The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
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“The river protects these marshes,” he tells us. “But it’s also what made Louisiana. The sediment it brought here, the nutrients that helped grow these wetlands.”
And the river would still be doing this if it were not hemmed in by the levees.
“What we have to do is redistribute,” he says.
He doesn’t mean the wealth, God no. He means the water. “Free the Mississippi,” it turns out, is Ryan’s rallying cry. He is not talking about radical freedom here, since without the levee his lodge would be underwater; what he is really looking for is a series of diversions so that the river can feed the marsh at various points, rather than dump all it has to offer in one great slug out in the Gulf.
“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “A little while ago I was in Alabama on Lake George with some friends, and they said, ‘Oh, I wish those boats wouldn’t go so close to the shore or they’ll cause erosion.’ And right then it dawned on me what the rest of the country thinks erosion is: a little bit of dirt falling down a bank. But when we speak of erosion down here we are speaking of millions of acres of land going away, never to return. And the only thing that is going to make this land come back is the same thing that built it in the first place. The Mississippi River. All we have to do is let the river go through these marshes like it did for eons of time when it built Louisiana. We have to break it out of the levee and reintroduce the river through different diversions and spillways. We could start slow, maybe one diversion channel, but that would be sufficient to bring in the freshwater and to grow the freshwater aquatics and to keep the saltwater at bay and start to rebuild Louisiana. If we let the freshwater start flowing into the wetlands it would start growing the land that very first day.”
I think of how the river looked this morning from above: corralled by its levee, segregated from the wetlands. In Ryan’s vision the river would spread out more naturally, like a watery hand, feeding the marshes with nutrients it has gathered during its powerful crawl and sludge from Minnesota down through the country’s middle and finally to the Gulf. Of course, far from “natural,” this would be a massive engineering project on the scale of building the levee itself. But it would be engineering toward a different end, toward releasing the river, to an extent, and letting it do what it once did naturally.
“It is such a beautiful solution and it doesn’t just solve the problem of erosion,” Ryan continues. “It protects us from hurricanes, and oil, and it tackles the problem of the dead zone in the Gulf. Right now we have a dead zone the size of New Jersey out in the Gulf, where the Mississippi dumps all the crap from a thousand farms—the manure and fertilizers and insecticides—along with the nutrients. This creates algae blooms and removes the oxygen and kills all sea life too. But if this same nutrient- and fertilizer-thick water runs into the marshes, the result is completely different. Everybody says, ‘We got to stop the nutrients; we got to stop the fertilizers,’ but you know, we really don’t. All the wetland plant life will use the nutrients, filter the leftover fertilizer, and when it comes out the other end it will be pristine, crystal-clear water. If we let the river go where it’s supposed to go, we will be using those nutrients while also cleaning up the dead zone. Let nature do that herself, the way she intended. We think we’re smarter than Mother Nature, but we’re not. We can sometimes outsmart her for a lifetime or two but she’s coming to get us eventually, and she’s coming back to haunt us right now.”
I think of an interview I heard with a New Orleans scientist. The reporter kept talking about the oil—the action, the adventure, the disaster!—but the scientist insisted on talking about the Mississippi, which he did until the reporter finally got fed up and ended the interview. A lot of people from around the country are mystified when Louisianans, upon being asked about the oil, start talking about erosion, the Mississippi Delta, the river.
“That’s because the loss of the wetlands connects to so many things,” Ryan explains when I bring this up. “People talk about greenhouse gases and global warming. But think about what losing these wetlands means. These marshes are like prairies, so rich in grasses, and they produce so much oxygen, you can almost see it pulsing off the marsh. I imagine it shimmering off in waves, the way the heat from a fire does.
“Think about what it means to lose a million acres of habitat like this. How many trees are equal to a million acres of grasslands? Many, many . . . a tropical forest’s worth. Then think of the way a healthy marsh reflects back sunlight with its pretty blue water and grasses. What do you think all this black water around us is doing? It’s sucking in the heat.”
I’m not sure if this is what the Ocean Doctor has come to hear, but either way he’s not complaining. I, for one, am spellbound. It is a bravura performance, obviously practiced but also passionate, delivered from the soapbox of the seat behind the boat’s console.
“Everybody wants instant gratification; humans only think of their own lifetime. But what happens is while we’re thinking in our seventy years, everybody wants their project started tomorrow and then they want it done the next year. It’s not going to happen like that: it took eons of time to build this land and it will take time to build it back. But if we don’t start right now, my great-grandchild will never see what I’ve seen and what my ancestors saw. And this part of Louisiana will not be here in thirty years. This is a national treasure, but we’re letting it slip right through our fingers. It makes me sick.”
Ryan is not a big gesticulator. For all his intensity, he keeps relatively still, hands on the steering wheel. No doubt he has spent a career telling fish stories from that very spot, regaling his customers. He is part nature boy, part showman, part arm-twister, and we, floating in the middle of the bay, are a captive audience. I’m not sure if Brian and Nathan, drifting fifty feet away in the Zodiac, understand what is going on—engine trouble?—but maybe they have stayed in Ryan’s lodge long enough to get it. Whatever the case, they wait patiently.
“I used to see deer and bear and bobcat out here when I was hunting and fishing,” he continues. “Now I see raccoons and otters clinging to little spits of grass that aren’t big enough to sustain life. A whole world is going away in front of our eyes. Not too long ago people made their living trapping down here. But there are no more animals to trap. They’re dead, there’s no habitat. So instead of yelling and screaming because someone was trapping animals, why aren’t people yelling and screaming because the animals are dying because there’s no habitat. There was once a way of life, but that way of life is gone. People used to hunt ducks for a living and sell them on the market. Well, now we have processed ducks—that way of life gone too. If it keeps on going like it’s going there will be no shrimp. And then, what next? This is the best place in the world. And for me not to know that my kids can come and see it? ’Cause it won’t be here? Scary.”
Ryan starts the boat up again. He seems to be done for the moment. The rest of us look at each other, stunned, and resist our instinct to applaud.
I love Ryan’s description of the way energy shimmers off the marsh in waves. And I also love the way it shimmers off the most motivated and driven people. I am energized by obsessed people like Ryan, who manage to unite a wild personal energy—an energy beyond reason—with a love of what they have found here on earth. Running into someone like Ryan is reassuring in the face of a larger hopelessness; it’s good to know that if we are going down, at least we’ll go down fighting.
Ryan is greedy for this wild place, he wants it for himself and for future generations. He needs it. Our best hope lies in working with nature, just as we must work with human nature, and that does not mean sitting in a field and picking daisies. It does not mean denying self-interest either. Self-interest, rather than an evil, contains as much energy as anything else on earth. What is a more glorious fuel, capable of getting more done?
I think back to a lunch I had a couple of years ago with Jim Gordon, the president of Cape Wind, who had fought for almost a decade to put a wind farm out in Nantucket Sound.17 When he first made the proposal I reacted with outrage, like so many other Cape