“In my opinion, it’s a joke,” the most outspoken of the group, Gary Shaw, said to Mills at one point. The sugar dissolved so fast he didn’t see how the carp could sense the flavor or find the bait. Mills responded diplomatically. “We have these ideas, but only through these conversations can we improve them,” he said. When all the hoop nets had been emptied, the fishermen hauled the catch to another semi-trailer. These fish, too, were destined for fertilizer.
* * *
—
Ideas about how to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes can seem as numerous as the carp themselves. “We get calls every day from people,” Kevin Irons told me. “We’ve heard everything—from barges that all the fish jump into to knives flying through the air. Some are more thoughtful than others.”
Irons is the assistant chief of fisheries at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and, as such, he spends most of his working hours worrying about carp. “I hesitate to dismiss any idea too early,” he said the first time I spoke to him, over the phone. “You never know which little thought might spark interest.”
For his part, Irons believes the best hope for halting the invasion is to enlist what might, with a certain amount of squinting, be seen as a biological agent. What species is large and voracious enough to make a serious dent in the carps’ numbers?
“Humans know how to overfish things,” Irons told me. “So the question is: How can we use this to our advantage?”
A few years ago, Irons organized an event to encourage people to love carp to death. He called it CarpFest. I attended the inaugural gathering, which was held at a state park not far from Morris. Near the park’s boat launch was a huge white tent; inside, volunteers were handing out all manner of invasive-species swag. I picked up a pencil, a refrigerator magnet, a pocket guide titled Invaders of the Great Lakes, a hand towel that said Fight the Spread of Aquatic Invaders, and a tip sheet for fending off flying carp.
“Clip the ‘kill’ switch to your clothing,” the tip sheet, published by the Illinois Natural History Survey, advised. “This will prevent the boat from continuing its progression if you get knocked out of or thrown from the boat.” From a company that turns carp into pet treats, I received a free package of dog chews, which resembled mummified snakes.
I found Irons sitting next to a map showing how Asian carp could use the Sanitary and Ship Canal to slip into Lake Michigan. He’s a burly man with sparse white hair and a white beard who looks like Santa might look if Santa, in the off-season, carried a tackle box.
“People feel passionately about the Great Lakes, the ecosystem, even though it’s highly altered,” he said. “We have to be careful about saying, ‘Oh, this pristine system,’ because it’s not really natural anymore.” Irons himself grew up in Ohio, fishing on Lake Erie. In recent years, Lake Erie has been subject to algae blooms that turn huge expanses of the water a nauseous green. Were Asian carp to make their way into Lake Michigan and from there into the other lakes, the blooms, biologists fear, would provide them with an all-you-can-eat buffet. The gorging carp might help cut down on the algae, but, in the process, they’d displace sport fish like walleye and perch.
“Lake Erie, that’s where we’d most likely see the greatest impact,” Irons said.
As we talked, a large man was cutting up a large silver carp in the center of the tent. A group had gathered around to watch.
“You see, I angle my knife,” the man, Clint Carter, explained to the assembled spectators. He had skinned the fish and was now cutting long strips of flesh from its flanks.
“You can take these and grind them and make your fish patties and fish burgers,” Carter told the group. “You can’t tell the difference between that and a salmon burger.”
Of course, in Asia, people have been happily eating Asian carp for centuries. This is the whole reason for raising the “four famous domestic fishes” and, indirectly at least, the reason they came to the attention of American biologists back in the 1960s. A few years ago, when a group of U.S. scientists visited Shanghai to learn more about the fish, the China Daily ran an article headlined Asian Carp: Americans’ Poison, Chinese People’s Delicacy.
“Chinese people have eaten the tasty fish, which are a rich source of nutrition, since ancient times,” the paper noted. Accompanying the article were photos of several savory-looking dishes, including milky carp soup and stewed carp with chili sauce. “Serving a carp whole is a symbol of prosperity in Chinese culture,” the paper said. “At a banquet it is customary to serve the whole fish last.”
China is an obvious market for America’s Asian carp. The problem, Irons explained to me, is that the fish would have to be frozen for export, and the Chinese prefer to buy their fish fresh. Americans, for their part, are put off by the fishes’ boniness. Bighead and silver carp have two rows of what are known as intramuscular bones; these are shaped like the letter Y and make it all but impossible to produce a bone-free fillet.
“People hear Asian carp—‘carp’ is a four-letter word—and they’re like ‘ewww,’ ” Irons said. But then, when they try it, they change their tune. One year, Irons recalled, the Illinois DNR served carp-based corn dogs at the state fair: “Everybody loved them.”
Carter, who owns a fish market in Springfield, is, like Irons, a carp-eating evangelist. He told me that one of his friends had his nose broken by a jumping carp and, as a result, had to have eye surgery.
“We need to control them,” he said. “If you can catch millions and tens of millions of pounds of them, it’s going to help, and the only way to do that is to create a demand for them.” He took the strips he’d cut, rolled them in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried them. It was a warm late-summer day, and by this point he was sweating profusely. When the strips were done, he offered them around as samples, to general approval.
“Tastes like chicken,” I heard one boy say.
Sometime around noon, a man in a white chef’s jacket showed up at the tent. Everyone referred to him as Chef Philippe, though his full name is Philippe Parola. Parola, originally from Paris, now lives in Baton Rouge, and he’d made the trip to northern Illinois—twelve hours by car, though Parola said he’d done it in ten—to promote his own idea of a killer dish.
Parola was smoking a fat cigar. He handed around more swag—T-shirts that showed a carp smoking a fat cigar and eyeing a frying pan with alarm. Save Our Rivers, the shirts read on the back. He’d also brought along a large box. On one side of the box was printed The Asian Carp Solution and, under that, Can’t Beat ’Em, Eat ’Em! Inside were fish cakes that resembled giant meatballs.
“With a little spinach bed, a little cream sauce, this can be an appetizer,” Parola said in a thick French accent, as he passed around a plate of the cakes. “You put two of these with fries, with cocktail sauce, that can be served at a football stadium. You can put them on a tray for a wedding reception. So the diversity of the product is unbelievable.”
Parola told me he’d devoted nearly a decade of his life to devising his cakes. Much of that time he’d spent banging his head against the Y-bone problem. He’d tried specialized enzymes and high-tech deboning machines imported from Iceland; the only result was Asian carp mush. “Every time I was trying to cook something with it, it was turning gray, and it tasted like pastrami,” he recalled. Finally, he concluded that the fish would have to be deboned by hand, but, since labor costs in the United States were prohibitively high, he would need to outsource.
The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In a concession to Americans’ anti-carp prejudice, he’d rechristened the fish “silverfin,” a term he’d had trademarked.
It was hard to know how many miles Parola’s “silverfin” had traveled i
n their journey from fingerlings to finger food, but I figured it had to be at least twenty thousand. And that wasn’t counting the trip their ancestors had made to get to the United States in the first place. Did this really represent “the Asian Carp Solution”? I had my doubts. Still, when the cakes came my way, I took two of them. They were, indeed, quite tasty.
2
New Orleans Lakefront Airport sits on a tongue of fill that sticks out into Lake Pontchartrain. Its terminal is a splendid Art Deco affair that at the time of its construction, in 1934, was considered state of the art. Today, the terminal is rented out for weddings and the tarmac used for small planes, which is how I came to be there, a few months after CarpFest, riding shotgun in a four-seat Piper Warrior.
The Piper’s owner and pilot was a semi-retired lawyer who liked having an excuse to fly. Often, he told me, he volunteered his services to transport rescue animals between shelters. Dogs, he indicated, without quite saying so, were his favorite passengers.
The Piper took off to the north, over the lake, before looping back toward New Orleans. We picked up the Mississippi at English Turn, the sharp bend that brings the river almost full circle. Then we continued to follow the water as it wound its way into Plaquemines Parish.
Plaquemines is the southeasternmost tip of Louisiana. It’s where the great funnel of the Mississippi basin narrows to a spout and Chicago’s flotsam and jetsam finally spill out to sea. On maps, the parish appears as a thick, muscular arm thrust into the Gulf of Mexico, with the river running, like a vein, down its center. At the very end of the arm, the Mississippi divides into three, an arrangement that calls to mind fingers or claws, hence the area’s name—the Bird’s Foot.
Seen from the air, the parish has a very different look. If it’s an arm, it’s a horribly emaciated one. For most of its length—more than sixty miles—it’s practically all vein. What little solid land there is clings to the river in two skinny strips.
Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water and patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and now are rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below.
Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teenagers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.
And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, America would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, at this point, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.
A variety of factors are driving the “land-loss crisis,” as it’s come to be called. But the essential one is a marvel of engineering. What leaping carp are to Chicagoland, sunken fields are to the parishes around New Orleans—evidence of a man-made natural disaster. Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.
And so a new round of public-works projects is under way. If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.
* * *
—
Start to dig in Plaquemines or almost anywhere in southern Louisiana and you will turn up peaty mud; the consistency of the region’s soil has been compared to warm Jell-O. Pretty soon, your hole will fill with water. This makes it hard to keep things like caskets underground, which is why the dead in New Orleans are stored in vaults. Keep digging and eventually you’ll hit sand and clay. Dig on and you will reach more sand and more clay, and this process will repeat for hundreds—in some places thousands—of feet. Except for those that have been imported to shore up the levees and reinforce the roads, there are no rocks in southern Louisiana.
The layers of sand and clay are, in a manner of speaking, imported, too. A version of the Mississippi has been flowing for millions of years, and all the while it has carried on its broad back vast loads of sediment—at the time of the Louisiana Purchase some four hundred million tons’ worth annually. “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god,” T. S. Eliot wrote. Whenever the river overtopped its banks—something it used to do virtually every spring—it cast its sediment across the plain. Season after season, layer after layer, clay and sand and silt built up. In this way, the “strong brown god” assembled the Louisiana coast out of bits and pieces of Illinois and Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky.
Because the Mississippi is always dropping sediment, it’s always on the move. As the sediment builds up, it impedes the flow, and so the river goes in search of faster routes to the sea. Its most dramatic leaps are called “avulsions.” Over the last seven thousand years, the river has avulsed six times, and each time it has set about laying down a new bulge of land. Lafourche Parish is what’s left of the lobe laid down during the reign of Charlemagne. Western Terrebonne Parish is the remains of a delta lobe built during the time of the Phoenicians. The city of New Orleans sits on a lobe—the St. Bernard—created around the time of the Pyramids. Many still-more-ancient lobes are now submerged. The Mississippi fan, an enormous cone of sediment deposited during the ice ages, now lies under the Gulf; it’s larger than the entire state of Louisiana and in some places ten thousand feet thick.
Much of southern Louisiana is no longer dry land.
Plaquemines Parish was constructed in this same way. Geologically, it’s the baby of the family. It started to form around fifteen hundred years ago, following the river’s last great leap. Since it’s the youngest lobe, you might think it would be the most long-lasting, but the opposite is true. The delta’s soft, Jell-O-like soils tend to dewater and compact over time. The newest layers, which are wetter, lose bulk most rapidly, so as soon as a lobe ceases to grow, it starts to sink. In southern Louisiana, to borrow from Bob Dylan, any place that is “not busy being born is busy dying.”
Such a mutable landscape is a tough one to settle. Nevertheless, Native Americans were living in the delta even as it was being created. Their strategy for dealing with the river’s vagaries, as far as archaeologists have been able to determine, was one of accommodation. When the Mississippi flooded, they sought higher ground. When it shifted quarters, they did, too.
The French, on arriving at the delta, consulted with the tribes living there. In the winter of 1700, they erected a wooden fort on what’s now the east bank of Plaquemines. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, the fort’s commander, had been assured by a Bayogoula guide that the site was a dry one. Whether this represented a purposeful misstatement or just a misunderstanding—“dry” in southern Louisiana being a relative term—the place soon flooded out. A priest who visited the following winter found soldiers wading “mid-leg deep” to get to their cabins. In 1707, the fort was abandoned. “I do not see how settlers can be placed on this river,” Iberville’s b
rother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, wrote to the authorities in Paris, explaining the retreat.
Bienville went on to found New Orleans in 1718, in spite of his cold, wet feet. The new city was called, in honor of its watery surroundings, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans. Not surprisingly, the French chose to build where the land was highest. Counterintuitively, this was right up against the Mississippi, on ridges built by the river itself. During floods, sand and other heavy particles tend to settle out of the water first, creating what are known as natural levees. (Levée in French simply means “raised.”)
One year after its founding, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans suffered its first inundation. “The site is drowned under half a foot of water,” Bienville wrote. The settlement would remain submerged for six months. Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They raised artificial levees atop the natural ones and started cutting drainage channels through the muck. Most of this backbreaking labor was performed by African slaves. By the 1730s, slave-built levees stretched along both banks of the Mississippi for a distance of nearly fifty miles.
These early levees, made of earth reinforced with timber, failed frequently. But they established a pattern that endures to this day. Since the city wasn’t going to move to suit the river, the river would have to be made to stay put. With each flood, the levees were improved—built higher and wider and longer. By the War of 1812, they extended for more than a hundred and fifty miles.
* * *
—
A few days after I flew over Plaquemines, I found myself once again gazing down on the parish. The Mississippi was rising rapidly, and there was concern that the gates on a spillway upriver from New Orleans weren’t functioning. If the water kept rising and the spillway failed to open, the city and the parishes downriver from it would be inundated. I was with several engineers, and they were starting to get nervous. I was anxious, too, though only a little, since the Mississippi we were looking at was about five inches wide.
Under a White Sky Page 3