Paddling in Louisiana - The Shaggy Tremendous Shape

You Are Here:

Home >> Travel >> The Shaggy Tremendous Shape

Today's Question
Where should I camp in Switzerland with my kids? answer

What's the best volcano to hike up in North America? answer

How can I plan a trip around riding the biggest, fastest roller coasters? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine, July 2000

Page:

The Hard Way
The Shaggy Tremendous Shape

By Mark Jenkins

Greg and other environmentalists and defenders of the Cajun way of life have been negotiating with the Army Corps for decades. Still, his optimism seemed odd to me, even though I was beginning to realize that that's the kind of man he was. He looked for, and perhaps even saw, the good in people and places and possibility.

Beyond Jackass Bay we slid up into the Range Line Cut, a narrow, almost subterranean canal. You would think that in a swamp the water would all be flat, almost by definition, but conflicting green water was gushing down against us.

"Just never know!" Greg exclaimed joyfully.

We put our backs into the paddles and pumped our arms and the canoe bobbed up and down. I was bent out over the prow, digging hard, concentrating, when Greg shouted, "You ever seen that movie African Queen?" I glanced over my shoulder and he nodded toward the bank and I saw it was moving the wrong way.

We both stepped out of the boat and sank up to our waists in cold-rushing water that knocked us backward. We grabbed the canoe and struggled up onto the bank, thinking it might be easier to line the boat along, but it wasn't. Everywhere the bank was either impossibly slick with mud or impossibly overgrown. We slid back into the swirling green depths and began plowing upstream, thrashing and splashing and slipping, me pulling, Greg pushing, water snakes sweeping around our bellies, razor-toothed alligator garfish shooting between our legs. Without a boat, humans are as fit for water as turtles without legs. Nonetheless, we eventually reached a tiny logjam, portaged up and over, and shoved off onto another expanse of flat brown water and giant stumps.

"Now," said Greg. "Now we're in the middle of the middle of the Atchafalaya." He explained that this was the Red-Eye Swamp, named for the primeval glint in an alligator's eyes.

As if to reward us for having gotten ourselves in here by dint of our own stubborn sinew, birds began sweeping in around us. They keeled between the stumps in the still air, planing just above the water while Greg called out to the birds by name.

"Kingfisher. Anhinga. Turkey buzzard. Tree sparrow."

I pointed toward something orangish.

"Cardinal!" His voice was high and happy. I suddenly knew that the idea of crossing the swamp had been a pretext. Although it was something he would later tell me he was proud to do, something he could tell his grandkids about, paddling across the swamp really meant paddling into it, penetrating that one place on the planet he held in his heart as a refuge.

"Snowy egret. Wood duck. Coot. Look at 'em all."

I was watching the birds and thinking about all the hope they seemed to carry so lightly; still, they were weaving through stumps—sad, monstrous monuments to human plundering.

Before the Army Corps of Engineers (at the behest of business barons from Baton Rouge to Bohemia) shut off the natural spigot and the swamp started silting in and the crawfish started dying, before the oil barons chopped up the swamp and sucked out all the oil and then left, there were the lumber barons. The Atchafalaya was once like the redwood forests. There were a million acres of ancient bald cypress, and loggers came from all over the country to cut the forest down. Everybody believed it would last forever. Every fence, water tank, barge, bunkhouse, and sugar mill in Louisiana was built with old-growth cypress, some planks measuring five feet across. Commercial logging started just after the Civil War, and the last ancient cypress was hacked down in 1930. Every solitary tree, every one not hollow or diseased, was taken—the entire Atchafalaya Basin, levee to levee, clear-cut.

Paddling onward, Greg was still naming birds—"Prothonotary warbler. Pileated woodpecker. Barred owl"—as if we were actually in a forest, as if in his mind he could still see the massive, majestic cypress rising from the swamp, as if he could still see the world wild and rich and innocent and vulnerable the way it was before he was born. It seemed naive. This was the ghost of a forest.

After we passed out of the open water he was silent for some time before telling me that he once wrote a novel.

"But it didn't sell," he said. "The photography books sell. People like pictures because they're pretty, not because they tell the truth."

"What was the title of your novel?"

"The Land of Dead Giants."

Page: