift items. Kathy chose a Virgin Mary close-up in a small wooden frame.
We walked to the car to deposit our purchases. A man was walking behind a team of horses pulling an old-time plow in the field near our car. One rein was slung over his shoulder and the other was in his hand. We were quite amazed as he maneuvered the reins with one hand and the plow with the other while turning the horses to start the next row. We talked about the next round of German Fest activities to explore and decided it was beer time. There was really no other acceptable option to drink at a German Fest than the featured German beer. Three flavors of one brand were offered at the beer garden tent: dark, amber, and light. We both chose the regular size glass of Amber, which I liked but Kathy didn't.
We sat in the big tent sipping our beers, watching the small local children of German heritage singing in German and dancing on the stage, the girls wearing colorful German dresses and the boys wearing felt hats and nicker-pants outfits held up by suspenders. They had undoubtedly practiced their routines for months in preparation for this big day. With big smiles on most of their faces, they performed with great enthusiasm to their families and friends in the audience with a few hoping to gain extra attention by singing just a bit more boldly than the others. One little boy in the front row sang mostly to his feet and occasionally to the ceiling.
Our next stop was the "Zoo-zoom" petting zoo. The array of animals was perfect, including three small goats, two prickly-furred animals that looked like miniature porcupines, a hairless rat that felt like a penis, a large and a small tortoise, not to be confused with the two medium-sized turtles, some very soft brown and white rabbits, a grungy-looking guinea pig, and a black pot-bellied pig with a very happy tail. I think we liked the petting zoo as much as the kids. But we missed not having little ones to explore with or worry about on the fun jumps. A six-car children's train came to a halt behind the petting zoo, pulled by a four-wheeler. A tractor pulling a load of pre-teens sitting on hay bales made it's way around the fields in the distance.
The Robert's Cove heritage museum was open to festival-goers for the day, and staffed by costumed docents. Even without the costumes, they had a nordic look and height that is distinctly different than the Cajuns of neighboring towns. Just inside the exhibit area an accordionist played well-known German songs on a red Hohner accompanied by a costumed guitarist, adding to the festive heritage ambiance. An antique doll room displayed old porcelain, fabric, plastic, and Barbie brands. The volunteer explained that the summer display was of lace items and lace quilts, and that the volunteers rotate the exhibits throughout the year. Family trees and photos covered the walls, with hand-written captions on paper taped to the spaces around them. Black and white wedding photos of generations of Robert's Cove descendants were displayed in large portfolios with names, birth, death and marriage dates labeled on each photo. As far as I could tell, the newlyweds never embraced in a photo until 1930, the grooms all wore black leather gloves before 1920, and nobody smiled until after 1940.
Lunch had settled and it was time for dessert. I chose a sweet apple cobbler and Kathy chose German chocolate cake. It had seemed sacrilegious to walk into the small chapel earlier with beers in our hands, but justifiable now to venture into the open-air cemetery eating desserts. We speculated that the spirits were probably celebrating the festival, too, and enjoying desserts among them was perfectly acceptable as we roamed the rows. Some other festival-goers were walking through with beer mugs, so it was ok. Cemeteries tell a lot about the community. The German names, mostly ending in -ein, -atz, and -schler, on the headstones dated back to the mid-19th century. A few French names were mixed among the others, but not many. One headstone among the small children's tombs listed twin boys that must have died at birth. Another showed photos of young brothers buried side by side who died just one year apart. Tracing them back, most of the dead buried here were probably related.
Polka music was blaring from the big tent. We arrived as the band was getting the audience loosened up with the recently famous Chicken dance. Despite our agreement that this was among the most trés lame things one could ever do publicly, our Louisiana German Fest experience would surely be incomplete if we stood on the sidelines. Spotting some acquaintances, we joined in their circle and started quacking, flapping, twisting and clapping along with the others. Four large circles of festival goers joined hands to polka around the floor as each stanza moved faster and faster. It was all in good fun, hot and sweaty as it was dancing under the tent, but the band leader finally sang the words we were actually thinking: "I can't believe ....I'm doing this dance.... I feel so stupid..... I hope it ends soon..." This, however, was only the beginning of yet another annual Robert's Cove German Fest celebration in the heart of Cajun country.