photo: jetheriot
We'd just turned on to the dirt-and-gravel road that leads to the camp when my dad, who was at the camp, called to ask us if we were on the way. My mom, in the back seat, said, "We're almost there. We just turned on to the shant." I said, "What did you call it?"
The little road is at the edge of a sugarcane field, and I'd always heard it referred to it as the headland, which means "a strip of land left unplowed at the end of the field." She said, the shant is the turn row, where you turn the tractor around at the end of the row.
It's always interesting to look up these old French words to see how they're spelled, and if they used to mean something different than what they've come to mean in the local dialect my parents grew up speaking in Louisiana. Andrew has the Grand Larousse French dictionary app on his phone, so we decided to look it up then, halfway down the little road to the camp.
Our first guess was C-H-A-I-N-T-E, based on my mom's pronunciation. Nothing listed under that spelling. Then we found it: C-H-A-I-N-T-R-E. "Espace où tournent les attelages à l'extrémité d'un champ que l'on est en train de laborer" Translation: "Where you turn the farming equipment around at the end of a field being worked."
We decided Au Bout de la Chaintre ("at the end of the turn row") would be a good name for the camp, because that's exactly where it is.