Local teen returns to TV

The last time a national television audience was introduced to Zamariah “ZZ” Loupe of Bayou Boeuf, they saw a pint-sized wise-cracker with a mullet haircut, whose alto voice intoned the words “gators don’t sweat.”

That was when he appeared with his parents on two episodes of the syndicated show “Trading Spouses,” first aired in 2004.

Now 16-years-old, 6 feet, 2 inches and 260 pounds, with a size 15 shoe and hair tied into a back braid, ZZ is one of the newest additions to the cast of the History Channel’s “Swamp People” documentary show.

The popular series, which has focused national attention on south Louisiana, begins its fourth season this week. The season premieres tomorrow, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m. local time.

ZZ and his on-screen mentor, Des Allemands native Tom Candies, have wrapped shooting. Both will be regularly featured when episodes air in March and then beyond. They explore the swamps and marshes that are the vast backyards of the communities they both grew up in, with the occasionally exasperated Candies acting as ZZ’s personal swamp sherpa.

They will join Grand Bois natives R.J and Jay Paul Molinere, Troy Broussard and other “swamp people” now well known to viewers.

“He was born to do this,” said ZZ’s mom, Diana Tregle. “It’s natural, coming from so many generations of great alligator hunters. When he was born, we were the biggest alligator family in this area. He was around alligators, alligator hunters and alligator skins when he was in diapers. That was our life. I was born in it.

“At the age most children get a teething ring, we gave ZZ big alligator teeth to chew on and we’ve been feeding him alligator ever since. That’s how he got so big. When he was the age to get a bicycle, he got a pirogue. What comes with the pirogue? A net. What do you get with a net? A turtle. Then you have to get food for the turtle, so you catch a snake. He did all that and more.”

Tregle operates Zam’s Swamp Tours, near the intersection of La. Highway 307 and Kraemer Bayou Road, on the banks of Bayou Boeuf. The bayou snakes for miles through cypress swamps and marshes, between Lake Des Allemands and Lake Boeuf, branching off into narrow canals where alligators lurk on fallen trees and in the black, brackish water, beneath cypress branches bearing long beards of Spanish moss. On the “Trading Spouses” show, she lived for two weeks in California acting as a mom for the children of a vegan woman tasked with playing “mom” to ZZ in Diana’s carnivorous venue.

The scene-stealing ZZ, then 8-years-old, pirogued, biked and motored on the bayou while back-talking his temporary mom, at one point echoing Donald Trump when he told the woman, “You’re fired.”

Candies, 37, who has been fishing commercially ever since he can remember in the marshes of nearby Des Allemands, takes the task of being a tutor in stride. Soft-spoken with an even disposition, he is pleased that he can display what he has learned over the years to a national audience. “I almost didn’t do it,” said Candies, who had concerns about how he and his community might come across after final edits.

But the experience, he said, has generally been positive and that is how he hopes local culture ends up being portrayed.

“He’s a good kid,” Candies said of ZZ last week, as they and other members of the “Swamp People” cast were ferried back and forth to a location where they were interviewed on-camera for segments that will be spliced into the final cuts of this season’s episodes. “The biggest problem is he wanted to bring all the alligators back alive. He wants to bring it back alive and I tell him we are in it to kill it.”

ZZ, who is more used to alligator wrangling than killing – he and his parents routinely bring alligators and snakes to schools and other venues for educational purposes – does not kill any alligators on the show. Candies dispatches them once they have been hooked with weapons ranging from a hatchet to a 22-rifle.

Using the rifle required extra caution, said Candies, who has seen what happens when a shooter misses the mark, and a bullet ricochets off of a gator’s hard skull. That’s one of the reasons, he said, why the hatchet was used more often than a gun.

Although patient while tutoring his swamp student, the Mr. Chips of the cypress exhaled the phrase “don’t get stuck on stupid” multiple times during filming.

Slightly mellowed with age, ZZ acknowledges that while he has grown up in the swamp and has plenty of experience of his own, Tom Candies has already taught him a few tricks he didn’t know about before, and for which he is grateful.

“He taught me how to run a line for the gator right in the middle of the lake,” the incredulous ZZ said. “I never knew you could do it that way. That’s a good place because in the middle is where all the dead fish fall to the bottom, so the alligators are there.”

The potential of national celebrity status has not interfered with ZZ’s schooling. He attends classes at Thibodaux High, where he is a junior, and also belongs to the school’s football team.

“Someone in school stopped me the other day and asked if I’m going to be like Justin Bieber,” ZZ said in an interview, explaining the reactions his celebrity status has prompted from schoolmates. “I told him no, I am no Justin Bieber.”

On weekends, he still helps his father, Lloyd “Diego” Loupe, with the family’s swamp tour operation, not only riding on the boats that take tourists out to the swamp but also giving tours of their back yard, whose inhabitants include a hissing, cranky 15-foot alligator named Thibodeaux.

Two years ago, ZZ was chosen for a different television show, but had to forego traveling to Indonesia in a quest to rid a village there of a killer crocodile because of contractual conflicts with a different network for a show that never got off the ground.

Now, traveling the swamps and bayous with Candies, ZZ says he feels more grown-up than ever before.

“It used to be I would do everything with my dad and my uncles,” he said. “Now, even though I am with Tom, I feel like I am doing it myself.”

Diana Tregle says ZZ’s close encounters with alligators make her a little nervous as a mother, but that she is confident in his abilities to handle himself given his personal history and family heritage.

“He knows what to do about the predators out there,” she said, pointing toward the edge of a nearby swampy forest. “I am more worried about predators on the computer, on the Internet.”

The History Channel’s executive producer, Zachary Behr, said adding ZZ and Tom Candies to the show will give it added texture and will be a plus for audiences.

“ZZ is the youngest hunter we have ever seen on ‘Swamp People’ and he has such an impressive and unique look,” Behr said in a telephone interview. “When we first met him, we knew he was good. The way he talks about alligators, he seems to have such a great knowledge. The fact that he is so young and he is out there with a guy who has been out there for more than 20 years, it seems like a great relationship. That was a new dynamic.”

Behr said he is aware of concerns by Diana Tregle and other people in south Louisiana about how the show depicts the region’s people. The show is doing that in a good way, he said.

“‘Swamp People’ is a show that celebrates Cajun culture and celebrates the swamp and the life and the culture that has been going on there for years and years and generations and generations,” Behr said. “It is a way to highlight the amazing traditions that exist in the area and ZZ is a part of that.”

Des Allemands native Tom Candies (left) and Bayou Boeuf’s Zamariah “ZZ” Loupe are joining the History Channel’s “Swamp People,” which premieres tomorrow.

JOHN DeSANTIS | TRI-PARISH TIMES