Cherish the Fleeting

While we spent much of our time in New Orleans eating delicious food (gumbo is now my favorite food of all time) and listening to incredible live music, a large part of why I've always wanted to see southern Louisiana is in the swamps and bayous.

It's the cypress and tupelo trees. The barred owls and alligators and limpkins and turtles and great blue herons. It's the Spanish moss hanging from the trees and the golden light falling through it onto the mirrored surface of the seemingly still water. It's the land that's steadily disappearing.

John McPhee, in his essay “Atchafalaya” from his book The Control of Nature, discusses how the US Army Corps of Engineers' attempt to control the flow of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers through the levee system has eroded these delicate ecosystems along the coast. He writes, "In a hundred years, Louisiana as a whole has decreased by a million acres...such losses are being accelerated by access canals to the sites of oil and gas wells...it has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water...Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river."

In other words, the coast is sinking out of sight. And McPhee wrote this essay 40 years ago, back in 1987.

So I came to see this land that has been forever altered by human hubris, to see it now before it's gone. We spent an afternoon skimming silently over the waters of Bayou Manchac, located northwest of New Orleans and wedged between a Walmart Supercenter and a Walmart Neighborhood Market. We paddled beneath a roaring overpass before the trees closed in, narrowing our path between cypress knees and sunken logs.

In the fading light, I shed some tears for the old growth cypress trees decimated by the logging industry of the 18th and 19th centuries and the invasive water hyacinths choking out the waterways and nutrient starvation and sediment deprivation caused by the levees.

I don't have any words of wisdom this week. I don't have any note of hope. Just the idea that the world as we know it will not always be this way. Cherish the fleeting nature of life. Sometimes it's all we have.

Read the rest of McPhee’s essay here.