Rising. Elizabeth Rush
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was hard for me to choose to give up a life I had imagined and invested in, what, I wonder, would it take for Chris to let go of the only place he has ever really known?
Chris invites me to visit the next day, and I accept. I walk back down the Island Road, and every hundred yards or so, I pass a huge cypress or oak stripped bare, its leafless branches reaching like electricity in search of a point of contact. The cause of the trees’ untimely demise isn’t in the air, but deep in the ground where the roots wander, where the salt water has started to work its way in. Just south of the Island Road, half the trees have fallen into the widening channel. Those that are still standing are just barely so. Everything, it seems, leans toward the salt water that wasn’t always here.
On my way back down Highway 665, I stop to buy some groceries at the Pointe-aux-Chenes Supermarket, a low-slung building with a long white veranda and a limited selection of shrink-wrapped vegetables in Styrofoam packaging. Inside, a woman speaks with the cashier about the squashed snake she almost stepped on in the parking lot. I check on the snake—a garter—and notice a bumper sticker on her rusting Camry’s trunk. The state of Louisiana is bright yellow, and inside it are the words “Shaped like a BOOT because we kick ASS.”
The irony is that Louisiana isn’t shaped like a boot anymore. Back at my rental house in Montegut, I pull up an aerial picture of the state on Google Earth. Today the wetlands that once made up the boot’s sole are all tattered and frayed. They look more like mesh than rubber. And in fifty years they are likely to be gone entirely. According to the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000, an area roughly equal in size to Delaware. And it is likely to lose another 1,750 square miles by 2064, an area larger than my soon-to-be-adopted home state of Rhode Island.
That’s because the southern edge of Louisiana is eroding at a rate among the fastest on the planet, and sea level rise and the oil industry aren’t the only things to blame. The Mississippi River is directly responsible for building up the coast of the Bayou State. For much of the past ten thousand years, it deposited silt from the far reaches of the continent here, where it emptied into the sea. The world’s fourth-longest river drained a vast watershed stretching from Wyoming to Pennsylvania, from the border of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In wet years a section of the river that might typically be one mile across can swell to as many as fifty (as has happened all along the river’s lower reaches in present-day Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana), picking up additional soil and sediment and carrying it south.
Pre-Columbian Native American societies understood that a healthy river goes through cycles of flood and drought, and they shaped their civilizations around the Mississippi’s ebb and flow. Their villages were sited not on the banks but nearby, and most weren’t permanent settlements but camps that could be relocated if the waters rose. In 1543, however, the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto was stopped in his march westward across present-day Tennessee by a swollen Mississippi. His chronicler, Garcilaso de la Vega, mentions the encounter in his book The Florida of the Inca; it was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that the Mississippi’s regular high waters and sediment-delivering surges were described as a deterrent to human progress. The second recorded instance of the river’s “wrath” came in 1734, when it flooded a fledgling New Orleans. Then in 1927 the river inundated an area the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined for several months, destroying new towns that had sprung up all along its banks. It wasn’t until the Mississippi got in the way of the colonial project that its predictably fickle flow was deemed a problem.
In an effort to “manage” the mighty river, the Army Corps of Engineers put in one dam, then two, then three, then nineteen. Today there are twenty-nine dams and locks on the upper Mississippi, and the lower Mississippi is lined with levees and floodwalls. Instead of preserving the low-lying land at the Mississippi’s mouth, these river controls have contributed to its destruction by impounding land-replenishing sediment behind man-made barriers upstream. Thanks in part to these interventions, the Isle de Jean Charles, and the wetlands surrounding it, started to disappear, not just temporarily beneath floodwaters, but for good.
The next day I drive back out to the island for my midday meeting with Chris. Here on the far reaches of the bayou, my visit is an event. Another one of Chris’s nephews, Dalton, comes over to watch Mission: Impossible and when the movie ends he joins our conversation. The afternoon is hot and still. The three of us sit together and eat slices of store-bought cake from the market in Pointe-aux-Chenes. The talk moves easily through a range of subjects: the kids’ schooling, the bus schedule, the weather. It is a great comfort to be engulfed in the workings of a family not my own.
I felt immediately at home despite the fact that Chris’s house is physically falling apart. The plaster and particleboard have been stripped from all the walls, and the bones of the structure shine through. In order to save it from mold after Hurricane Lili, in 2002, Chris gutted the entire thing.
“That Lili, she got all the way into the house here,” he says with a sweep of his arm. “I had to take out all the walls. I’ve been repairing them little by little, but the going’s slow.” He rolls from the living room to the kitchen and offers me a soda. “When more people lived on the island I would have been able to call on some of them and get help with this here,” he continues. The bedsheet tacked between his bedroom and the kitchen flaps in the wind. “Now I get help occasionally but mostly do the work myself, one board at a time.” His living room, which is separated from the children’s bedroom by a faded piece of red fabric, has been under construction for more than a decade.
“Do you remember,” Dalton says, “I forgot what hurricane it was, when they were dropping all them sandbags from the helicopters? You know that levee busted for the fourth time during the storm and they still haven’t finished fixing it.”
“It wasn’t Rita, and it wasn’t Gustav or Katrina or Ike,” Chris says, rattling off names with an ease that borders on the familial. He looks out the window to where the nameless bay laps at the disappearing land and laughs. “If they really wanted to save the island they would have included it in the Morganza to the Gulf protection plan.” Chris is speaking of a $13 billion infrastructure project to construct ninety-eight miles of levees that would wrap most of the Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in ten-foot-high earthen berms. The project, which is part of an even larger so-called Master Plan designed to “rescue” part of the state’s crumbling coast, will require $50 billion to complete. That’s more than the costs of the Manhattan Project, the recovery from Sandy, and the Hoover Dam combined.
“No one is surprised that we weren’t among those who were saved,” Dalton says firmly. “We are Indians, after all.”
On the last morning of my trip I speak with Albert Naquin, the reigning chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe to which Dalton and Chris belong. Albert, like so many others, doesn’t live on the island anymore. He moved to Pointe-aux-Chenes—a stone’s throw from the grocery—after he had to mop an inch of mud off brand-new appliances and dining room furniture in his first year of marriage. “I was fresh out of the army with a baby on the way. The first time I flooded, it was the end for me,” Albert tells me, tugging at a black baseball cap with the word NATIVE embroidered on it in big block letters.
Albert, who is in his sixties and built like an old Buick, has spent the last twenty years trying to organize the remaining islanders to relocate as a group and to get the Army Corps of Engineers to pay for it. While Chris says he isn’t against the idea, he has yet to wholeheartedly embrace it. And others are completely opposed. Back in 2002, when the initial Morganza to the Gulf feasibility report was submitted and Jean Charles left out, that was as close as Albert ever came to uniting the islanders.
“I think the Army Corps was feeling guilty about not including us in their big plan, so they offered to help us relocate,” Albert tells me. “But we needed to show that nearly everyone living on the island would be interested in leaving. On the day we met with the government folks