BATON ROUGE, La. — People were everywhere. They were on one another’s backs. They were sloshing through mud, hurdling 4-foot high barriers and collapsing on hard concrete. They were waving their arms furiously and chanting wild things, most of them in water-logged shirts and dirt-stained pants. They were fist-bumping and high-fiving. They were pushing one another closer to the main event, and they were pulling each other away from it—an inebriated tug-o-war.
It reeked down here, smelling of sweat and booze, the scent of any French Quarter street on Fat Tuesday. Music filled the air, its notes entrenched deeper here than the thousands of oak tree roots digging into the Louisiana swamps.