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Heading back to New Orleans from the Atchafalaya I spoke with Randy about the possibility of the Corps opening distributaries from the Mississippi in order to build the coastline back up. The way he spoke had been encouraging. He spoke of the current model – channeling the river so it flows fast and deep straight to the deep water of the Gulf – as being great for navigation (which was what the Corps had been empowered by congressional mandate to engineer the river for) but wasteful of an important natural resource – the sediments carried by the river. “Like I told you, once they get shot into deep water, they’re unrecoverable,” he said. “It’s a waste.”

“So what has the Corps been doing?”

“Well,” he said, looking behind him to merge onto the highway and dropping into high gear, “this is all very new. But we have several sediment distribution pipelines that we’ve been putting into the river, so we can dump the sediments into the swamps and marshes.”

“I saw some coming up, I think. What do they look like?”

“They’re just pipes. You see them coming up over the levee?”

“Precisely. Well, the idea sounds great.”

“Well, there’s been opposition,” he said. “See, here in Louisiana there’s always opposition. There’s so many interests all around the river; some people have homes, some people have businesses, there’s crawfish fishermen, oyster fishermen, shrimp fishermen, and they all want different things. And basically, no one wants it in their back yard. We have another big spillway, which you’ll see as you bike up, the Bonnet Carre spillway, which enters Lake Pontchartrain. People don’t like us using this, because when we dump all those sediments into the lake you get a big algae bloom which kills the fish in the lake. And it’s not very pretty, and people have all their lakeside homes right there.”

Atchafalaya Basinkeeper was an example of this. They were complaining that the Atchafalaya basin was silting up – in other words, it was receiving sediments. This was changing the ecosystem, and in particular turning swamp into bottomland forest. This was bad for the existing forest. But the other options were probably worse. If the river came down the Atchafalaya, it would completely alter the existing ecosystem, flooding out some parts and dumping huge banks of silt and mud elsewhere. And the only way it would not come down the Atchafalaya is if the Corps kept on doing what it was doing: by putting sediment there, it was slowly building up the level of the basin – plugging the hole, so to speak. Lake Pontchartrain was another good candidate for receiving sediment: it was the ocean lapping right at the edge of New Orleans. It was dangerous. “I think Lake Pontchartrain should just get filled in and turned into swamp completely.”

“Right. You can imagine how that would go over with the people who have their houses there. ‘We’re going to take your nice lakeside property and turn it into a mosquito hole.’ It’d be safer for New Orleans, although I’d say that New Orleans really does benefit from having all that navigable water on its north side. There are tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs.”

“I read about the Corps sediment diversions online, and read that some of the opposition was for environmental reasons: the water is not clean – it contains pesticides and agricultural runoff and pharmaceuticals and all sorts of other things in it, and there was a study done suggesting that diversions from the river will kill the swamp vegetation, making the coast even more vulnerable to being ripped apart by storm surges.”

“Right. That’s possible. And that’s why the Corps projects are small. We’re just running pipelines. It’s nothing like the Atchafalaya. The Atchafalaya is thirty percent of the water.”

“What are the diversion pipelines?”

“Oh, less than one percent. Much less than one percent.”

“Is that going to be able to do anything?”

“Probably not,” he said. “But you have to start small. The Corps has never rebuilt a coastline. That’s never been part of the mission. We don’t have experience doing this. No one really has any experience doing this. So you can’t just rush into it.”

“But isn’t there some kind of urgency on this project? The coast is losing thirty square miles every year.”

“Well, that’s why we’re doing the pipelines, despite the fact that some people say we shouldn’t even be doing that.”

I found myself thinking of the lady at the post office in Pointe a la Hache, who said that it was too late and everything should have been done fifty years ago. Sero sapiunt Phryges, the Trojans are too late wise.

“Are there any thoughts of opening up the old distributaries like Bayou Plaquemines, or building a new spillway for the area south of New Orleans?”

He just shook his head as if in polite condescension to someone who just didn’t understand the world very well. “Those would be big, big projects,” he said. “You have to understand, the Atchafalaya can take all this water because it’s not developed. Look around here, there’s no one here. But everywhere lower on the Mississippi, shit John you saw it as you came up, there’s houses and people and businesses all along that river. Big distributary projects would expose thousands of being to being flooded out. Projects like that are going to require a huge mandate, which we don’t have. People don’t want the Corps or the government in general making decisions as to who is going to get flooded.”

“But the coast probably does need to get flooded in order to survive.”

He looked at me and laughed. “That’s the problem. You see, it’s like I’ve been telling you, the Corps is subject to our political system. If we don’t have a mandate we’re not going to do it. The only reason we can flood Morgan City if we need to is we had a mandate to keep the Mississippi River where it was. But sediment distribution is going to be a much harder sell.”

The problem, in short, was this: we had taken over nature’s management of the river, and replaced it with our political system. This actually functioned reasonably well – I am not a pessimist in these matters – but it functioned slowly and typically lurched forward in reaction to disasters. There was, in fact, demand for rebuilding the coastline. And I think there were potential candidates for locations for replacing the levees with dams that could be opened to flood the swamps. At West Pointe a la Hache, for instance, there is a clear channel from the river to the swamp without towns or businesses; and both north and south of Pointe a la Hache on the eastbank there were several possible locations. These would be big projects, but they would be necessary. In the end, the only way forward was a more accurate imitation of nature’s system of distributaries throughout the delta.  But in the meantime, it looked like the coast erosion was going to get very bad.

“One percent isn’t going to do very much, is it?” I asked. “The coastline was maintained by getting one hundred percent of the river-water in the past.”

“No, it’s probably not.”

Two, three, or five percent isn’t going to do very much either, is it?”

“Probably not.”

Into the swamp.

I think most people whose love of nature is undimmed by mechanized life fantasize about the swamp: paddling a boat beneath a dense canopy of trees; being watched by motionless reptiles and cunning panthers; feeling the thud of living motion against the hull of your boat and wondering what it is; seeing strange blooms deep in the darkness and eyes at the edge of the campfire’s light. The swamp is primal and archetypal and hence godlike, containing its opposite; it is the generator and nourisher of life, but because it is so difficult for land animals to cross and so labyrinthinely featureless in its arrangement, it speaks to us of the danger that life always poses to life.

We were now in such a place, ducking in the high water to get beneath the buttonbushes and swamp-privets that clogged the boatways, entering dark passageways beside smooth-boled cypress and tupelos. Cottonmouths darted across our paths, intent on their course; alligators peered at us from inaccessible corners of the swamp.

But my restless mind does not stay mystical for long in an obviously distressed forest, as this was. Within minutes with the help of my guide I had learned the three tree species that were there – and in the standing water there were only three: bald cypress (Taxodium distichum – by far the dominant species), swamp tupelo, and water locust. But none of these species were regenerating. The absence of young cypress was particularly striking.

“Why aren’t they regenerating?”

“The water’s too high,” was the response. “When the Mississippi flooded naturally, any one spot might flood only once every few years. Now the Atchafalaya gets water from the Mississippi every year. The young cypresses have to have a few years of low water to get established. That way they can get above the water level. They can’t get completely covered by the floodwaters for months at a time. It kills them.”

This was part of the contradiction of the area. The Atchafalaya was one of the last great cypress swamps left. But it was a fossil ecosystem: cypresses grow slowly and can live for thousands of years, and the ones growing here were relatively old (though not terribly large). But the swamp was becoming a river – a river a third as big as the Mississippi, in fact. This would not be a problem if swamps were forming elsewhere. But they weren’t. In fact, existing swamps elsewhere on the coast were increasingly falling victim to the influx of seawater, and none of the swamp species could stand salt water. The water and sediments the swamps needed were almost all in two places: in the Mississippi, where they were channeled behind levees and shot into deep water into the Gulf, where they never became part of any freshwater ecosystem, and in the Atchafalaya.

The fact that the swamp could only take a few floods per decade was indicative of the basic problem with nature: its terribly complexity, a complexity far greater than human thought, which is simple. As soon as we interrupt a natural system, we take upon ourselves the task of mimicking this complexity. We don’t typically have the patience for this kind of activity. The Atchafalaya could only reasonably serve as a floodway for the Mississippi if three or four other Atchafalayas were created, which could receive water in other years. Of course, cutting twenty-mile swaths of floodland through privately owned property would not be easy. But the Atchafalaya, big as it was, would not be able to function alone.

There was also about the place a kind of lifelessness, which I was surprised by. It was quiet – few birds, few insects, and we saw few animals. Accepting the fact that this was an unusual time – the water was very high and we did not visit a hummock where the animals might gather in the high-water – there is also simply the fact that this is a highly disturbed ecosystem. “The most important plants here are the old cypress,” Ryan (our guide) said. “That’s because they develop holes and cavities. The wood is extremely rot-resistant, so even with holes in them the trees can last for a long time. Since the birds and mammals can’t live on the ground or in the water, they need big, old trees.”

“And they’re all gone,” I said.

This one is just a shell.

“They’re not all gone, but they’re mostly gone. I’ll show you one, there’s one in this way.” He turned the boat and we came up within a minute or two to a six-foot-diameter tree. “See this one here? The whole swamp was full of trees like this – and a lot bigger ones, too. There’s only one reason why this tree was left.” We circled around it and could see – it was hollow. “There was no wood inside it. It’s just a shell. Now, it’s important – trees like this are perfect habitat – but look around. There are just a few of these trees around here. I can basically take you to each one, it’s like you get to know them individually. But the swamp used to be filled with these.”

“How old is this tree?”

“You can’t take a coring of a hollow tree, but based on the way these grow, it’s probably over a thousand years old.”

“They grow slowly.”

“They grow really slowly.”

“Even though we’re in the subtropics.”

Cottonmouth.

“You can tell they grow slowly from the logging industry. That’s one of the things we’re fighting against. Basically, these trees grow so slowly, and are so important, that we think they should be protected. But most of this land is private land. You can log in most of the basin and people do. But the trees grow so slowly that now most of it is either mining the cypress – that’s when they find old trees under the water, and they don’t rot, so you can pull them out and still use them – or they cut the trees down when they’re small and use them for mulch. It would take too long even to wait for them to become lumberable trees.”

“I read that your father had put pressure on Lowe’s and Home Depot and got them to stop selling cypress mulch from Louisiana.”

“Yeah, that was one of the things we did here at Basinkeeper. But we just found out there’s an operation going on in Baton Rouge where they’re chipping up the young cypress and shipping them to Europe. Europe has some new regulations coming into effect about generating a certain percentage of their electricity from sustainable sources, so they’re switching from coal to burning wood chips at some of their plants. And they can get cheap woodchips from the Atchafalaya. Cypress woodchips.”

Basinkeeper was apparently trying to put pressure on the Louisiana government, but that was an uphill battle to say the least, despite the fact that the coastal wetlands are demonstrably the only truly effective hurricane protection for Louisiana’s biggest city. Louisiana was asking for federal money to rebuild its wetlands but did not want to tell private landholders what they could do with their land – the thinking being that if they wanted to make woodchips out of the wetlands they could go ahead and do it. It’s a free country.

The more time I spent with the cypresses, the more I was amazed. Their needles resemble the needles of sequoias, and they are, in fact, related. Living in hurricane country, the cypresses could never get as tall as the sequoias, but I suspect that the cypress forests that greeted Bienville and the other first Frenchmen here were as grand as the forests of the Sierras. The sequoias were preserved while the cypresses perished simply because it was so much more practical to kill the cypresses: while the sequoias fell and shattered and then had to be lugged down dry mountainsides, the cypresses plopped softly into the water and could be floated on out almost without effort to the Big Easy, which, it is no exaggeration to say, is a city of cypress.

Inveni urbem taxodinam, taxodinam reliqui.

Cypress is the reason why New Orleans is so beautiful today: all the filigree on all the houses is cypress, and even if left unpainted and neglected for decades the stuff does not rot. It is mealy-grained and odd-colored and was never used by the wealthy for finer purposes, and so the endless abundance of the swamps was used not for furniture but for building, and building anything and everything: bridges and mansions and fences and slave-quarters and shotgun-shacks and cheap mass-produced filigree, all of which gives New Orleans the appearance of being the most meticulous city in America for preservation, when in reality it is just lucky to have been surrounded by a whole hell of a lot of cypress.

Six hundred years will not be enough to grow those forests back, and it is still not clear where they would even have a chance to grow right now. Regeneration on the Atchafalaya, the country’s largest stand of bald cypress, is currently stalled.

“You can see here, when all the trees are gone, a lot of times what comes in is willow,” our guide said, “and that creates a totally different type of ecosystem.” The willow – I could not identify it to species, but it may be an exotic invader – grows like an overgrown bush, only twenty to thirty feet tall, fast-growing, fast-dying, and not creating the kind of deep shade and old-growth forest habitat the cypress and tupelo do.

The tupelos impressed me too. They do not, at first glance, look like the tupelos of the Catskills: they get extremely fat butts when growing in water, and as flowering, berrying trees they are a crucial food source for pollinators and birds in the swamp.

Spanish moss in bloom.

We saw few other plants in the swamp, which disappointed me, but the ground was so flooded there were little forbs to be seen. There was much buttonbush and swamp-privet, and on slightly higher ground much of the palustrine senecio native to the area. But there were not too many flowers.

“You want some flowers?” Ryan asked. “Take a look at this.” He reached over a plucked some Spanish moss from a tree. “It’s flowering now.”

And there, amidst the gray links of the moss – which is not a moss but a flowering plant – was a little orange flower. I was amazed – I had seen these everywhere and never stopped to notice their flowers. I loved them as I love all the small, unnoticed beauties of life.

But coming back from the tour I was pensive and even melancholy. There are times when I wish I had some other brain, that considered and imagined and appreciated less; or that would only appreciate what was there, and not look in the forest for the young trees to check its health, or ask why so many trees were the same age and suspect that the whole place had been logged at some point. I could feel how beautiful the swamp had once been; I could imagine what an uninterrupted forest of old-growth cypress would be like – a place to make the worshipper in all of us stand dumb with awe. And we had destroyed it.

Melancholia.

The Atchafalaya. A river fully one-third as big as the Mississippi, and perhaps someday just as big.

As a person who thinks about things as opposed to just doing them, I generally understand human catastrophes. Human catastrophes are typically the result of thought – the result of some kind of understanding of the world. Any understanding of the world is necessarily limited, and when people act enough on such limited apprehensions, catastrophes are a common result.

Not that long ago, the Mississippi River was thought of as the source of the water for southern Louisiana. And it is. And since southern Louisiana is prone to flooding – flooding being an excess of water – the thought was that flooding could be controlled by controlling the river. I understand systems of thought like this perfectly well, and I understand how people fall right into them. The Mississippi is now tightly behind levees, which have not been breached since 1927. And yet if you look at a map comparing the Louisiana coastline of 1927 with that of today, you see that the entire southern part of the state is falling into a permanent state of flood – vanishing bit by bit into the ocean. The total loss is around 30 square miles every year – an area larger than Manhattan island getting bitten off from the coastline every year.

This was not happening until the river was effectively encased behind levees. So what happened? The problem, as so often, lies in the basic premise. Stand on the bank of the river and watch the river flow by: it is easy to apprehend that the Mississippi is the source of the area’s water. It is less easy to apprehend that the Mississippi is also the source of the area’s land. When the river does not flood the land – and it is currently not allowed to – it drops no sediments on it. Over time the goopy land compacts and subsides, and the ocean eats away at it, and there is less and less land every year. Lower Louisiana is getting flooded by the sea because we do not allow the Mississippi to flood it anymore.

Human beings have lived with floods for thousands of years, but someone apprehended that they were inconvenient at best and extremely dangerous at worst, and now not even in Egypt are rivers allowed their normal cycles of flood and dryness when people can help it. But it is now recognized that the people of the true Mississippi Delta – i.e. the land south of Baton Rouge, not the area between Vicksburg and the Peabody Hotel – will have to find some way to restore or artificially mimic the ancient floods of the river in order to have a land at all.

Going about this will be exceptionally difficult. We are talking about an area comprising thousands of square miles, which cannot survive as land without being periodically flooded – an area, moreover, which is thickly populated now and is also home to “the American Ruhr” or “Cancer Alley,” several hundred miles of chemical plants, oil refineries, grain elevators, coal transfer facilities, and all the other dirty businesses that can use the Mississippi’s ample water and ocean access. None of these homes or businesses are built to be flooded. The political problems involved in flooding out people’s land – and it is almost all privately owned – are almost infinite. Nor can sediments possibly be trucked in in sufficient supply to make any difference to the coastline. Only the river can possibly provide what the area needs in order to remain land. But the river is hemmed in, and kept there – by act of the U.S. Congress, and its enforcers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

So I decided to take a trip out to the Atchafalaya Basin with Randy Perrin, an engineer for the Corps, who happens to be one of my friends from my days in New Orleans. The Atchafalaya – a river running to the west of the Mississippi, reaching the sea right in the middle of the Louisiana coast – was a quiet, natural area, a perfect backdrop for conversation, first of all, but also more than that. The Atchafalaya is a comparatively healthy river ecosystem. In fact, it is one of the few areas on the Louisiana coastline which is growing – land is being added, because the Atchafalaya still floods relatively normally.

But it also represents the single greatest engineering problem on the Mississippi river, a problem so brilliantly and thoroughly dissected by John McPhee in his 1987 essay “Atchafalaya” that no one has bothered to talk about the problem much since. When people think about the problems of New Orleans, they think of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures on the Industrial Canal, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. But those are small problems compared with the danger the Atchafalaya poses. Storm surges recede. But the Atchafalaya has the potential to destroy New Orleans entirely by severing its connection to the river.

The Atchafalaya is, by itself, a tiny river, draining part of Louisiana. But several hundred years ago, the Mississippi eroded a bend for itself which touched the Atchafalaya. At the point of contact, the rivers were at the same level, but the Atchafalaya reached the sea in half the distance the Mississippi did. Do the math: that means its slope is twice as steep. In times of flood, when the Mississippi was high, the differential was even greater. Slowly but surely, the Atchafalaya started to capture the Mississippi, each year taking more and more water. By 1950, the Atchafalaya had captured one-third of the water of the Mississippi and the process was accelerating.  It was headed for complete capture: a new river, the Mississifalaya.

This would be a complete disaster for all the river towns south of Baton Rouge, and primarily New Orleans. The riverbed at New Orleans is 180 feet deep, and the only thing keeping the ocean from rushing in and turning the riverbed into a sluggish brackish estuary is the constant pressure of the water coming downstream. Without fresh water in the river, the city would lose its water supply, and without flow, its sewage system. Cancer Alley would suffer the same fate – without access to the garden hose known as the Mississippi none of the old factories and refineries would be able to function. They would be abandoned within years.

The Army Corps of Engineers stepped into the gap, building a series of massive dams between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya, and stabilizing the Atchafalaya’s flow at thirty percent of the Mississippi. The result has become the Corps’ first experiment in distributing Mississippi water into other outlets, and an example of how the coastline could be rebuilt by using the river. In that way it has been a success. But the same basic problem remains: the river wants to abandon New Orleans, and it seems to be merely waiting for its opportunity. “The Mississippi River,” as McPhee observes,

with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side.

A glance at the map shows the extent of the problem. The Mississippi has, in fact, become a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico – I had biked and seen precisely that, with open water on both sides – while nearer parts of the Louisiana coastline are nutrient-starved lowlands just waiting to capture the river. The most obvious spot is West Cote Blanch Bay, the northernmost intrusion of open Gulf water on the coast. If you were charged with distributing sediments along the Louisiana coast, this would be the place you’d start – it looks like the hungriest spot. It is also almost precisely the mouth of the Atchafalaya. Nature was working perfectly. But man had changed nature’s workings – or perhaps just postponed them.

Whether or not this project of attempting to make the Mississippi do something it had never done before – stay in one channel – would work is a question which we can leave until I got a look at the dams I found upriver, the Old River Control Structures where the Mississippi and Atchafalaya touch. As Randy Perrin said, “If you’re asking me if we can prevent the Mississippi from going down the Atchafalaya, I’ll say of course we can. Until we can’t. It really is just a question of mathematics. If you have a big enough mountain, the river will take a long time to get through it. If you have people to maintain that mountain, the river will never get through it. Unless there’s something you can’t predict. Something that’s not in anybody’s equation. And generally, something you can’t predict happens eventually.”

But it might be possible that the big dam holding the Mississippi off from the Atchafalaya might be too successful – here was something which did not enter the equation at all. The Mississippi was being held off from the entire Gulf coast, and its sediments were being routed out to sea and shot into deep water. The result was the collapse of the coastline. This made the entire area susceptible to storm surge – a process which would work gradually, but eventually eat the whole coast away if some solution were not found.

And the Corps was now looking into solutions. “Basically the buzzwords now around the Corps are sediments, nutrients, capturing sediments,” Randy told me as we drove away from Johnny Angel’s house. “We’re looking at that as a resource that we’re supposed to conserve. Right now, we’re shooting all those sediments into the Gulf. They can never be recovered there. They’ll be lost. We’re seeing that as a problem now.”

“Why wasn’t that seen as a problem before?”

“Well, you have to understand the way the Corps works. The Corps really was never here to manage the river in some holistic sense. The Corps has very specific mandates from Congress. First it was navigation – the Corps was involved with improving navigation on U.S. waterways. You can see that making sense from a military standpoint, the same way roads are a military concern. Then it was flood control. Really it was the Great Flood of 1927 that got the Corps involved in flood control and the levees. Basically, they saw that state agencies were not reliable during a big flood, because one state would fight against another state trying to get the river to flood somebody else’s land. There had to be someone impartial – or at least less partial – involved. If you want to read about there’s a great book, called, Rising Tide, about how the Corps started really paying attention to the river after that flood. That flood was a disaster, and it was clear that something had to change.”

And the Corps had, in fact, changed things. In 2011, the Mississippi River had the greatest flood it has ever had, and yet you have probably never heard of it. The river was carrying twenty-five percent more water than the 1927 flood, and yet very little damage was done. The Corps had managed the situation brilliantly – including making politically difficult decisions to blow levees. This had been done in Missouri and Arkansas, in sparsely settled farmland. Those farmers, of course, did not like the situation, but the needs of the many had outweighed the needs of the few.

“So anyway, that was what the Corps did, navigation and flood control on rivers. Shipping and the economy. That was our mandate from Congress. We didn’t really do anything else. So people who complain about building up the coastline, that wasn’t part of the mandate. If it was part of the mandate we would have a program. But that has to come from Congress. So the environment has always been something of an afterthought for the Corps. And hey, you can blame Congress for that.  But in recent years the Congress has given us a new mandate to also do projects for environmental restoration.”

And the fundamental environmental restoration work that had to go on was restoring the relationship of the river to the wetlands around it – a relationship where the river nourishes the whole coast. And so we were headed for the Atchafalaya, to take a look at the one part of the Louisiana coastal wetland that was growing.  The Atchafalaya had been seen as a problem: it might just be the solution.

Mystic Blue Signs, New Orleans.