In 1821 a French-Haitian shopkeeper named John James Audubon took a job at Oakley House in West Feliciana, teaching drawing to a teenager named Eliza Pirrie. The terms: room, board, sixty dollars a month, and every afternoon free to paint. He stayed four months. In those four months he produced thirty-two paintings that became the foundation of Birds of America — the most expensive book ever sold at auction. The forest he worked in still stands on the hundred-acre grounds, and the birds he painted still use it. The place looks enough like 1821 that you can see what he saw. Nearly two centuries later the John James Audubon Bridge opened in 2011, ending the last Mississippi River ferry crossing in Louisiana, throwing a 2.44-mile cable-stayed span across the same narrows between high bluffs. Drive it at late afternoon, light on the towers, over the river Audubon watched.
