The vast brackish estuary beside New Orleans, on whose shores voodoo rites were held through the nineteenth century — most famously Marie Laveau's St John's Eve gatherings at Bayou St John. Traces of offerings still turn up at night: candles, coins, bones. A causeway nearly twenty-four miles long crosses the lake, and from its middle no shore is visible at all — a sensation locals count as its own reason not to drive it in fog.