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Throughout Louisiana, the roads are at least slightly embanked to deal with flooding, and the river of course is heavily leveed, and the material for the banks and levees typically comes from nearby – generally the ground adjacent to the road or levee.  So you are always travelling next to a ditch.  The drier ditches are lined with little mud-towers four or five inches high.  I am told [erroneously; see below] these are made by fiddler crabs.  Mark Twain mentions them in his Life on the Mississippi: “The drainage ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs – ‘fiddlers.’ One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise.  Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees.”  I never saw any myself; and I think the levees, which are much larger now, are not much endangered by these crabs anymore.

[These are in fact made by crawfish, thank you Don for the correction.]

This is actually a pretty good transcription of the way people talk in Louisiana, where there is no distinction between “fine” and “find.”  But I’ll note the full transcription should be “Who fahn may, fahn lahf.”

Andrew with a crawfish.

When you’re in a car, you drive by people sometimes and wonder, “What the hell were they doing?” But you’re already long past, and don’t circle back to find out. On a bike, you just press the brake, drop your bike, and find out. I grabbed a sprig of a white-blooming shrub I hadn’t recognized – a privet as it turns out, an invasive which has taken over vast amounts of the South – and brought it over to this black couple, who were sitting, without fishing poles, by a bucket beside a ditch. The ditch was not more than a foot deep.

“Excuse me do you know what this shrub is?” I said, proffering the man the little sprig of white flowers.

He looked at me. “Dat – dat deah is a white flar, dat blooms in de springtime.”

I was not sure if he was mocking me, or if I had come across the most literal-minded person in Louisiana. I’m still not sure. But I could now dispense with the preliminaries. “So… what are you doing?”

“We crawfish fishin’.”

“Crawfish fishin’! Here?”

“Oh yeah dis is a goodplace.” The accent on the first syllable of Southern compounds – like a redlight – is quite a phenomenon.

“Can you show me how it’s done?”

“You nevuh seen nobody crawfish fishin’?”

“Never. Never in my whole life.”

Zana with some crawdads.

“Where you from?”

“New York City.”

“Hooooo-wee! You come all de way heah from Newyowk on dat bahsickle?”

“No a friend drove me down here, I’m biking up the Mississippi River. I started in Venice, I’m going to Minnesota.”

“Minnesota?” They both looked at each other. “Why you doin’ dat?”

“Well, this way I get to see everything. A couple of days ago I got a shrimp fishermen to take me out to the Gulf, I saw them fishing for shrimp, now I’m seeing crawfish fishing! We don’t have stuff like this in New York.”

“Oh yeah, it’s different down heah. Oh yeah.”

“So have you caught any?”

“Oh yeah we got some.” He showed me the bucket, at the bottom of which about half a dozen crawfish were crawling about.

“I’m John by the way.”

“Andrew.” He gave his last name too.  He was wearing jeans and a very large white t-shirt.  He was probably in his fifties, with white hairs in his thin moustache and at his temples.  The rest of his head was covered by a now-almost-formless baseball cap.

“Zana,” she said.  She looked at least a decade younger.  Both were wearing white rubber boots – coonass boots.

“So how do you catch them?”

The crawfish and the bait.

“We’ll show you,” Zana said. She took a garden hoe and reached it into the center of the ditch, where a kind of wire pyramid could be seen coming up out of the water. She put the hoe into the wire pyramid and lifted, pulling out a net which was suspended on the wire, like a pair of scales or a hanging brazier. Three or four more crawfish were crawling on the net around a gooey meat-colored glob. Holding onto the glob, the net was dumped into the bucket, and then returned to the water.

“That thing in the middle is meat?”

“Yup dat’s the bait. And they come right fuh it.”

“Can I try?”

“Shuwah. We got anodduh net right deah.” So I grabbed the garden hoe, pulled the net up with it, and put the crawfish into the bucket without dumping the bait.

“This is great! It’s easy!”

“Oh yeah dey jes come right fuh dat meat.”

“Should I put the net in the same place or should I move it to a new place?”

“Move it ovuh deah.”

So we continued our crawfish fishing. To me it is a miracle that people can be fed so easily: put a little bait in water, and there appears a meal. But it takes some knowledge: until I did this, I had no idea that there were crawfish in the wet ditches next to the road. They asked me about New York and I asked them about various things I had seen along the road. I tried to ask about the mud mounds I had seen around – mounds of mud about four or five inches high, with a hole in the middle, like a little volcano. Andrew tried all kinds of answers – alligator holes, muskrat holes – but I kept saying they were much smaller. I then found some on the other side of the road and showed him.

“Oooooh, dose. Dose ah fiddluhs.” That made sense – fiddler crabs. The holes were everywhere in drier ditches.

“Do you eat those?”

“Fiddluhs – yeah, shuwah you can eat dem. Crawfish is easier to catch dough.”

I stayed for awhile, for another changing of the nets. When I got up to go, we spoke about my trip to Minnesota, and how long it would take. I said two months. He seemed to think that was about right. “And when you get to your destinay” – dropping off the -tion – “I bet you gonna lay on yo back, and jes look at the stahs.”

It was a strange prophecy, I thought, but I hoped it would be true. It was beautiful.

I landed on the eastbank and immediately the place was different. It was quiet here – no highway, and indeed, no people. There was a structure, right across from the ferry landing, which was actually old – somehow or other an old wooden house had survived the hurricanes. It was abandoned, mind you, but it was still there. It was the finest piece of architecture I had seen so far.

Across the street from it was a brick shell of a building which had been the courthouse. It had been operating recently – it had modern additions tacked onto it, and war memorials along its front of fresh granite, and the kind of signs that indicate a twenty-first century government building:

NOTICE

ALL PACKAGES, BRIEFCASES, AND CONTAINERS
SUBJECT TO SEARCH PRIOR TO ENTERING BUILDING.

Old Plaquemines Parish Courthouse.

But it was just a shell, forty-foot-tall brick walls standing roofless under the blue sky. Charred timbers filled the enceinte of its walls. I was left to speculate if it had been flooded by the hurricane, and an electrical fire commenced, or was flooded and then set on fire by someone later, or something else. It was a striking enough ruin, with red brick arches through which the blue sky shone. It had become a kind of massive hive for large bees, resembling bumblebees. I don’t know if they were swarming particularly on this April day or if they are present in such numbers that they are always flying about, but it appeared that this entire hundred foot-long structure was their hive. They quite effectively deterred me from trying to explore within.

There was no one around. I ate my lunch under the tree in front of the courthouse ruin, and then walked around to the back, where I saw a post office in a trailer in the parking lot. Figuring whoever was working at the post office would know some things about Pointe a la Hache – and would also have time, given the complete desolation here – I walked over. As I came to the wooden ramp leading up to the door of the trailer, a woman in a post office uniform emerged with a can of wasp killer. She shook the can and looked up above the door.

“My God,” she said. “They just did that! That just happened! I can’t believe that!” She then took aim at a bee and shot some kind of foamy stuff at it. It buzzed around her, apparently unafraid, and she shot again and then swatted at it. It flew off. In her swatting she caught sight of me.

“It just put another hole in the wood!” she said. “Right now! In the last hour!” She pointed to a clearly visible dime-sized hole in the wood.

“What are they?”

“Wood bees,” she said. “They chew into the wood, they’re everywhere.”

“The old courthouse there seems to be their hive,” I said.

“Yeah… well they come from that tree over there,” she said, pointing to a bald cypress standing in what appeared to be the swamp, which began at the edge of the parking lot. She had a southern accent, but it was very slight. I could just barely pick up a slight lingering over her vowels. She had dark hair streaked with gray, and she looked fit and active and intelligent.

“How long has that courthouse been abandoned?”

“Oh… it burned down just before the storm. Then there was the storm, and… I don’t know. They say they’re going to fix it again, put the courthouse back on this side of the river.  I don’t know what will happen. You can see a lot of things got destroyed.” Indeed, we were standing in a weed-filled parking lot behind a ruined building, which was across the street from an abandoned house. The only thing functioning was the small trailer where she worked alone, waging a bardless war against a swamp full of wood bees.

“How much water was here?”

“Oh I don’t know. Probably over the levee. I was in Buras we had twenty-three feet there.” She paused. “It’s come back a little but… but not really. It’s mostly just trailers and mobile homes… when I was growing up we had a lot, we had hotels, all kinds of restaurants, we had stuff to do… we had three movie thee-ay-ters” – that word jumped out from her generally standard English – “we had one in Venice, one in Buras, one in Empire… now the kids today they don’t have anything to do… there’s the Whah” [the Y] “that’s got a swimmin’ poo but that’s about it.”

I spent about ten minutes later in the day while biking saying to myself over and over, “Swimmin’ poo,” and it did not get old to me.

“They say it’s gonna come back… I don’t know. You know my uncle he wrote an article I was looking at it… he wrote it in 1965, see we had Betsy in ’65 that was fifty years ago, before Katrina. He wrote the article just begging them to rebuild the coastline. Now they say they’re gonna do that but they shoulda done this fifty years ago. The bayous are all different we used to have mangroves and trees… all that’s gone. The whole land here has changed, you can tell.”

She said she was a few years from retirement, and then she’d “see.” It seemed she might have other places in mind to go. She seemed thoughtful and considerate, the kind of person who would spend her retirement going to wildlife refuges and looking at birds, thinking whatever quiet beautiful thoughtful thoughts those people think.

We parted warmly and I walked back over to my bike, determined to head north.  But after a few hundred feet I came to a store. My guidebook had informed me that this would be the last place I could get food or water today – the next store of any sort was on the other side of the campground I would be staying at, which was at the outskirts of New Orleans. So I decided to stop and hydrate. As I walked in I looked at the signs posted in the entryway, and one in particular charmed me:

It’s Summer Time If
You Are Looking to
Cool Off Call????
D-Money Waterslide
Contact: Desmond
(Tunafish) Simeon

Needless to say, I am always made happier by remembering that somewhere out there there is a person called Desmond “Tunafish” Simeon; even more so by knowing that I am near him, and can touch a piece of paper that ran through his printer.

Inside I admired the cashier, a thirtyish black woman who said things like, “You nee a bag chile?” She and a customer kept laughing and joking so much I just had to say, “I’m not from around here I’m from New York, and I just wanted to say what a pleasure it is listening to you two laugh and joke and talk. People around here HAVE FUN, and I think it’s beautiful.”

They broke into wide smiles. “WHAT? It’s not like that in New York??”

“No, in New York everybody works all the time.”

“Yeah,” he said: “it’s like they tense!”

She said, “You know, I’ve been to New York! One time. Yeah. You’re so right! Everyone there was like robots. Fast robots, but robots.”

He agreed. “You know I lived for a year in Huxtable Georgia you know every day I saw this woman she just waved at me, never came by to say hello or nothin. Never talked. Just waved – what the hell is that? Man, I’m not like that. I got to know you. I got to know you. We different here.”

I thanked them and took a seat with my drink. I downloaded the photos from my camera onto my computer, and discovered there was internet access there as well. So I got online and started sending emails, when I looked up and saw a muscular black man sitting down at my table with me. “Hey how y’all doin,” he said. “Where you from? I’m Zachary.” And after shaking my hand he started eating his lunch right there across from me. I couldn’t believe this. You didn’t need to be terribly extrovert to meet people in Louisiana: all you had to do was sit someplace and conversations would happen. He worked maintaining the levees, mostly mowing the grass; the levees are mowed in order to prevent trees from growing on them; trees, while binding the levees together while alive, rip out chunks of the levees when they fall, and ultimately weaken them. We discussed the animals found around here. He inquired very particularly about the deer in New York, and he sounded jealous when I told him how many we had.

“You got coyotes theh?”  It seemed to be a point of special curiosity for him, as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to ask someone from New York about coyotes.

“Lots. I hear them all the time at my cabin.”

With Zachary.

“They a new problem here… we never had ‘em before.”

“Well, they’re not a problem. Something’s got to eat the rabbits, right? You said there are lots of rabbits here.”

“Well that’s the problem I want to eat the rabbits, so I don’t want no coyotes! We catch the rabbits all the time.”

“You catch stuff, huh?  Is there any fur business around here anymore? I hear that used to be a major industry around here.”

“Yeah, that used to be… no mo. They used to catch muskrat.  Now they got that nutra-rat.”

“Yeah I’ve heard about them, don’t the coyotes eat those?”

“Oh no, the coyotes run from them, they get fifty pounds! Imagine a fifty-pound rat? That’s a nutrarat.”

The nutria, an introduced species, has caused problems by eating local vegetation so thoroughly that it compromises the physical structure of the swamp.  There was a government program encouraging hunters to kill them.

“The nutrarats, you get fi dollahs a tail if you bring ‘em in.”

I got one of the other diners to take a picture of me and Zachary. I felt hydrated and ready to strike north.

Unfortunately the next morning I lingered a bit in watching the sunrise – it was one of the most spectacular I had seen, beginning almost clear and then rising into a layer of cloud or smog, and turning red and strange.  It was precisely the kind of sunrise you would expect in a town called “Port Sulphur.”  The cause of the strange redness I do not know, but it is certainly a fact that the lower stretch of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge south is home to a substantial segment of America’s chemical plants and refineries.  It is known as “Cancer Alley” for the effects living here seems to have on local residents.  But however terrible these sunrises may be, I may also report that they are beautiful: I just stared and stared and amazed into it for quite awhile.  The reason this is significant is that when the colors of the sunrise had faded I was still packing away my tent when a pickup truck came over the levee and pulled to a halt nearby.

Port Sulphur Sunrise.

I had known the area where I had camped, some flat ground by an old landing between the river and the levee, was not truly abandoned or waste ground: I had seen vehicle tracks. But it had been a convenient place to stop for the night. There is a good deal of good camping between the levee and the river: since it floods, no houses are built there, but there is often quite a bit of ground which is flat and (this not being a bad flood year) dry. The only problem is that the rich, fertile soil will typically support a tangled thicket of vegetation, except where human beings have kept the ground clear. And in order to do this, they must be using the ground a fair amount. And so you are likely to be discovered in your campsite. The best plan is to leave before sunrise.

But I hadn’t left before sunrise, and now I had a serious-looking visitor.  He got out of his truck and walked right toward me, with his head down. A lack of direct engagement is a pretty sure indicator that the conversation will not be between person and person, but between violator of rules and enforcer of rules.

“Uh-oh, am I in trouble?” It was my standard opening gambit.

“Straight to jail,” he replied.

“Straight to jail!”

“Straight to jail,” he repeated, looking up at me. He was an older man with a gray moustache and a baseball cap. His face was hard and did not change when it met my gaze. I did not get any particular impression from him that he would give a damn about calling the cops on me.

“I’m sorry. I’ll be out of here in a minute. I was biking along the levee yesterday, and I thought that the levee was public property. I’m biking up the Mississippi River, and last night was my first night, so I wanted to be right by the river.”

“This is private property.”

“I see you’re doing work here. These look like bulldozer tracks.”

“I’m building a gravel dump.”

“You know I was talking with some guys yesterday about how they used gravel for the oyster business. Will you be doing any of that?”

“Well,” he said, warming slightly now that the topic of his business had come up, “I’ll be selling mostly for building purposes, driveways, that kind of thing.”

“I would imagine with the subsidence and water around here, there would be quite a need for shoring up driveways.” Just now another pickup truck came over the levee. I was a bit afraid it would be a cop, but the truck was a bit beat up and it was driven by a plainclothes black man.

He watched the truck come to a stop, then looked at me.  “So you’re biking up the Mississippi, huh?”

“From the Gulf to Minnesota.”

“You haven’t gotten very far.”

“Well, just the first day. And I took it easy.”

“Well, I’m going to get to work. Watch your step.”

“Will do. Thank you.” He had been mollified, it seemed. I was not going to get arrested that morning. He went off to speak with the black man, who it appears was his partner or employee.

Quis ut deus?

I packed up quickly and off I went. Within a few minutes I was in Port Sulphur. I stopped off at the Catholic Church there, and, finding the door open, went in. It was a nice enough church; I always appreciate that Catholics offer these spaces to the public, for people to use – just to sit in, or be alone in, or be quiet in. This one had some windows which I found nice, and finding my back very stiff from a night on the ground, I prayed for health enough to finish the trip. I also prayed for love, to have and to give.

Port Sulphur was the site of a large sulfur industry; the swamps nearby contain underground some of the world’s largest deposits of the mineral, which was brought through the swamps to the river here, where it was processed and sold. Sulfur is a basic component of many industrial chemicals, as well as being used as an acidifying fertilizer on alkaline soils. Most of the world’s demand today, however, is met by sulfur extracted from petroleum during the refinement process, a nice example of industrial thrift: desulfurized fossil fuels emit far less sulfur dioxide into the air, which is not only a pollutant in itself, but becomes sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, a major component of acid rain. And by purifying our gasoline of this brimstone, we get sulfur for our industrial purposes.

But in the process the need for sulfur mines was greatly diminished, and the mine is now closed. The old buildings have now become the de facto seat of Plaquemines Parish, whose courthouse and offices burnt down some years ago (and then Hurricane Katrina came, which gave the Parish government other things to do besides restore their own buildings). But Port Sulphur still lives on as a town, and in fact it had a supermarket, the first I had seen coming up the river. I stopped to “make groceries,” as they say, and I enjoyed the atmosphere there: it seemed everyone knew everyone, white and black both.

Sea-irrumated swamp. Becoming marsh.

North of Port Sulphur all the northbound roads are gathered into the highway, which passes through a swamp; the larger, older trees on the western side of the road were almost all dead, from the sea’s irrumation of the wetlands during Hurricane Katrina. I turned off the highway at West Pointe a la Hache, where a quiet country road brought me over the levee and down to a metal structure on the river; it looked like a canal lock, but with a drawbridge rather than doors. There were no people there; just a port-a-potty and a large garbage pail which had fallen on its side. This was the Pointe a la Hache ferry. Coming to it, though, I feared that like many ferries it had been shut down: there were no cars there, no signs, no schedules: the ferry, it appeared, was closed.

This was a disappointment. As I approached each potential river-crossing I considered which side of the river I preferred to follow, and I had determined that I would like to cross to the eastbank here. New Orleans was on the eastbank, so I was going to cross sometime before New Orleans; the bridges at New Orleans were dangerous – extremely dangerous, as I recalled – for bicycle traffic, so I was hoping to cross by a ferry. I was confident the Algiers Ferry would still be running, but there were two others, at Pointe a la Hache and Belle Chaisse. I wanted to get a chance to get on the river, and see Pointe a la Hache besides: like Venice, it was at the end of a road, this time the end of the eastbank road, and I wanted to see if the eastbank was different.

West Pointe a la Hache Ferry.

As I was contemplating this a car came up behind me and pulled to a stop, cutting its ignition. The driver was not looking for me: he was expecting the ferry. Looking to the other side of the river, I could see that there was a boat moored on the other side; and indeed, as I watched, it darted out from its dock and came into the middle of the river, facing the current, its course sagging downstream like a clothesline full of wet clothes. But this was no gradual process, like watching the Staten Island Ferry lumber across New York Harbor: this boat had powerful little engines, and its arcing course was a study in efficiency: in a few quick moments it was chugging up to the ferry-dock before me, facing upstream. Two more cars had appeared behind me, and the gangplank was lowered and I walked my bike on, followed by the cars. I parked my bike in a corner of the boat and took a seat on a chest of life-preservers. I was crossing the Mississippi River.