BTNEP and the bayou

In Louisiana, the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary fills the lopsided delta between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya. Bayou Lafourche, running down the middle, used to be a major branch of the Mississippi (Lafourche means "the fork"), but it was dammed in 1905 to protect settlers from floods. The dam stopped the flooding, but it also stopped the new layers of sediment that came with the floods, and ever since then the sediment that remains has been compacting, settling, and washing away. (Researchers call this "subsidence".) Today, an acre of land disappears beneath the water every 45 minutes. Hurricanes like Katrina and Rita scour away more sediment, and subsidence makes the hurricanes worse by turning wind-breaking woods and barrier islands into open water, which makes for a feedback loop. Louisiana Highway 1, which used to pass between endless orange groves, now has water lapping at its edges. Telephone poles and gravestones sprout from the sea.

I, adfamiliares, and seven of our friends went down there last week to volunteer with the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program (BTNEP, pronounced "BIT-nep"). They put us up in a beautiful plant materials center (PMC) in Galliano, just off the bayou, at the corner of Airport and Cobra. An impressively knowledgeable and affable good ol' boy named Mel hosted us, answered our ten billion questions, tolerated our craziness, woke late risers with an air horn, gamely played the name game, and generally herded the cats that were us into a big white van at 6:30 every morning so he could drive us to various sites to do a few hours of exhausting and sweaty work in the hundred-degree heat. Everywhere we went we saw shrimp trawlers draped with nets, white egrets standing among the cows or flapping after lawnmowers, fields of ten-foot sugar cane like corn without the corn, big big skies filled with towering cumulus clouds and frequent rainbows. Everybody we met was friendly, in a big big way. It was an amazing week, exhausting and fulfilling and filled with so many sights I felt like my eyes were crammed full every time I opened them.

I'll post a day-by-day blow-by-blow shortly. That was the intro.

(The pretty blue Mrs. Crab in the picture was pissed at me for getting between her and the water. She ran back and forth at my feet in the surf, clacking her claws together in the crab version of a rude hand gesture. I got a movie.)