by Bill Heavey
Even on a normal day, the channel’s current was swift and dangerous. Jody’s eyes, I noticed, never stopped moving. He continually adjusted the tiller to minimize pounding on his boat and as he swept the water ahead for hazards to navigation. These ranged from the inconvenient (old fishing line and floating vegetation that could foul a propellor) to the catastrophic (huge old cypress logs floating just under the surface). The Basin’s cypress trees, some of which were 1,000 years old when cut, had been pretty much logged out by the 1900s. But the same density that made the wood so desirable also made it prone to sinking when wet. Nobody knew how many big logs had sunk during the logging boom. What everyone knew now, a century later, was that the scouring action of the channel’s swift current regularly dislodged such logs. When one of these ancient “sinkers” came back to life, it often floated just beneath the surface of the water, almost invisible until it was too late.
“You hit something like that and it jerks the tiller handle right outta your hand,” Jody said. He was a happy fireplug of a man—five-foot-eight and 230 pounds, built like the football lineman he’d been for the six weeks he spent at college, which was all the time he needed to decide he’d rather be back catching crawfish in the Basin. The boat would turn sharply, he explained, and if it turned too sharply, the hull could bite the water in such a way that it actually propelled the craft downward. “Then you got a hundred fifty horses driving the boat right toward the bottom,” Jody said. “A cavitation I guess you’d call it. The boat just buries itself.” He had lost a friend in this very stretch of water not long ago and believed that’s exactly what happened. The boat popped up and was recovered the next day. What was left of his friend’s body—identifiable by his dental records—was found weeks later, fifty miles downriver. The guy had been a childhood friend. Jody missed him. “But he liked big motors and liked to run too fast,” Jody said. He shrugged.
The Atchafalaya Basin, roughly twenty miles wide and 150 miles long, has long been and remains one of the wildest and most forbidding places in the country. Early travelers wrote of “birds and reptiles, alligators, enormous bullfrogs, night owls, anhingas, herons whose dwellings were in the mud of the swamp, or on its leaky roof . . . their voices bellowing, hooting, shrieking, and groaning.” Today, environmentalists defending the Basin against various threats point to its role as the most productive land in the country, its 300 bird species, 100 species of fish, crawfish, crabs, and shrimp, and its forty species of mammals. Half of the nation’s migratory waterfowl depend on it. One thing that has never thrived here, however, is forgiveness.
While Jody never stopped watching for danger, he was also busy doing one of the things he most enjoys in life, which was to scan the water for critters, pointing out the ones he spotted, and telling me how good each was to eat. And it seemed that each was better eating than the last. There were gators, of course, sunning on the banks and reluctantly sliding into the muddy water when the boat was still 100 yards off. “All good eating except for the biggest ones,” Jody called over the motor’s din. “That reddish-tinged meat’s too strong.” He flicked a finger as we passed stout fishing lines tied off to bushes along the shore, different owners apparently marking their lines with different flagging tape of different colors. “Set lines. Catfish, most likely.” A minute later we scared up two coots, ungainly black birds that ran on top of the water for forty yards—looking more like cartoon birds than the real thing—before they finally attained liftoff speed. Even after liftoff, it took another forty yards of frantic flapping just inches off the water before they gained sufficient airspeed to climb. All I knew about coots was what I’d been told by duck hunters, who unanimously despised them. They referred to coots as “mud hens” and “the duck you’ll only eat once.” Jody actually looked both surprised and somewhat hurt by that assessment, which was nonsense. Coots were fine eating, particularly in a gumbo. “It’s the fat and the skin that are fishy,” he shouted. “You breast ’em out soon as you kill ’em, get rid a’ that fat and skin, and they’re delicious.” Coots made Jody think of garfish, another fine meat that got a bad rap outside Cajun country. Gar are ugly, primordial fish, with an elongated body and a long jaw lined with sharp teeth. Their scales are so thick that some Indian tribes used them as arrowheads. In my world, if you happened to hook and land a gar, you had someone snap your picture with it, then threw it back into the river or into a garbage can, whichever was closer. Jody maintained that gar patties were delicious. Again, it was a question of knowing what to do with the animal. “It’s got these sorta ligaments that you have to cut around. And you need to scrape the meat from the skin with a spoon and let it soften up in the fridge for a day or two. But mix that meat up with some breadcrumbs, dip it in milk and egg, then dredge it in seasoned flour, and fry it up? Hoo! Best thing you ever ate.” The very thought brought a smile to his face.
His view about the superiority of gar patties as table fare held until he spotted a group of turtles sunning on a log. A couple were as big as any freshwater turtles I’d ever seen, nearly the size of trash can lids. I’d had sea turtle eggs years ago in Nicaragua but had never knowingly eaten turtle or knew anyone else who had. “Oh, you gotta love turtle, Bill!” Jody called, his tone almost worried, as if whoever had been charged with my upbringing had neglected his duty. “See ’em? See that big snapper, that big peaked shell? Now, snapper’s good, but that other one there? We call ’em yellow bellies. That’s the best. Smother ’em in a brown gravy, or brown ’em in a pot with some onion and make a sauce piquant? Talk about some good! Hoo, son! Shoot, you got light, dark, every kind of meat you could ask for is on a turtle.” When next I looked, Jody had his head cocked ever so slightly to one side and I realized that for once he wasn’t scanning the river for the next wild thing. He appeared to be savoring some distant memory. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but I’d have bet money that it included people he loved and a large platter of yellow-belly turtle.
Having collected and eaten a salad of plants growing in my own lawn, I felt I’d taken personal locavorism about as far as I could. In addition to realizing the primacy of garlic in any dish it graces, I’d discovered just how much time and trouble it took for a child of the suburbs to close the gap between himself and what he ate. Which made me wonder if there were still people in America for whom it was not a time-consuming stunt, but something they just did. Were there people who had no need to rediscover the old ways because they’d never given them up in the first place? People who got their sustenance with their own hands as naturally as I selected a shopping cart from the parking lot corral and shoved it toward the motion-activated doors of my supermarket?
The circuitous path that led me to Jody Meche had begun with the old saying, “A Cajun’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat him first.” At least I’d thought it was an old saying. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I’d seen it on a bumper sticker. Whatever its origin, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It might even be an apt motto for the whole human species. I’d been seeing a recent spate of stories in the media about new discoveries of humanlike species or subspecies with whom we’d apparently shared the planet for thousands of years. There were the Denisovians, discovered in Siberia in 2010, the Red Deer People in east Asia (so-called because of their evident fondness for venison), and a hobbit-like race discovered on an island midway between Asia and Australia. The discovery of these cousins had been a mind-bender. Like most people, I’d grown up thinking that our only competitors were the Neanderthals, the Hummer of humanoids—large, powerful, and doomed. Now it seemed that every week brought the discovery of a new shoot of the family tree. All of which made our survival that much more remarkable. We—Homo sapiens sapiens—had somehow beaten all comers and won the evolutionary Hunger Games. These discoveries were so recent that anthropologists had yet to advance theories about them, although those were sure to come soon. It was our bigger brain, some would argue. We’d schemed our way to the top. It was our constant horniness, others w
ould say, the ability—and desire—to mate irrespective of the season. We’d sexually outhustled the competition, swarming them with superior numbers. I wasn’t likely to be asked my opinion, which was infinitely more elegant. What if our forebears were proto-Cajuns? What if we’d prevailed because we’d eaten everything that didn’t eat us first?
I started making phone calls and one contact led to another. Eventually, I talked to a woman named Toni Deboisier, who at the time worked for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. Unprompted, she actually quoted “A Cajun’ll eat anything.” Better yet, she knew some Cajuns who still got a good portion of their food from the Atchafalaya Basin. She gave me some background information about the place that I hadn’t known. I was correct, she said, in that it had always been wild and sparsely populated. The few people who lived there gathered together in small towns—settlements, really—often consisting of just a few families and a store. These people got their living from fishing, hunting, trapping, and collecting Spanish moss, which was used as mattress stuffing and even in car seats until the early 1900s. Until well into the latter half of the twentieth century, when the market for fur collapsed, Louisiana had led the nation in the production of furs, well ahead of its closest competitor, Alaska. Most of its trapping took place in the Atchafalaya Basin.
If one were to identify a turning point, it was 1927, the year that the most destructive river flood in U.S. history came. It is hard to imagine the scale of this disaster. The Mississippi breached its levee system in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles of land, some of it to a depth of thirty feet. The flood affected seven states and killed 245 people. When it was all over, Congress gave the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the responsibility of making sure such an event never happened again. And so the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel was dug. As with most large-scale fine-tunings of nature, there were a few unforeseen consequences. The faster river carried more volume and dropped vastly more silt. Some parts of the Basin that had been swamp and marsh, suddenly receiving more water, became less productive. On the other hand, other watery places—bayous, swamps, and lakes—got silted up and turned into bottomland. A good number of houses in the Basin were literally underwater, while in other areas, siltation was turning once-navigable waters into bottomland forests. Towns that had kept in touch with neighboring towns by boat found themselves cut off. Fishermen found some of their best areas dry. With houses either washed away or isolated by the silt, people had no choice but to leave. One by one, the settlements withered. A centuries-old way of life came to an end.
Not completely, however. What happened in many cases—including Jody’s, as I was to discover—was that while the family relocated to towns outside the Basin, the men either commuted to the Basin to ply their trades or built small camps where they could stay for days if the fish were running. And some of the children of these men still made their living by trapping wild crawfish in the Basin. Toni had come to know some of these people, who were about the only ones left making a living inside the Basin itself and who still got a lot of their food there.
She knew them because a group of crawfishermen had formed an organization to assert their rights against the oil and gas companies whose pipelines crossed the area and which leased drilling rights to areas in the Basin. In theory, under such leases the area itself was supposed to remain open to the public. In fact, the companies usually posted “No Trespassing” signs, put up fences, and closed off waterways. And they enforced their claims with armed guards. After decades of such treatment, the notoriously independent crawfishermen had finally banded together to take their fight to the courts. The group they founded was the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association.
Toni offered to make some calls on my behalf but warned me that historically, outsiders had been viewed with suspicion by “swampers,” as they called themselves. The first outsiders coming to the area had been game wardens. They were not welcomed with open arms. Swampers had never been much on paperwork, calendars, or limits. They took what the swamp gave when it gave it. Toni recounted a recent conversation with a man on the Monday after the Saturday squirrel season opener. “I asked how he’d done and he said, ‘Real good, Toni. I got ninety-eight.’” When she had tactfully noted that the limit was twelve squirrels per day, the fellow had replied, “Hell, Toni! Gotta get ’em while you can!”
The one thing working in my favor, she said, was that the people knew they were a vanishing breed and wanted the old ways recorded before they were gone entirely. A few days later she called to give me the number of Mike Bienvenu, the president of LCPA-West.
When I got Mike on the phone, he didn’t exactly rush to make me feel comfortable. After a few minutes of talking about nothing in particular, he said he was willing to tell me what I wanted to know, but there was something that I needed to understand before we went any further. I told him I was all ears. “Bill, the level of corruption in Louisiana surpasses anything else in the nation. Anything you’ve ever seen or heard or imagined. Because the oil and gas companies run everything here. Everything here exists to further their interests.” He paused to make sure his words were registering. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Bill?” I said that I understood. When you’re a writer trying to gain the confidence of someone who wants to talk, you let him talk.
“They own every living politician in this state,” Mike went on, his voice rising as he cataloged the bribery, extortion, and fraud. “Every sheriff in every parish. Every judge. They own the same state officials who are charged with seeing that they obey environmental laws. They pay these state officials more not to do their jobs than the state does to do them. Do you see what I’m telling you, Bill? So, if the police are called to a dispute between a crawfisherman and an oil company guard, who you think they’re going to arrest? Our members. And, of course, the oil and gas boys are going to break every environmental law in the book when they dig their work canals and drill and build their pipelines. They’re going to pile that spoil right next to where they dig it, which stops the natural flow of water in the Basin and kills all the fish because there’s no oxygen left in the water. Because that’s the cheapest, easiest way to do it and because they know nobody is going to come and tell them they can’t.”
The more he talked, the less Mike sounded like someone trying to sell me something. He sounded instead like a guy embittered by the corruption and injustice all around him, like a man trying to relieve himself of a burden by talking about it. It’s a strange phenomenon, but not all silences are equal. I think Mike sensed that I was really listening. “Lemme ask you something,” he said abruptly. “You think you would have heard about that oil spill”—the BP spill of 2010, when an oil platform exploded, killing eleven men outright, wounding many more, and releasing nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf—“if those fellas hadn’t been killed?” His voice slipped into that of a befuddled oil company man who had just had a reporter’s microphone shoved in his face. “‘Oil spill? What oil spill? I don’t see no oil spill.’ Hell no, you wouldn’t have heard of it. You wouldn’t have heard a peep. See, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Where you come from, corruption is a—whatchamacallit—an ‘unfortunate aspect’ of life or business or politics. Down here, corruption is not an unfortunate aspect of life. It’s all there is. It’s the way of life itself.”
Mike said he had started crawfishing right after he graduated from high school in 1973. In those days, he said, he often caught 2,000 pounds of crawfish a day. Now he was lucky, “really lucky,” if he got half that, though he was one of the few trappers still out there trying. These days, he said, very few people cared to venture any deeper into the swamp than they could while still keeping some outside reference point—a boat or a bridge piling—in sight. “The swamp is a scary place if you don’t know your way around it,” he said, describing the endless maze of bayous, swamps, and marshes. “You get turned around and it all looks the same unless you know it by hea
rt.” The wild crawfish trappers, who set and checked 200 to 400 traps a day, were about the only ones who ventured deep into the Basin regularly. They were the only ones who saw firsthand what the oil and gas companies did out there. “We’re what you’d call ‘inconvenient witnesses’ to the oil and gas boys,” Mike said. “We know what the areas they’re ruining looked like five or ten or fifteen years ago, before they laid their pipelines and illegally mismanaged the spoil so that it made the water stagnate and the fish die. So of course they’re doing everything they can to throw us out.”
At a certain moment, I blurted out what I was really thinking, which was that all this sounded so deeply and hopelessly fucked up that I didn’t think that I’d have had the stomach to keep fighting back. I asked point-blank how he kept from giving up. There followed the longest pause yet in our forty-five-minute conversation. I thought I heard him exhale and was for some reason sure he had been smoking the whole time. “Bill,” he said in a subdued voice. “This is our life. This is all we got. I’ll fight those sons a bitches till the day I die.”
And then he invited me to come see the swamp for myself.
A few months later, I flew to Lafayette, rented a car, and drove an hour east to the house of Mike and Alice Bienvenu in the hamlet of Saint Martinville. A few minutes later, I was following their truck down LA 352, the Henderson Levee Road, a gravel road that sometimes ran parallel to the levee and sometimes atop it. The levee itself was a rounded hump forty to fifty feet high that looked as if it had been there for at least a century. Henderson Levee forms the western boundary of the Atchafalaya Basin and runs for many miles. After half an hour, Mike turned off the levee and descended to a boat ramp, where his skiff was waiting. Five minutes later, we tied up to the houseboat, which was moored semipermanently along the bank of a canal. It was essentially a barge, fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, with an open porch at either end and walkways on both sides of the “house” part, which took up less than half the available space. Three other skiffs were tied up, and four or five adults and as many children were aboard. The adults were taking it easy and the kids were fishing from the boat, running ashore into the woods and back again, shouting and playing.