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.)

THE NEXT EVENING at sunset, we barreled down a black-tar road between fields of tall sugarcane in Schoeffler's truck. We were heading to Catahoula, on the edge of the basin, to a meeting of the Cajun crawfishermen, fellow plaintiffs in Schoeffler's lawsuit against big landowners.

The men are fighting for the survival of a way of life that's been handed down from generation to generation since the 1800s: making a living fishing crawfish and crabs out of small boats in the maze of the swamp. With less and less water being diverted into the Atchafalaya, they are battling effects of the basin's stagnation and degraded water quality, as well as access issues that are addressed in the lawsuit.

We pulled off the state road onto a dark lane lined with small houses. Twenty pickups nosed up to a clapboard camp.

"Do you drive a Cadillac?" I asked the CEO of Unifab International, a large fabricator of heavy equipment for marine oil drilling. "No! My wife does, from Schoeffler, which irritates me no end. I drive a Lincoln for spite."

Harold opened the door of the cabin and let out a gust of accented voices and the smells of a fais do do, a Cajun party. Inside, 30 men and a few women sat at two long tables littered with pop cans and bottles of hot sauce and paper plates piled with fried soft-shell crabs and crawfish étouffée. The men wore overalls, jeans, and baseball caps, and many had cell phones clipped to their belts. "Oh, hey, Mr. Harold," said Mike Bienvenu, president of the western branch of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association. "We was just discussing the boundary case." Jody Meche, a 34-year-old fisherman, stood up. "They want the big sell of the Cajun way of life," he said, pushing back his cap. "Keep the Cajun music alive, keep the French speaking going. All that. But they don't want us to have the freedom to exercise and practice our heritage, fish the way our fathers fished. We're not in a celebrating mood anymore."

Schoeffler leaned over to me. His hand quavered as he set down a can of Dr Pepper. "Man," he said, "that's a bunch that's gonna be tough to reckon with. They've learned how to access the press, they've learned about the law, and they're a little angry about everything." Schoeffler was happy. Democracy was in fine fettle. A Goliath was lumbering toward his destiny. Less than a mile away, on the other side of an earthen levee, the ancient basin pulsed and hooted and sang in the dark.

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