Atchafalaya Mud

After years of dredging, straightening, and leveling, the largest river swamp in the United States needs help. But no one can agree on what this iconic wilderness is supposed to look like. How do you conserve a landscape when the only constant is change?

Words by Boyce Upholt | Photos by Rory Doyle

January 4, 2022

Artist Alain Gakwaya exhibits his Louisiana-inspired art at Lake Martin, which sits just outside the Atchafalaya Basin but offers a glimpse of what the basin’s aqueous landscape looked like before the engineers waded in.

Williams’ song is an elegy. By 1952, Cajun families were moving to dry land on the far side of the new federal-built levees that lined the swamps. The Atchafalaya River had just been reengineered to carry more water, which meant it carried more mud, too. Within a few years, conservationists began to push to save the depopulated waterways by turning them into a wilderness area, perhaps even a national park. That idea proved so controversial that it launched a decades-long battle. Very little conservation has been accomplished since.

Which is why, in late 2020, Louisiana’s governor convened a task force, a group of stakeholders who have met once a month over the past year as they’ve tried to forge a “master plan” to save this place. Some meetings have veered toward chaos. In April, two of its members, the land manager and the crawfisherman, failed to even agree on the nature of the place. Was this a terrestrial swamp, or was it aquatic?

Really, the debate doubled as the latest salvo in a decades-old grudge match. Eventually, the task force chairman had to intervene. “We’re not going to get personal,” he said. “We’re not going to rehash old wounds and pick old scabs about who tried to put who in jail and this, that, and the other.” He asked the combatants to stick to the issue at hand: land and resource use. Nonetheless, the land manager launched into a soliloquy on the history of Louisiana property law and just why it prohibits crawfishermen from fishing on his land.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the official government body tasked with preserving a beloved American wilderness. Welcome to the Atchafalaya swamp. Let’s have big fun.

Think of the Atchafalaya Basin as an inverted island: rather than a hump of high dirt surrounded by water, this is an expanse of lowlands encircled by slight ridges. The high ground was dumped by the Mississippi River, which over millennia flailed back and forth along the Louisiana coastline, charting various routes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Through the center of this basin runs its namesake, the Atchafalaya River. The name is a rough approximation of the Choctaw phrase for “long river,” though this is not truly a river. It’s a distributary, an alternate path to the ocean. It is, in fact, the largest distributary of the continent’s largest river: A few dozen miles below Natchez, the Atchafalaya veers away from the Mississippi to the west.

On a geological scale, the Atchafalaya is an infant. Just a few hundred years ago, the northern basin included many small streams; not until the 16th century did these coil together into a single channel. Even into the 19th century, visitors reported you could walk across the Atchafalaya headwaters by laying down a single plank. This little stream flowed for 50 miles, passing through solid, forested ground. Then it frayed into a maze of interlinked ponds, bayous, and lakes. Grand Lake, the largest, once occupied nearly half the basin. Though it’s been slowly filled by Atchafalaya mud, Grand Lake at the beginning of the 20th century still spanned 175 square miles. At the southern edge of the lake, the water squeezed back into a single channel so as to press through the basin’s southern ridge into the Gulf.

Early European settlers saw the Atchafalaya Basin as a nearly impossible landscape, a place where “the inexperienced traveler would require the thread of Ariadne in order not to wander forever,” as one 1803 visitor suggested. It was a seeming no-man’s-land, in part because it was inaccessible to anyone floating down the Mississippi River. Its uppermost 40 miles were plugged with driftwood. Some visitors claimed they could ride across these logs on horseback; flowers and shrubs grew up from the rotten wood.

But it was not a no-man’s-land. Shell mounds here date back thousands of years and are still visited by the Chitimacha, a tribe that holds lands just west of the basin. In the 1710s, after a disastrous war with the French, the Chitimacha retreated into the swamps and avoided the scrutiny of settler culture for more than 100 years. By then, they’d been joined by Acadian farmers, peasants of French extraction who were evicted from Nova Scotia by the conquering Brits. The Acadians settled on the high ridges of land surrounding the basin, where they set up small farms and eked out a living. Then sugar boomed, and a new wave of Americans — made wealthy by the free labor of enslaved African people — proved willing to pay high prices for dry ground. The Acadians could hardly afford to say no. Some drifted into new home sites deeper in the swamps. Eventually, through the lazy habits of the American tongue, the Acadians became known as Cajuns.

The reengineering of the Atchafalaya began in the mid-19th century as the Louisiana government cleared the old logjam, opening a path for steamboats that serviced the sugar plantations. The federal government had already straightened the Mississippi just upstream of the Atchafalaya. Together, these changes made a rinky-dink river much bigger — carrying more water and flooding the little Acadian farms. This, in retrospect, is not remembered as a tragedy but the beginning of what some call the “golden age” in the Atchafalaya swamps. Men made their living catching fish or felling timber. Some camps had no dry land to speak of — just houses built atop floating rafts of logs, with floating plywood yards where chickens and pigs and pets could live when the water was high. Other villages were built on the strips of forested riverbank. The largest was Bayou Chene, which would have been akin to any rural town in the era, with frame houses and churches and a general store and, in this case, a saloon that doubled as the funeral home. The one key distinction: Instead of roads, there was a network of bayous. Timber companies owned much of the land, but people “just settled anywhere, with some of them later acquiring land through ‘Squatter’s Rights,’” as local writer Gladys Calhoon Case recalled in her 1974 book, The Bayou Chene Story. “Anyway, no one ever asked folks to move. Once a man found a spot that suited him and his family, he stayed.”

These people became known as “swampers.” Some were the descendants of Acadian settlers; others were new arrivals drawn by the emerging industries on the water. From the Chitimacha, the swampers learned traditional medicines: cocklebur tea to treat a fever, oil of alligator tongue to fight a cough. They profited from a full faunal calendar. There were rabbits and squirrels and snipe and woodcock in winter, raccoons and opossums and turtles in springtime, catfish and crabs all year. In the 1920s, good money could be found picking Spanish moss, which was considered prime material for stuffing furniture. The sheriff rarely visited, and for those who chose to float in houseboats, no property taxes were ever due.

The beginning of the end came in 1927. The timber industry was already waning — the trees had been cleared, mostly — and then one of the worst floods in U.S. history snarled down the Mississippi River. The water poured into the Atchafalaya Basin, too, where gardens were choked and houses were swamped. The water stood 12 feet deep in some places that had never been known to flood.

To avoid another disaster, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided the Mississippi needed a series of “spillways,” emergency release valves that could be opened when the river grew too full. As a large and mostly undeveloped swath of swampland, the lower Atchafalaya Basin was designated the largest of the spillways. In the case of the “project flood” — a statistically calculated worst-case scenario — it will carry half of the water that comes down the Mississippi and its tributaries.

That’s 1.5 million cubic feet of water each second, a lot of flow for a little river. (It’s enough to fill the Superdome in less than a minute and a half.) So in the 1930s and ’40s, the Army Corps set to work renovating the old Atchafalaya Basin. They dredged a single channel through the morass of lakes and bayous, one that could pass more water. They cut a second outlet through the ridge that separates the basin from the marsh along the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring the water would not get trapped. They erected new and improved levees around two towns near the head of the Atchafalaya and put up a floodwall at Morgan City, the port town that sits at the Atchafalaya’s mouth. The most obvious change is the addition of two guide levees, north-to-south earthen walls that set the 15-mile- wide floodway apart from the protected dry terrain. These sliced Grand Lake into two pieces; its western edge now sits outside the levees and is known as Lake Fausse Pointe.

The dry side of these levees remains quiet, rural Louisiana: sugar cane fields, humble homes and trailers; a dusty state highway that runs alongside a sluggish brown bayou. Trump flags flutter and johnboats sit atop trailers in driveways. The levee stands so tall — up to 20 feet above the natural elevation — that you cannot see into the swamps. Climb to the top, though, and you find yourself standing upon the edge of a water world. The lakes and streams and forest blare with birds — and are all but empty of people. I know few places in the world where the transition from one ecozone to another is so abrupt or complete.

“Do you eat frog legs?” Annie Blanchard asked me when I visited her home last spring. I told her it had been a few years. “Today is your day,” she replied.

Roy Blanchard, Annie’s husband, had seen the frogs jumping in Red Eye Swamp when he was baiting trotlines. He’d told his son, who caught the frogs, then gifted them back to his parents. Now Annie was frying them in a cast-iron Dutch oven to be served atop rice and stewed white beans. I was just the latest link in this chain of Cajun hospitality.

The Blanchards offer a link, too, to the old basin. Roy can trace his Louisiana ancestry back 11 generations; he was born in 1941, just as the guide levees came up along the new floodway. Though his family lived on the levee’s dry side, their home was on an island with no roads. Roy took a boat to school, at least for the years that he attended. He quit by seventh grade — frustrated that they never let him speak his native French — and started fishing. He worked alone, usually, meeting his father back at the dock to unload the spoils. He loved the work, and loved the water.

Annie, too, knows the swamps intimately, and not just because she accompanies her husband on hunting trips. She was born in a houseboat on Lake Rond in the late 1940s. Her family moved to the dry side of the spillway levees when she was ready to go to school.

The swamps were changed already: The spillway corridor was half the size of the natural basin, and less space for the water led to a predictable outcome. The annual high water went higher, so that even the forested ridges were swallowed. After the floodwaters drained, they left behind a thick layer of silt. Each year, a few more families gave up their flooded, mud-streaked homes.

Meanwhile, thanks to outboard motors, it had become possible to live on dry land and still hop in a boat to get to the lakes. In the 1950s and ’60s, new towns arose along the levees; sometimes, fishermen still lived in houseboats, which were now set on pilings on dry ground. The timber companies had found a new lifeline, too: They pivoted to oil and gas, which had been discovered beneath the basin’s mud. Pumpjacks and pipelines began to sprout where villages once stood. At the end of 1952 — the year that “Jambalaya” was released, and just as Roy Blanchard was launching his career on the water — the post office at Bayou Chene was closed.

Now the couple lives in a trim white house that sits just outside the western guide levee. Roy built the house himself, with cypress he pulled from the swamps. He built the levee, too, or at least rebuilt it, earning extra money in the off-season by joining work crews engaged in the periodic task of upkeep and improvement.

One of the Blanchards’ neighbors, a frail and elderly man, used to talk about going back to Bayou Chene. He begged Roy to take him out in his boat. “Well, you should’ve brought him,” Annie told Roy, as we discussed their memories. “I mean, just for him to ... realize.”

The man seemed not to understand that there are no more homes at Bayou Chene, just a few part-time camps. The old town has been caked over with 12 feet of silt, and the live oak trees — chenes, in French — have been killed off by the river’s rise, their branches grasping up from the mud.

It is not just homes that have been buried: the basin’s lakes, too, are filling in. In the two decades after the 1927 flood, Grand Lake shrank by nearly half. (Lake Fausse Pointe, outside the levee, remains nearly unchanged, frozen in its 1932 state.) At first, the Army Corps supposed locals would be pleased, since more mud meant more land for planting crops. The typical response was closer to Roy Blanchard’s. The place is being ruined, he told me: “Our fishing ground, it done shrank to a fourth of what we had.” His kids and grandkids do not make a full-time living swamping. This is a career — a way of life — that is disappearing with the water.

But the mud is not just a problem for swampers; it undercut the effectiveness of the Army Corps’ spillway, too. As an agency official once put it, if you dump 15 gallons of dirt into a 30-gallon bathtub, the thing is no longer really a 30-gallon bathtub. It’ll hold just 15 gallons of water.

In the 1950s, as families were abandoning the basin, the Corps set out to solve this problem by dredging the Atchafalaya River, trying to keep it deep and powerful. They closed some of the bayous that branched away from the river, assuming that if you hold all the water in the river’s main channel, the force of the current will carry the mud south into the Gulf.

This was an imperfect solution. The southern Atchafalaya Basin comprises two separate waterscapes: the Atchafalaya River runs through the middle; it is surrounded by slower-moving backswamps. The swamps face a “paradox of water flow and sedimentation,” as one state official put it at the May task force meeting: If the river water runs into them, it delivers sediment, choking the lakes and bayous. But if river water does not run into the backswamps, they grow stagnant until — as a writer noted in a 1979 National Geographic story — they sometimes smell like a septic tank.

The first efforts to “save” the Atchafalaya Basin were focused on this stagnant water. In the 1950s, as the Army Corps began dredging, sportsmen complained about the impacts on fish. In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law, requiring the engineers to consider this problem. The dredging program, paused a few years earlier due to a lack of funds, could not be resumed until the Corps analyzed its environmental impacts. That process — which quickly grew heated — took 12 years.

By 1970, conservationists were worried not just about the Army Corps, but also about landowners. They were clearing forests, especially in the high ground near the head of the Atchafalaya, and eyeing ground farther south that might be dried out by the dredging. Meanwhile, in order to install gas pipelines, companies had carved canals, piling the mud into “spoil banks” that ran latitudinally across the basin. Before, when the water flowing through the bayous rose into a flood, it would become a nearly basin-wide sheet unfurling south. Now the spoil banks acted like walls, impeding this flow.

Conservationists had long dreamed of finding some public agency that could buy up the land. Perhaps the Army Corps itself, or a state agency, or even the National Park Service. This was the “obvious way” to protect the remaining wetlands, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put it in a 1978 booklet. The publication described the swamps as a national treasure being hoarded by a few wealthy fat cats: 50 companies and individuals together owned 70% of the land in the lower portion of the spillway, where most of the swamps are concentrated.

To underline its message, the booklet included a photo collage of “NO TRESPASSING” and “POSTED” signs that were then beginning to be tacked to the swamp’s trees.

Two years later, an association of landowners shot back with its own booklet. Called “The Atchafalaya Story: The Part They Forgot to Tell You,” its layout precisely mimicked that of its governmental predecessor, though its tone was quite different. The opening epigraph quoted a public school teacher who, at a public meeting, had compared the public-purchase proposal to the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

The book was “dedicated to all the people of Louisiana who believe in the right to private ownership of property and in the free enterprise system that built the greatest nation in the history of the world.” It highlighted the people of Bayou Chene in particular, insinuating that the Army Corps had forced their removal by creating the spillway. (The agency paid very few landowners in the southern spillway for damages, claiming that the region was already flood-prone before the guide levees were built.) In response to the no-trespassing collage, this book featured its own montage artwork: a collection of newspaper headlines decrying the “federal land grab.”

In 1982, the Army Corps finally assembled a compromise that suited all parties. Dow Chemical, which owned substantial acreage in the basin, donated land to the state. This became the nucleus of a small wildlife refuge, which today is run by the Fish and Wildlife Service. (The Corps also began to purchase easements from willing landowners, who committed to leaving their acreage undeveloped.) The basin was split into 13 “water management units,” or WMUs, which could be individually managed so as to address issues of both mud accumulation and water quality. Two units were selected as pilot projects, though no specific plans were set. Due to lack of funding, work on the WMUs was postponed for another two decades. And while there were new investments in the basin, including boat ramps and a visitor center, the ecological issues — big floods choking forests; mud filling lakes; still water going sour — persisted.

A house on a canal north of Dauterive Lake.

In 2015, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a national nonprofit conservation group, tried a new tack: They purchased a 5,000-acre tract nestled within a portion of the basin the state had targeted for restoration. This purchase reinvigorated a long-delayed plan: The state intends to cut notches in the spoil banks that run along the edges of the area, allowing some water to flow longitudinally once more. TNC spent years researching the region’s ecology and building relationships in the region; they touted their involvement as a major step forward: a collaboration between environmentalists and landowners, rather than a fight.

Last January, I joined TNC ecologist Joe Baustian on a trek through the project area. The mud seized my boots, which were borrowed and slightly too large; I nearly tumbled a few times into a face-full of cold swamp muck. Baustian was a far more experienced swamp-walker, but even he moved slowly, especially when the water reached our hips. At one point, the skeletal tower of a cypress tree rose before us, spared by the loggers a century ago because it was already hollow. Thirty feet up, there was a hole, carved out by a woodpecker — perhaps an ivory-billed, Baustian said, a species that is now presumed extinct.

While Baustian navigated — consulting an iPad hanging from his neck — I assisted by carrying a heavy 2-foot cylinder: a sonde, a specially designed probe that, once inserted into a vertical frame, would track the water’s temperature, turbidity, and oxygen content. This will supply baseline data. More than six years after TNC first announced its purchase, no engineering work had begun. The state was waiting on the Army Corps to approve the permits. Baustian speculated that the agency might be stalling, worried it’d get sued for the project. He noted that one man, in particular, was likely to object to the permits: Dean Wilson, known as the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, often viewed as a hero of these swamps.

Dean Wilson was 24 years old when he first arrived on the Atchafalaya River in 1984, a young adventurer en route to a vaguely planned Amazonian expedition. Wilson had grown up on the balmy coast of Spain, and his plan in Louisiana was to acclimate to humidity and mosquitoes. He looked at a map and picked an empty-looking patch of green. Then, armed with a bow and arrow, a spear, a few fishing hooks, and a canoe, he lived in a tent for four months.

He ate nutria and catfish and squirrel. He watched egrets lift like angels into the pale blue sky. He found himself amid the largest freshwater wetland ecosystem in the United States. Wilson lost his interest in the Amazon. He stayed, and taught himself to crawfish, which became his livelihood for 16 years. This was one benefit of the spillway: The levees all but guaranteed high water each year, a key ingredient for a bumper crop of these crustaceans.

Commercial crawfishing is a relatively new industry in the U.S. Until the 1930s, there was no way to keep the crustaceans alive long enough to ship them to restaurants. But highways and refrigeration changed the calculus. By the 1960s, crawfishing had become so central to the Atchafalaya economy that during the high season, swampers like Roy Blanchard did little else.

It’s a sometimes fraught business. Blanchard told me that when the river rises, crawfishermen can go anywhere that’s flooded. (“After a flood, there’s no law.”) Louisiana case law disagrees, but for years, so long as they didn’t fell any timber, landowners seemed not to care where swampers fished. By the 1970s, as the public-purchase feud grew heated, no-trespassing signs were coming up. So in the 1980s, as Wilson settled into crawfishing, his peers began to organize, launching the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West, a group that fights in court for access rights on the water.

Wilson, too, grew concerned about access, and about what landowners were doing to this landscape. New pipelines kept appearing, creating new spoil banks. Timber companies sold off ancient, gnarled cypresses, which were shredded into garden mulch. He eventually joined the Sierra Club, and then, in 2004, founded the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, or ABK — a local outpost of an international network focused on protecting waterways. His work involves staking out mulch plants and tailing logging trucks and flying over the Atchafalaya Basin to monitor forest destruction. If the problems can’t be resolved through the usual channels, ABK takes the culprits to court.

In February, a few weeks after my travels with Baustian, I joined Wilson and his staff on a patrol in his bateau. He stood at the front of the boat, shirtless, in jeans and cowboy boots, while his German Shepherd, Tanka, scuttled back and forth beneath the seats, pausing sometimes to bark at the passing waves. We were joined by the ABK development director, Monica Fisher, as well as an intern, Ellie Sovcik, and a volunteer photographer named Preston Holm. Wilson pointed out scrubby willow trees and flares of buttonbush that lined the narrow channels. These, he said, were growing on the newly accumulated mudbanks. They are nothing like the majesty of the old cypress swamps.

The real concern was a site that Wilson and this team had visited a few weeks earlier. A recently completed Army Corps project had resulted in a small rivulet of water trickling over the banks of the Atchafalaya River. The river was rising; Wilson was worried that the increased flow might bust a hole in the bank.

As we pulled close to the site, a hush descended over the team. “Holy fuck,” Holm said, half under his breath, and then apologized for the expletive. It fit the mood of the boat, though. Where there had been land a few weeks ago, there was now the mouth of a new bayou, pouring muddy water into the backswamps.

“Unbelievable,” Wilson said, though he quickly corrected himself. This is just what he expected to happen. It’s less unbelievable than it is unconscionable.

As Holm launched a drone to document the damage, Wilson smoked a cigarette on the bank of the river and explained the conspiracy he sees unfolding in the basin. The landowners, he told me, are working behind the scenes to convince the state to reengineer the swamps so as to build new land. “They say ‘water quality,’” he tells me. “They always use the same excuse — water quality.”

Here, again, is the paradox of water flow. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the coalition fighting to save the Atchafalaya included recreational fishermen and environmentalists — people who wanted flowing water. Wilson and his team, meanwhile, believe river water should never be artificially diverted into the backswamps, where it piles up silt and sand. He often points to a 1979 EPA report that, for the sake of both flood control and ecosystem health, discouraged such diversions. This might mean stagnant water in the backswamps, but low-quality water is better than no water at all. Better still, Wilson said he would like the spoil banks removed, restoring the natural flow of water, drifting slowly from north to south.

The implications are not just ecological implications; they’re economic. Water law, and Louisiana water law in particular, is an ornate tangle of tests and rules and classifications. Whether a water body is considered a stream or a lake, for example — not always a clear distinction in the Atchafalaya Basin — can determine whether the banks are public or private property. One thing is clear, at least: All of the waterways that were navigable when Louisiana became a state in 1812 are considered public property. The trouble, though, is that if these waterways fill with mud, the newly built land becomes a part of the adjoining property.

The fight over access in the Atchafalaya gets tense. In 2004, when a man named Jody Meche was frogging with his two sons in a lake, gunshots broke the water’s surface just a few feet from his boat. The shooter was a landowner who claimed the family was trespassing. Meche is the president of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West, and currently serves on the Atchafalaya River Basin Restoration and Enhancement Task Force. He’s worked to keep access at the center of the conversation. (“I’m fighting for the public,” he said at the April meeting. “My rights are the rights of everybody.”) This kind of advocacy has led to more attacks, he says: His truck windows were smashed a few years ago, and a tire came off his boat trailer while he was driving on Interstate 10 around 2006. He believes a lug nut was intentionally loosened.

The Nature Conservancy has publicly expressed its commitment to working alongside landowners, and has received funding from major corporations that own land in the basin, including Shell Oil. In Wilson’s eyes, this money taints the group. “They came in to support projects to fill swamps,” he said as we stood on the riverbank. (Full disclosure: While reporting earlier stories in the Atchafalaya Basin, I have twice accepted free lodging in a houseboat owned by TNC.)

Wilson considers the TNC-affiliated restoration proposal, known officially as the East Grand Lake Project, to be among the greatest threats to ever face the basin. Some spoil banks on the south end of the project will remain unnotched, and Dean worries that mud will be trapped here. This, he believes, threatens not only aquatic ecosystems and the last remnants of the longtime swamping culture, but also the safety of the entire region, since it fills up the spillway with more mud. ABK has written dense legalese letters to the Army Corps and to state agencies, explaining their opposition to the project. Baustian, though, indicated that this tract drains naturally already, which is why no new outlets were planned.

The kind of government corruption that Wilson imagines has precedent in the Atchafalaya Basin. In 2005, an environmental project was completed within the spillway, on Bayou Postillion. More than a decade later, in an investigation prompted by a whistleblower, the state Legislative Auditor’s Office determined the project’s staff had conflicts of interest, given their relationships with landowners. The investigation found that the scope of the project had been altered for the sake of oil and gas companies, which wanted better access to the waterway so they could more easily drill. Don Haydel, who oversaw the state’s Atchafalaya restoration projects during the investigation, maintains that the work at Bayou Postillion was successful. Even now, the public has access to a bayou that, until the engineers intervened, was being filled.

When Governor John Bel Edwards launched the Atchafalaya River Basin Restoration and Enhancement Task Force in late 2020, controversy erupted immediately. Wilson was unhappy that he had not been notified ahead of time, and along with three other nonprofits — the local branch of the Sierra Club, a regional advocacy group called Healthy Gulf, and the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West — he sent a formal request to the governor asking to be included.

The task force seats were doled out to leaders of various constituencies with an interest in the basin: the pipeline industry, for example; the river barge industry; the recreational and commercial fishing industries. Two seats were reserved for landowners and two for conservation groups. One of these latter seats was granted to Thomas Edgar Ashley, a friend of Wilson’s and a donor to ABK. That makes him a “member” of the organization, technically, but not an official representative. The two men remain close — we visited Ashley’s camp after surveying the crevasse along the river — but Wilson is nonetheless displeased. “Nobody, not even the governor, can tell Basinkeeper who is going to represent Basinkeeper,” Wilson said. “So we’re pretty pissed off. And the problem is, I probably know more — well, no, not probably — I know more about all the threats to the basin than anybody else on the planet.”

The second conservation seat was granted to Karen Gautreaux, the state director for TNC — a group that, as Wilson notes, itself owns land and wants to work with landowners. “It’s like putting Exxon in charge to come up with a solution to global warming,” he said. “You cannot do that.” (Gautreaux, in an interview, pointed out that land ownership and conservation are not mutually exclusive.)

Wilson has scored some victories. At the June task force meeting, an official announced that the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which serves as the local sponsor for the basin’s engineering, had pulled out of a water management unit project that ABK had long opposed, meaning it would not be built. The restoration authority also announced that it had paused its pursuit of a permit for the East Grand Lake project, the partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Conditions had changed in the basin — in particular, the riverbank breach I had visited with Wilson had changed the flow of water — and so the project needed further study. Wilson, though, remains concerned that the plans might be resumed at any moment, with no further input from the public.

In August, the task force assembled a set of recommendations; the members had managed to find a few points of consensus. Everyone is worried about the accumulation of sediment near the mouth of the river, which creates a pinch point that causes flooding upstream. There is agreement, too, that the Atchafalaya deserves more attention and more money. The task force wants the state to push Congress to fund more Army Corps studies of the basin, and for the agency to make restoration a priority here, alongside flood control. In terms of what restoration looks like, the task force wants to bring back the north-to-south sheet flow that has been inhibited by the pipeline spoil banks — though first a study needs to be completed to determine where the spoil banks even are. Deepwater habitat should be retained, too, by limiting the flow of sediment out of the river. Wilson told me he was excited by the final recommendations, though he remains concerned that ABK lacks a seat on the task force, which the CPRA hopes to continue to use for input on projects moving forward.

Throughout the task force meetings, the key disagreement was over what the Atchafalaya Basin is — and what constitutes an ecological problem. Wilson’s key ally on the task force is Jody Meche, the president of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West. He, like Wilson, does not want any river water flowing into the backswamps, and at meetings loudly and vehemently argues his case. Meche paints a picture of a once-watery wilderness that is quickly filling with mud. Meanwhile, Rudy Sparks, a landowner representative, describes formerly dry forests that are drowning in the rising water. The back-and-forth between these two men sometimes grows tense.

Sparks is the vice president of Williams, Inc., a company that owns 85,000 acres across Louisiana, mostly concentrated within the southern spillway. F.B. Williams, the company’s founder, went into the timber business in 1872; by the early 1900s, he operated one of the country’s largest sawmills. In 1928, his company announced that the cypress swamps were exhausted; the sawmill closed. The company was saved by the discovery of oil and gas on the former cypress lands in the 1930s.

Sparks and I chatted over lunch after the June task force meeting. His frustration with the crawfishing industry was clear. He thinks the industry has been poorly managed — that populations have crashed because of overfishing. “They want no seasons, they want no mesh-size limits, they want no regulations,” he told me. “You can’t do that to any resource.” He wants the state to create a better plan, and he wants to be paid for crawfish that are taken on his land. Despite the law, crawfishermen still go wherever they want. “It’s our property,” he said. “We pay property tax on it. Go to the courthouse — there’s the paperwork, we own it. If somebody gets hurt out there, who are they going to sue? They ain’t going to sue another fisherman.”

The disagreement really comes down to which part of the landscape each man cares about. Sparks acknowledges that mud is filling in old lakes. “The lake beds, they’ve now become swamp,” he said. “That horse is out of the barn.” But he is not a fisherman; he is a forester, focused on the high ridges of land that once ran along the bayous. These were covered with live oaks, he said, and then, below the ridges, on the edge of the swamps, there were breaks of overcup oak and bitter pecan. Then, finally, came the low-lying cypress woods. “It was magnificent,” he said.

Now the trees are dying, choked by the high water. “[There’s] no natural regeneration. We’re not going to have any natural regeneration. So all that area is going to revert to open water,” Sparks said. This is the modern Atchafalaya: at once too much mud and too much water.

The task force has endorsed an idea that Sparks proposed: use the sediment to our advantage, piling it on the existing uplands to keep them above water. It would be just as possible, Sparks acknowledges, to make the basin one giant crawfish pond. “We can go either direction,” he said. “We’ve got total control over it.” Then, quickly, he corrected himself: Mother Nature might answer all these questions herself.

This brings us to what is perhaps the most famous fact of the Atchafalaya Basin: It’s where the Mississippi River wants to flow. The Mississippi builds a delta at its mouth, dumping out the dirt it carries — thereby creating an ever longer path for itself, one that is increasingly inefficient. Every thousand years or so, the river “avulses,” as geologists put it, finding some weak point in the terrain where it can push through to claim a shorter path.

This is the geological process that created the Atchafalaya Basin; its surrounding ridges are the remnants of old, abandoned routes to the sea. The river has been making such jumps for 12,000 years now. Then, three centuries ago, we began to build New Orleans — and later added highways and suburbs and pipelines and ports. If the Mississippi jumps again, all this will sit along a tiny, brackish creek, without the supply of fresh water the city needs for its power and industrial facilities, or for its citizens to drink. (The flood of water down the Atchafalaya, meanwhile, would bury its swamps under 20 feet of silt.)

As early as the 1810s, when engineers first discussed removing the driftwood from the Atchafalaya’s mouth, they expressed fears of impending avulsion. If the Atchafalaya grew bigger, it might capture the Mississippi’s flow, becoming the master stream. But no one conducted a comprehensive geological investigation of the Mississippi River’s valley until 1941, when the spillway was nearly complete.

That study, conducted by Harold Fisk, remains a classic; its multicolored maps tracking the river’s wandering history double as psychedelic art. By the time he was done, Fisk was worried about the Atchafalaya. In the 1880s, the river had pulled less than 10% of the water out of the Mississippi. By the 1940s, the Atchafalaya was seizing a quarter of the bigger river’s flow. A subsequent report determined that if the problem was not solved, somehow, by the end of the 1950s, it might be too late to prevent the Atchafalaya from “pirating” the Mississippi entirely.

The Army Corps scrambled to build what I think of as a giant thumbtack: a wall of steel and concrete that regulates the flow of water between the rivers. The thing is nearly 600 feet long and wide enough to accommodate a two-lane highway; as you drive across, gantry cranes, used to pull open the 11 gates, loom above your car. Steel beams, driven 90 feet into the mud below the river, help rivet the wall in place; concrete wing walls flare from its edges, channeling the water through the gates. Another wall, six times longer, sits just upstream to ensure that even when the river rises out of its banks, the flow can be controlled. By 1963, construction on the complex — known as the Old River Control Structure — was complete. The rivers were frozen into place. Each day, the gates are raised or lowered, ensuring that 70% of the upstream water stays in the Mississippi, while 30% flows down into the Atchafalaya and its swamps.

Sometimes, when I’m traveling these bayous, I get a tingling sense that I’ve entered an alternate dimension, a place that would not exist but for the intervention of our godlike engineers. But is there anywhere on Earth left, really, where this is not the case?

A pessimist might see the Atchafalaya as a story of human hubris still awaiting its comeuppance. The Old River Control Structure will fail; the river will have its way. This nearly happened in 1973, when a massive flood began to dredge a hole in the mud beneath the gates; one of the wing walls was torn completely free. The thumbtack survived, but it was so thoroughly damaged that the Army Corps had to add one more set of gates, known as the auxiliary structure, to the complex. Now the Mississippi’s bed is rising just downstream of Old River; for some reason, more mud is settling here. That makes the Atchafalaya an all the more tempting path.

One solution might be to reengineer the control structure so more mud runs down the floodway, keeping the Mississippi relatively mud-free. Doing so would further fill the backswamps, reducing the floodway’s capacity even further. One catastrophe or another: Such seems to be our choice on the modern Mississippi.

Any change to this infrastructure is years away. The Army Corps is not even sure how much mud currently runs down the Atchafalaya; this is one of many questions currently being researched by the agency. (Another: whether the original control gates, now more than 60 years old, can still perform as needed.) The Army Corps has two major studies underway about the Atchafalaya that, once completed, will inform a third report — which is where recommendations about changes to the system might finally appear. The Nature Conservancy, meanwhile, is working with the Corps to determine whether small tweaks to the flow through the control structures might improve the basin’s ecology. “We’ve got a lot going on,” Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the agency’s New Orleans district, told me. “It’s all making sure we can pass what we’re facing now — but also that we have a system that can continue to manage this water in the future.”

Journalists like to invoke the Atchafalaya River and its control structures as a symbol of the human fight against nature. I’m not sure, though, that what we’re controlling here is nature, really. Engineers began to rework this river nearly 200 years ago — clearing out plugs of driftwood and reshaping the channels of the Mississippi upstream. Thus the Atchafalaya grew bigger. Then the engineers added pumps and floodgates and concrete control walls. They’ve sent out fleets of dredge boats to alter the shape of the Atchafalaya’s own channels. They’ve frozen some geological processes; others have been sent into hyperdrive. So what is natural? It’s impossible to say, at least here.

The first people to live in these swamps knew it was a place of constant change. They expected to move at times to accommodate its flow. Now modern scientists are finally catching up to this idea: Ecosystems are dynamic. Restoration, then, is always arbitrary. We have to decide what conditions to restore. The fight in the Atchafalaya is not against nature, but among humans who disagree about what to build next.

When I visited the Blanchards, while we waited on our frog legs, I asked Roy if he thought the basin might be saved yet, or if it was just a place where people would fish for however many years remained before the swamps were filled. “That’s about it,” he said. It’s too late to rebuild what he knew.

I wondered if that made him sad. “It’s more than sad,” he told me. But he noted that his father, Wilmer Blanchard Sr., was sad before him. “Son, you never saw beautiful country,” the older man, born in 1910, used to say. Wilmer had known the basin in its golden days, before the spillway — a place of narrow coulees and winding bayous and big oak trees. Eventually, he refused to even cross over the levees with Roy. Back then, Roy was incredulous. He was making good money catching crawfish. He was having fun. How could the place be ruined?

Roy leaned back in his chair, recalling his old way of thinking, and chuckled — tickled, apparently, by the way he used to think. He’s come around to his father’s view.

His laugh sounded less mournful, really, than accepting. He’s not on the task force. He’s a retired fisherman. He can afford to contemplate the inevitable truth: The mud will come, as it always has. He once had a water well dug on his property, he told me, and the drill turned up cypress shavings 180 feet down — remnants of ancient forests, long ago buried. That’s how much sediment has accumulated over the past few thousand years. “Just think of what’s down there,” Annie said, as she joined the conversation. A dinosaur, maybe, she suggested. A different landscape, certainly. “There’s changes all the time,” she told us. “We’re just here for a little while.”

“Atchafalaya Mud” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.

This story was updated on Jan. 27, 2022.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer living in New Orleans. He won the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and his work has been noted in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Follow Boyce's work at www.boyceupholt.com or on Instagram @boyceu.

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