Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Heroes
Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)


	Schoeffler gazes at the Atchafalaya's Cove Swamp. "The basin is dying," he says. (Jake Chessum)

SCHOEFFLER AND I DROVE over the grass hump of a levee one afternoon, put a canoe in at a small concrete landing called Meyette Point, and began floating down the Atchafalaya River. The autumn sun hammered down, and we slipped along in silence, bent to the paddles.

The Atchafalaya takes 30 percent of the combined flow of the Red River and the Mississippi and feeds it into a system of lakes and ever-smaller bayous that spread like capillaries into swamp and marsh wetlands. Even with runoff from 31 states and two Canadian provinces pouring into this sponge, the wide river was low at its densely jungled banks, the current brown and barely perceptible. We paddled steadily into a maze of blackwater channels, turning into Bayou Boudie at dusk. Schoeffler had stroked powerfully, without letup, all afternoon. I was beat. He rested his paddle, and we drifted into a tight bend choked with mats of floating hyacinth. The canoe whispered into the lilies and stopped. All around us, the massive, bell-shaped trunks of the cypress trees spread into a lacework canopy trailing veils of Spanish moss. From every quarter throbbed peepers and katydids and locusts. A great blue heron ghosted out of the trees, stately and slow. There wasn't a speck of dry ground anywhere.

"The basin is dying," Schoeffler said.

You could've fooled me. Smack in the path of the Mississippi Flyway, it supports half of America's migratory waterfowl. It is home to 300 species of birds, including 26,000 nesting pairs of herons, egrets, and ibises. Fish yields have exceeded a fantastic 1,000 pounds per acre.

One of the problems is that all this takes place between two roughly parallel earthen levees, 15 miles apart. The entire basin as it exists today is a giant spillway designed to drain off the raging Mississippi in case of a "project flood," Army Corps-ese for all hell breaking loose. The idea is to shunt the water down the Atchafalaya and save New Orleans, one of the most vulnerable potential disaster areas in the country. When that's not happening, the massive Old River Control Complex—basically a series of gates—regulates the amount of water that flows from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya. Schoeffler and others believe the basin isn't getting nearly enough water and is stagnating.

"It's silting in," Schoeffler said. "The 1954 Flood Control Act, a federal law that controls the division between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya, was deeded to keep the Atchafalaya mid- to full-bank. There was enough flow to scour out and maintain the channels in the lower river so that when the flood comes it can handle it. But the Corps isn't giving the basin enough water.

"We have attorneys working on a federal lawsuit that will challenge the Corps's failure to comply with certain environmental protection regulations," Schoeffler continued. "Last May and June, there was dead water everywhere—dead crawfish and dead fish and dead oysters from Cameron Parish to Terrebone Parish. It's a threat to water quality, to the fisheries, and to public safety."

The mosquitoes thickened around us. I turned on my headlamp and saw pairs of shiny red eyes like rows of tiny taillights all along the edge of the hyacinths.

"Those are alligators, huh?" I said.

"You bet," said Harold.

"Um, where are we going to camp?"

"Camp?" He laughed. "Man, we're just getting warmed up."

We paddled until 2 a.m.

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