Joe & Isaac's Adventure: Episode 3 - Chapter 7

Sunrise over the Gulf. Click to enlarge.

Like the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge that we visited last summer, The Mississippi delta is a wonderfully unique natural area. It is beautiful beyond words and valuable beyond measure. A wildlife habitat unparelled in richness, the delta is a unique natural area where the fresh water of the river meets the salt water of the sea in a vast expanse of marsh. The river water, rich with nutrients, pours out into the marshes constantly refueling the life cycle that, in this wondrous place, is best called a feast. I was enchanted. Isaac was ready to catch fish.

Isaac caught the fishing bug last summer and I must admit I picked up a slight case of the same. We have no idea what we're doing, but we were excited to try our hand now that we had arrived in "Sportsman's Paradise." Our first attempts met with little success; we caught catfish which was something we could do back in St. Louis. We wanted to catch the famed redfish or saltwater drum that was prized by the locals as the center of a delicious meal. We eat the fish that we catch. I have made a point of instructing Isaac that it is only appropriate to catch fish if you intend to eat them. All of God's creation must be respected; it is disrespectful of life and so disrespectful of oneself to harm and kill other living creatures for entertainment. Fishing is great fun and appropriately rewarding when, at the end of the day, you can sit down for some delicious fried fish. Fortunately we found one of the dock attendants at the Venice marina willing to give us some basic instruction on how to rig our lines and where to go. With his help we progressed from catching catfish to catching sharks. On our second day fishing we stumbled into a school of sand sharks. We knew we weren't hooking catfish, but we couldn't land the sharks because they kept biting through our line. We didn't know what was taking our bait and so on our third day we added steel leaders to our arsenal. The sharks were still there and exciting to catch but they were out of season and had to be returned to the water. Still not the prize we were after.

Finally with a change in location and appropriate instruction from our friend at the marina we started catching redfish. It was Father's Day that our luck changed and we started to fish with great success. No father could have been happier than me -- afloat on the sea with my son at my side. Isaac would soak the redfish filets in beer before breading them. I manned the fry pan. Each evening as the sun set over the Gulf -- a display of beauty beyond words -- we feasted on fried and blackened redfish; the envy of kings indeed!

The river delta is now in serious trouble. Simply put it is rapidly sinking into the Gulf. The map above was created from US Census data that is as much as ten years old. Look at the enlarged version and find the area marked Tardif Flat. Today Tardif Flat is 80% under water. Look at the land just above marked Delta National Wildlife Refuge; Horseshoe Pond is no longer visible as a seperate body of water. That region is likewise 80% under water. Look to the left and find The Wagon Wheel. Most of the area west is now submerged. The costal wetlands of the Mississippi Delta are going under at the rate of fifty acres a day. That's twenty five square miles a year. Here's a very instructive link about the problem from the USGS. This isn't a change that's taking place over thousands or even hundreds of years as geological changes often do. This is a rapidly occurring disaster that is happening within a period of decades. The consequences which could be upon us before this century is past include among other things the loss of the entire city of New Orleans.

How is this happening? Ecological systems are vastly complex and problems are never easy to explain. Likewise solutions can be nearly impossible to develop or implement, but in this case two events in recent history are clearly the culprits behind the current crisis. First, we sorely damaged the surface of the costal wetlands while looking for and drilling for oil. The oil companies crisscrossed the entire area with human-made bayous and laid thousands of miles of pipeline. Look again at my enlarged map and note the red lines across the river. I only marked submerged pipelines that cross the river or a major pass. The fact is the entire region is a grid of underground and/or underwater pipe. It's fair to say that the photo at left represents the most common sight in the region.

Second, we successfully leveed the river. Where did the delta come from afterall? The land that is the Mississippi delta was deposited as sediment carried down by the river. Each Spring as high water in the river would flood the delta, hundreds of thousands of tons of new earth were left behind. The delta has always been subsiding, but that action was countered by the deposit of new earth from yearly floods. We've stopped the floods, but not the subsidence. The result is inevitable and in this case soon to be realized. There is barely enough delta left now to protect New Orleans. Within fifty years, at the present rate, additional errosion of the delta wetlands will leave New Orleans vulnerable for total destruction. Large parts of New Orleans are now as much as fifteen feet below sea level. Six huge pumping stations around the city work constantly -- every drop of rain that falls must be pumped out. With the buffering wetlands gone, a single class four hurricane directly on target for New Orleans will be capable of throwing up a storm surge that will drown the entire city within hours. We may live to see it, God forbid.

The lesson is an easy one to learn, yet one that we collectively seem to be unable to get. When you tamper with a large intricately interconnected system there will always be major and often unanticipated consequences. The system will be renedered unstable and begin to change. The system must then adapt to the alteration and re-stabalize. Once set in motion such a process may be impossible to stop. Historically, the outcomes of our tamperings have not been positive for the planet.

After two weeks we had enough. The fishing was wonderful and we had explored enough of the region. We took our "party barge" out into the Gulf via three or four different passes. Living on a boat in the delta was great, but it did have its difficulties. There were the ever present mosquitos that came out in the evening. We were ready for them but we could only handle a few million at a time; they always managed to overwhelm us by sheer force of numbers. The sun during the day was relentless and in the Gulf marshes there is little shade. The nights were hot, if there was no breeze it became difficult to sleep. We both had a few sleepless nights. We had an electric fan with us but by the end of the first week we had used up our battery power. So we called Jay Hamilton and made arrangements to meet him in New Orleans. If we had turned over the boat in Venice we would have been stuck there. We needed access to taxi services and a rental car.

It was ninety miles back up river to the Industrial Canal that crossed over into Lake Ponchatrain. We headed back the day before Jay was due to arrive. When we reached the canal we found our way temporarily blocked. To pass through the canal we had to clear one lock and three or four draw bridges. During peak rush-hour traffic the draw bridges remain closed. All we could do was wait. At 6:00 p.m. the bridges reopened and we made our way into the lake. The nearest marina was just a mile or so east on the south shore. We tied up the boat and called a taxi. Earlier in the day I had arranged for a rental car which we picked up the next morning. We drove back to the boat where I dropped Isaac. He brought the boat back to the canal entrance where there was a public boat launch. I drove the rental car there to meet him. We had barely finished unloading what we wanted to keep from the baot and stuffing it into the rental car when Jay called and asked for final directions to our location. He and his son had left Vandalia early and arrived in New Orleans by mid morning. They had managed to borrow a trailer. The exchange went smoothly -- I had the titles with me for the boat and motor. By noon Isaac and I were headed north on interstate 55, back up the river valley to St. Louis.