Catfish Heaven:
Winter on the Louisiana Bayou

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.

But soon after they arrived, Acadia fell to the English. The land shifted between the two old world empires for a hundred years until the British launched a military campaign to claim the region at last. The French Acadians, they demanded, must renounce their Catholic faith and their allegiance to France.

The Acadians stubbornly refused, and things got worse as the years progressed, until finally the English began a series of deportations. France now had to find new lands to dump the refugees from their lost colony. Many were shipped directly to France’s Louisiana territory, others were dropped off on France’s various West Indies holdings. Others still made their way into the United States; places like Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The French and Spanish colonists who had already been profiting in the region for years had taken up the good land in Louisiana. So these Acadians struck out west from New Orleans and settled the backwaters.

France was so intent to maintain their stake in the island of Hispaniola that Napoleon Bonaparte sent an army to squash the slave uprising. France needed control of Louisiana as a military and economic staging ground for Hispaniola. But by 1803, the slaves crushed the French military so severely that France needed to sell their Louisiana territory just to keep up with their renewed war with Britain.

Buying this ‘Louisiana Purchase’ from France was a bargain – a bargain of desperation by a country broken by their own slaves, and forced by Britain to turn their heads elsewhere. By 1804, the French half of Hispaniola was independent from France, and the Louisiana Acadians were now governed by the United States.

As slave rebellions spread throughout the West Indies, more and more people of Acadian heritage found their way north to the bayous. Through time, the term Acadian Americanized to ‘Cajun.’

Fast forward back to today, and many of these Cajuns still speak English as a second language, are isolated culturally and physically from the rest of America, and maintain a culture of incredible hospitality and cuisine.

Jon says that for a hundred years, man has been dredging this Cajun region, and levying the Mississippi River.

Because this part of Louisiana is built from the silt water sediments of the Mississippi River, it is naturally compacting. The land maintains itself as the Mississippi carries sediments south from the rest of the Great Plains. As the soil compacts, new soils materialize during the yearly flood season.

But the Louisianans levied their Great River and the oil industry built its own levees and canals in the basin, and so today, the Atchafalaya region receives no sediments to replenish the land.

The protective barrier islands are being eaten up, and many of the coastal regions have already sunk. In thirty to fifty years, the sea will swallow up Cajun Country. The locals are reporting that many of the places they fished and played as children have completely sunk.

Even this far north in Gibson, the bayou canal banks have flooded over, killing oaks and palmettos. Some of the flooded palmettos are still alive, which means some of these areas have only become inundated within the last few years.

I ask Jon why he thinks nothing’s being done about it. He explains the costs of the current proposals. Fifteen billion dollars. Twenty billion dollars. Twenty five billion dollars.

Jon believes the solution is easier than that. He says it’s a matter of controlled flooding of the Mississippi River. Of man reproducing the traditional flooding season by opening up a portion of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya, and of the state and federal governments working with the oil industry to help pay for their past mistakes.

"You mean like Yellowstone?" I say. "You mean the problem with sinking in Louisiana is as simple as the fire policy in Yellowstone?"

Instead of let in burn, I said, "A let it flood policy?"

"Yup."

"In Theriot,” I say, some of the houses were on stilts, and about twenty feet in the air. Some were three feet in the air, some were brick structures on the ground."

"Exactly. You know, the Indians who lived here, their houses were on stilts. And now there are regulations requiring you to build your house a certain level above the ground."

But the fact is apparent. If Louisiana has a tradition of corruption in government, and self-motivated legislators are concerned about current votes, a policy that would flood and effectively harm thousands of personal properties would cause them to delay work to future administrations, even if the costs to the Louisiana economy escalate by each year delayed.

Those costs, Jon says, include the devastation of a hurricane. "If a hurricane would hit the bayou, or worse, New Orleans, the whole place would sink. Death everywhere. The fact is those salt marsh islands were the only protection against the wind. The slowed the hurricane down."

I explain the water pumps I saw near Theriot, and Rubin explains that everything is being drained, sucked out and displaced, making things even worse.

After years of speaking at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana meetings, the Governor’s office finally wrote Jon a letter, thanking him for his ideas and that yes, he was likely right all along. The letter detailed specific policy concepts, and when I read it, I felt like there was a sense of hopelessness. You’re right, it suggested, but politics is more complicated than that.

In the evening, Jon parks his skiff next to the grocery in Gibson and we share a boudin – rice, pork and spices encased in a pig’s intestine. Jean, the owner of the grocery, offers me a piece of dark meat, and then gives Jon a spry look I wasn’t meant to see. “If it’s alligator, that’s no big deal,” I say, trying to size up the meat. Jean smiles and Jon tries to keep from doing the same.

I ask Jon if he’s ever eaten nutria. He says all the time, it’s delicious. He explains that Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme almost lost his reputation by adding Nutria to his menu, but that in reality its great meat, and people shouldn't be afraid of it just because its a giant water rat. I say, “Even if this is nutria, I’ll eat it.” I thought that would be the best way to fool their cruel joke.

And then I eat it, and Jean says, “You just ate roast beef!”

Fast forward a day and the bar to go in Morgan City is at The Holiday Inn. You may find that funny, but Morgan City, northwest of Gibson, is a so-called Anglo town. When I ask for a recommendation on a restaurant in Morgan City, a young lady says, "Well, there's four Chinese Restaurants and ten fast food restaurants, and then there's here. You choose your pick." That's Morgan City, because Morgan City isn't Cajun.

So I opt for a couple Powerbars and some Jamaican rum at the bar. Here I meet Rubin, whose bar buddy just announced to everybody that 'they're remaking the Dukes of Hazzard. No shit, yeah?'

Rubin is dressed like a businessman, with a yellow polo shirt and khakis. He's bored by what's on the bar television (a show called the O.C., which the bartender says she 'lives for'). So I ask Rubin about what he does. "I run a freight and transport company. I've got boats running here and in other states too. I run a service that takes employees and freight out to the oil rigs."

"Morgan City is pretty much the capital of the oil industry, and the shrimper industry too," he says. "With access to the bayous, the intercoastal waterway and the gulf itself, it's kinda a hub for Louisiana’s big industries."

"What do you make of this talk about the bayous sinking?" I ask him.

"Hah. Its not talk. Every month, I can tell the difference. I make the trip to the rigs a couple times a month myself," Rubin says. "Look, there is not a shrimper or a boater in South Louisiana who will tell you we're not losing our land. And it's going fast!"

Rubin is intelligent, reasonable headed, and well-dressed in the way you would expect a banker to be well-dressed. So I ask, "if what you're saying is true, why doesn't Louisiana just fix it?" And then I add, "Like if the al Qaedas were trying to take over Louisiana's bayous, we'd be all over that. What's the difference?"

The bartender is dressed in a red shirt with some words on it. She puts pickled carrots and spiced green beans on our bar napkins and says "Tas' em, dare good." And Rubin crunches, "Well you see, this is Cajun Country, and the thing is most of these people can't read or write. And English is a second language to a lot of them, you have to remember. They know they have a problem but they don't have the means to organize themselves."

Rubin's friend says that he heard Jessica Simpson is going to play Daisy Duke. The bartender says who's Daisy Duke and I ask Rubin if he knows where I can rent a pirogue or a canoe around here?

Rubin says, "Why not mine?"
"Like twenty bucks or something?"
"Nah, just come by tomorrow. You have a phone? Call me for directions in the morning."

That some stranger offered me his pirogue would be odd almost anywhere else. That I’ve been offered food, directions, stories, handshakes, and "just pee in my backyard" at the drop of a bucket is extraordinary.

I’m on a dirt road with a pirogue borrowed from a stranger. It's tied down above the Jeep. A pirogue is a similar to a canoe, but with a flat bottom and a tiny draft.

This gravel road leads north of Stephensville, into what looked from the maps to be some of the deepest sections of the Atchafalaya. When I'm pretty far from anything, I dump the pirogue in the water and leave the Jeep behind.

I paddle next to the road for a few miles. To my left is some of the darkest swamp I have ever seen. Shades of brown and black that hang and droop into a green mush.

Three black folks are fishing off the bridge, and so I decide to see what they are catching. I dock the pirogue by the road and climb up to the bridge.

”What do you fish for here?” I ask. The water is muddy and looks inhospitable to fish. “Everything,” the lady says. “Crappies, bass, stripers, flatheads, catfish.”

They are fishing with small grass shrimp, which the lady says she finds right there in the water. I look for some in the water but find nothing.

”You want to try,” she says, offering me the line.
”No, no. Can I see what you caught?”
”Yeah, jus’ look in the pail,” she says.
"Oh, he looks dead,"
"Yeah, he in catfish heaven now."

When I ask the lady about the area, she says that she is actually from New Orleans, spending a weekend with her relatives to enjoy fishing. She is what you might call a sports fisherman.

I paddle some more until I find an oil cutaway, a slim passage through the cypress trees. I turn left, and in. Jon had warned me about these narrow corridors, because of how easily you are tricked into losing your direction. But the duckweed is thick, lending a breadcrumb path home.

I paddle for a quarter mile and then lay the paddle inside the pirogue and listen. This is when the owls swoop and the wood ducks wade and the water rats rise. But not the alligators. They are here, underneath me, but in hibernation for winter.

The alligator so fascinates Americans that bayou country actually profits immensely from this curiosity common to everyone. There may be more to this than meets the eye: Some scientists believe man instinctually fears crocodiles (alligators are crocodilian lizards).

In his infancy, before technically he was man, our small and monkeylike ancestor Australopithecus was thought to migrate from Savannah to Indian ocean seasonally. He was what primatologists might call a generalist species: utilizing different skills to find different types of food.

This act would have required him to move through the great East African swamps of this era. Some argue further that this swimming through swamps would naturally have been dangerous - Australopithecus was prey, and especially so from the crocodile. By learning to wade upright, he naturally selected himself into walking man. What this theory means is a lot of your ancestors may have been crocodile food. And that maybe the crocodiles made man stand on two feet.

Perhaps I forgot to tell you. I am trespassing. The oil companies own this water. So many travel writers are paid to write about hotels and resorts and destinations that it is only appropriate that another kind of travel writer exists – one who goes where nobody wants him, just to even things out.