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

It didn't take us three days to canoe across the Atchafalaya Basin. It took eight hours. Greg was surprised. We hadn't paddled fast, only steady, but the swamp is not a big place, on the map if not in the mind. Twenty miles wide, just over a hundred long; even with all our meandering we probably only traveled 25 miles.

"So, Mark," Greg said, as we stepped into the water and pulled the canoe up onto the East Levee, "you want to go logging?"

"Logging!"

"Actually, I call it 'resurrecting.'"

The next morning we motored out into the swamp in a tiny aluminum skiff. Dangling by a cord from a limb was a huge, half-submerged log.

"Pull it up," Greg said.

I could barely move it.

When the Atchafalaya was clear-cut, some of the densest logs—so ancient and compressed and full of oil that they wouldn't even float—sank out of sight. Ever since giving up teaching, Greg has been prying these "sinkers" from the mud during the dry season, roping chunks of foam around their bellies, and waiting for high water to set them afloat. He sells the wood to sculptors or custom furniture makers or anybody who just wants a solid piece of what once was.

"It's a way for people to see what we all lost, what the world lost," Greg explained. "Cypress is the most beautiful wood in the world."

We wrestled with this one lost-and-found log for half a day before finally pulling it ashore.

On the day I left, Greg told me he had one last thing to show me. Along the levee, on a corner of the land that had been passed down in his family from generation to generation, he had started a forest. He'd hand-planted tulip poplar, black walnut, swamp chestnut oak, six varieties of red oak—25 species in all—and in the very middle, where the water pooled, 1,500 cypress trees. It's a cool green world of slim-waisted, ten-year-old trees that will one day, someday, be giants.

He had placed a bench among the cypress and we sat there together. On the bench, wrapped in opaque plastic, was a book. It was a book by William Faulkner, of course, that includes "The Bear"—the story Greg loves more than any other—in which Faulkner mourns "that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life...."

When Greg first read this story, in 1961, he was so moved he had to see this mythic bear for himself, but the only way to do so was to drive all the way to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.

Greg told me he still reads the story every year, even though he knows that in the end the bear is killed.

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