Later, he would spend three months out here, with 'my wife, a pirogue, some olive oil, flour, salt and pepper."
In that summer, "the best days of my life", Jon learned to hunt alligator, to fish, to utilize hundreds of swamp plants as medicine, insect repellent, seasoning. "We just ate and survived," he says, stopping along the way to show me dozens more plants.
In 1939, the most famous Louisianan, the man who invented Tabasco, had a plan. An ingenious plan! To rid Louisiana of the dreaded water hyacinth, E.A McIlhenny held captive a large rodent, with the hopes of experimenting with an animal that would eat away Louisiana’s hyacinth problems. A hurricane damaged their pens, and dozens of these oversized water rats with their nasty faces bred in the wild. Rather than eating the hyacinth, the nutria ate everything else in the swamp, and wouldn't lick their nasty chops near a water hyacinth.
This overgrazing rodent began causing massive damage by eroding the riverbanks. In a few years, the bayou's woes doubled as the nutria proliferated at an alarming rate.
But then a tiny plant, the water fern, was also introduced to the bayou. Unlike other ferns, this aquatic genius produces by cloning, as opposed to spores. Soon after its introduction, the water fern propagated into every nook and cranny the water hyacinth could not. Because it propagates five times faster than the water hyacinth, it is estimated to become the dominant species of the entire bayou, suffocating nearly everything in its path.
The history of invasive species in Louisiana's bayou country pales compared to what ecologists found out fifty years ago. The bayou coast is sinking, and along with it will go the shrimping industry, the petroleum industry, the largest bird flyway in North America and one of America's last unique subcultures.
To understand the plight of the bayou, we need to understand the dominant culture of the region, a people called the Cajuns.
So push the rewind button 214 years. It’s 1791 and you're on the island of Hispaniola, which now contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Adrien and his wife are running for their lives. The plantation owner for whom Adrien worked for and his entire family, all dead. It’s a slave uprising, and Adrien has cornered a route down the mountain he knew as a child.
Generations of cruelty toward slaves had just welled up into a revolution, sending shockwaves across the slave-owning Americas, and firing off a war that will leave half the territory’s citizens – French of African – dead.
But Adrien was no slavemaster, no land owner. His family’s route to Hispaniola was a tale of generations of refugees spread across the Americas. When the French sent his family to Hispaniola, little did they know they were being sent to work in harsh plantation conditions.
Rewind again and it’s the early seventeenth century. Adrien’s ancestors migrated from France to a region in Canada, which now roughly encompasses Nova Scotia. They set out to build a new life in this land they called Acadia.
