The Atchafalaya Basin in central Louisiana is the one region of the American South that I struggled hardest to capture in my novel, and still managed, in my opinion, to fall short on. I was devastated to read in this morning's paper that the Mississippi Floods are posing a real threat to the area and the phenomenally rich culture it supports.
This particular article cites as one of its primary sources Oliver A. Houck, a Tulane Law School professor and former general counsel and vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, who fought to preserve the basin during his tenure there. Mr. Houck lays out the parameters of Atchafalaya, a sock-shaped region 20 miles wide and 150 miles long that tracks the course of its namesake river. The latter is in fact a branch of the Mississippi itself, splitting from the main channel north of Baton Rouge and flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico. Recent flooding on the Mississippi has made this parentage problematic, especially following a distressing decision by the Army Corps of the Engineers to open a major spillway that diverted millions of cubic tons of water into the Atchafalaya Basin, sparing Louisiana's cities but putting thousands of swamp-residing Cajuns in critical danger.
Rather than act as a broken record, pointing out the classist connotations of this maneuver, I'll instead lament with political neutrality on what this means for one of the country's most singular communities.
Cajuns, a culture almost solely unique to Louisiana, are descendants of the French-speaking residents of far-eastern Canada, whom the British expelled from their homelands during the Seven Years War, an event many historians have compared to ethnic cleansing. While many Cajuns were deported across the Atlantic, the majority settled in Louisiana, where they have resided ever since.
The Times interviewed Russell Melancon, a Cajun resident of the Basin who is faced with the prospect of abandoning a home that his family has inhabited for generations.
“It’s where we was raised,” he said. “Where my daddy was raised. Where we make our living. Why you are here is something you never even think about. You are this place.”
“You can’t have the Cajun culture without the basin,” says Professor Oliver Houck, echoing Mr. Melancon's sentiments.
Though tragic, the article's description of what will happen when the flood reaches Mr. Melancon's home underscores the distinctiveness of the Basin, and the culture it informs:
“Copperhead snakes might slither into the rafters. Alligators will take up residence on sheds. Gardens fat with tomatoes will be gone, and mosquitoes will swarm in such thick clouds that even he, a Cajun with skin as thick as one of those alligators, might not be able to stand it.”
Such descriptions would seem to apply as much to the Jurassic Period as they do to the jungles of Africa or Asia, neither one a part of the nation to which Atchafalaya actually belongs.
Dig and Abida, the protagonists of my novel, role into the basin on the fringes of a storm, a storm that both prefaces the climax of the book and echoes my own experience in the region, on which much of the novel is based.
I remember the rain pounding on the windshield, our mud-drenched Mercedes-Benz plowing down a narrow, intermittently unpaved highway, blasting Zydeco so loud we rattled the glass, looking out at the cabins and the trailers stretched out on the water, exuding an air of belonging and pride so palpable that I found the pen of my journal lunging for the paper, struggling to convey my impressions.
This very durability of presence gives me hope that whatever damages the flood exacts will be impermanent, an optimism that many Cajuns are quoted as sharing. Nevertheless, there's something indisputably gut-wrenching in watching another epicenter of our national heritage sustain a massive blow to the head.
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