make levees not war…

Make levees not war. That’s a popular t-shirt these days in New Orleans. Vying for the tourist’s attention among other classic shirts that say “pinch the tail and suck the head,” usually with an affectionate looking crawfish smiling lasciviously from the shirt, and “I’m not an alcoholic… Alcoholics go to meetings,” we are reminded that a serious, serious catastrophe hit this state and specifically this city less than 3 years ago. Sadly, despite the nice phrase, people are making money off this calamity. I was particularly mortified when I saw signs offering tours of the devastated Ninth Ward. I did not inquire if any of the proceeds from the tours went to the displaced citizens of that part of the city; it just seemed so viscerally wrong.

As it was explained to me by a U.S. Park Ranger several things happened to broker the New Orleans disaster. Not to go into incredible detail here, but the levees that were created to control the river, or to circumvent the Mississippi River by ships, and building far too dangerously close to Lake Ponchatrain all led to the disaster. The eye of Katrina hit Mississippi. It was the storm surge that shot up the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal or MRGO that raised the waters of the Lake and then eroded the levees in the Ninth Ward. Look at a map. Trace MRGO from the Gulf straight into the heart of the Ninth Ward. It’s eerie to see how the disaster can be easily explained and how man unwittingly disrespected nature and created all the conditions for this to happen. If the wetlands and marshes south of New Orleans were not being eroded, by oil, by the controlling of the Mississippi’s course via levees and were able to absorb the brunt of hurricane force storm surges, this may have been averted. If homes were not built on what really is marshland, reclaimed from the lake, the disaster that horrified America in 2005 might not have happened.

Water always finds the easiest route to take. Water will go where it “wants” to go, was a lesson my Father taught me. The Mississippi is kind of headstrong on this subject. Sure, we control it with levees, but that is until it finds a better way to go. As it was explained to me by the Park Ranger in Thibodaux the Mississippi River is like a huge garden hose, flopping about if unchecked. Of course the flips and flops take hundreds and hundreds of years to complete. Bayou Lafourche and the Atchafalaya water basin were once the main routes of the Mississippi River. This river that flows at such incredible volume taking sediment with it from as far north as Minnesota builds lands, thrusts up natural levees as it rushes to the gulf. It floods too. That’s what it normally does. But, since monstrous, towering levees were built along its banks, the Mississippi complies, at least for now.

Our plan this day was to see a plantation. Sugarcane made the area west of New Orleans prosperous and a couple of the old places are open for tours. We settled on the aristocratic Oak Alley Plantation. We listened politely to the tour, marveled at the opulence and gaped in awe at the three hundred year old oaks gnarled and wise, stretching over the main entrance and giving this place its name. But from the second floor balcony where we were afforded a spectacular view of the oaks lining the alley, barely a sun splash making it through the thick canopy, I kept looking at the large hill across Route 18. It was the levee. I figured I have been reading about this river, I have to go see it. When we left Oak Alley Plantation we drove directly across the small road and parked in a gravel area. We took pictures of the plantation and then we walked to the top of the levee.

It was alarming because it was so unexpected. The Mississippi River, completely hidden by the levees that create a country lane-feel to this sleepy road, is so wide and is moving so swiftly that it is hard to consider that the two are side-by-side. Yet here it is and suddenly the power of this great river is before us, whisking the air from our lungs. Afterwards we drove with reverence along the many twists and bends of this great river all the way to Donaldsonville. We did not mind that this piled on the miles; it was fascinating to follow upstream every whim of the Mississippi.

Bayou Lafourche, once joined at the hip with the Mississippi, starts in Donaldsonville. Now separated from the might river by less than 1,000 feet, the bayou is a nothing like the water it sprung from, yet Lafourche will take you all the way to Grand Isle. We drove along the appropriately named Mississippi Street that separated the two water courses and marveled at this comparatively withered street of water before heading north to drive past the Nottoway Plantation in While Castle. No sliders here.

But, hunger was getting the best of us. We headed in, away from the river to take a typically circuitous route back to Thibodaux. We used route 69 and eventually 70 to get us to Morgan City and route 90, but we got on some roads that drove as deep into the Atchafalaya water basin as possible. Any more into it and we would have needed a boat. There was once a small colony of people living here in the 1920’s, called Bayou Chene. The trappers, fishermen and lumberjacks and their families that once comprised this community eventually disappeared and according to a film we saw at the U.S. Historical Park, the exact site of Bayou Chene is unknown today.

I think we found them….

Well, we did drive by some very poor homes. We drove past trailers, ramshackle, clapboard listing homes, some sitting in water and hoped these were just camps, where people would come to hunt and fish. But, then we saw kids playing amongst eviscerated cars and Spanish moss looking particularly ghost-like and figured that a large part of this poverty was called home.

Thibodaux seemed especially cosmopolitan when we returned. We had a ho-hum dinner at Flanagan’s and then went to her sister restaurant in the historical section of town, Fremin’s, for a much needed martini; anything to affirm our place in the fortunate social order of things.