Driving along the backroads of West Baton Rouge Parish, through the rural community of Erwinville, it would be easy to pass by the Purdin property without a second thought—dismiss it as just another family farm, some sort of agricultural venture. You’d never know that the 131-acres are home to more than sixty of the finest Arabian horses in America.
And even if you were to wander the property, observe and admire those majestic beasts—you might miss, without a second thought, the other highly specialized creatures that call this land home. Towards the center of the property, about a ten-acre tract houses a series of barns and buildings, all of them filled with a collection of highly-engineered “ponds” (which, to the average person’s eye, resemble something more akin to lap pools.) Inside swim hundreds of the most meticulously bred koi fish this side of the Pacific.
When Scott Purdin, age seventy-seven, talks about how he came to be one of America’s premiere breeders of koi, the story takes many turns.
It goes back to when, as a young man, he moved to New York with no intentions of ever returning to his hometown of Baton Rouge. It pauses within his aversion to high-exposure public life as a successful young writer, but swirls around that very success—which brought him a certain amount of economic prosperity. The story focuses on the nature of art, the subjectivity and magic of it, which has always guided Purdin’s choices, and follows him into the romance that would eventually draw him back to Baton Rouge. And no matter how many different ways he tells it, the story of Purdin’s relationship with koi always circles back to reflections on what he considers his greatest work of art: his daughter, Amanda…