Paddling in Louisiana - The Shaggy Tremendous Shape

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Outside Magazine, July 2000

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The Hard Way
The Shaggy Tremendous Shape

By Mark Jenkins

I stopped at the end of a tunnel of dark down a dirt road and there was still a light on at the house half-hidden in the hangy trees. It was 2 a.m. and I was planning to just sleep in the car, but suddenly there was a hulking figure coming toward me. I got out. "Made it," he said.

My hand disappeared into his.

"Good directions," I said.

We sat up at the kitchen table in his house. His family moved here from St. Martinville, 15 miles away, in 1939, when Greg was a kid. Back then it was just a ramshackle hunting and fishing camp deep in the woods on the edge of the swamp, and it wasn't much more even now. Greg and his brother spoke mostly French—or rather, Cajun French—just like the other waterborn, waterbred Cajun kids, all of them like some disappearing swamp species that hasn't yet acquired webbed feet or gills. First Greg's brother and later his own children all left the swamp behind and moved to big cities. Greg and his wife divorced in 1989, and Greg only recently remarried. His second wife, Kathy Martin, is a blues singer and tarot-card reader from New Orleans who learned to read cards from a six-foot-five Bourbon Street transvestite named Morgana.

Greg spread out the maps of the Atchafalaya, pushing aside a sizable alligator skull and several slices of fungus-eaten cypress used as hot pads for all that burning bayou cuisine that he had already told me any self-respecting Cajun male made himself, and carefully penciled our route across the swamp.

"Figure it'll take two, three days."

We went to bed after three, got up at five, loaded his aluminum canoe into the bed of his rusting pickup, drove down the levee, and slipped into Bayou Benoit before dawn.

I had ignorantly imagined the Louisiana swamp as godforsakenly muggy, buggy, and hot. But on this particular morning, the water was cold and black and the air was chilly and the bugs were apparently too stiff to fly. We paddled hard down Grand Bayou into Lake Fausse Pointe Cut, partly to push some miles beneath the bow before the sun came up, but also to stay warm. The skin of the water was shivery and taut. Only when the sky started opening up did the water change, smoothing out and harmonizing in blue hues.

"This is the magic time," said Greg.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when we disappeared into the depths of the Texaco Location Canal. It was overgrown and unused, just like hundreds of other canals dredged through the Atchafalaya like a hatchwork of highways after oil was discovered in the 1930s. Huge platforms were built throughout the Basin to support the massive machines that pumped out the crude until it was almost gone. The big companies started selling off their fields to contractors who squeezed out the last of the oil and left many of the platforms behind. We passed several that day, most rotting and abandoned, but Greg hardly seemed to notice them, as though they had been here so long they belonged in the swamp.

We broke back out into sunlight on Jackass Bay. Here were the giant stumps with their long, fateful shadows, and occasionally a forlorn crawfish trap shipwrecked on protruding cypress knees. After checking another cage Greg pointed with his paddle to a dry waterline eight feet up one of the stumps. "That's how high the water was once," he said, "but they won't let it in here anymore. Half the crawfishermen already got out. Even Roy Blanchard, who used to be the best in the Basin. Now he works as a janitor for a hotel on Highway 10."

The entire Atchafalaya Basin has turned into an auxiliary spillway for the Mississippi River. The nation's largest waterway comes wriggling down from the north, turns left at the corner of Mississippi and Louisiana, diagonals southeast through Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and lolls on out a delta shaped like the head of an alligator. But rivers, not unlike most humans, prefer to take the line of least resistance, and the Mississippi knows this circuitous course is not the fastest way to the sea. For hundreds of years it has been leaking more and more of itself into the Atchafalaya Basin, and it would probably have taken the shortcut decades ago—veering right rather than left just north of Baton Rouge, breaching the silt bars, pouring full-bodied into the Atchafalaya distributary, and rushing straight down to the beach—if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn't stepped in.

"The Mississippi was too important to be captured," Greg said. "What would happen to Dow Chemical and Texaco and Union Carbide and Georgia-Pacific? They all need the Mississippi. First the Corps built levees—and more levees—wherever the river was threatening to spill due south. But the Basin was still needed as an overflow valve, so locks were put in. In flood years they open the gates and fresh water flushes through the Basin and the crawfish and the fishermen flourish. But in low-water years most of the water is kept in the main channel.

"But it might change," Greg added. "It might just get better."

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