A near-perfect copy of the Jean Charles of today, but ruled by a slightly different set of laws. Everything here is just as it was there, with a few notable exceptions.
The cypresses are all in the same places, but their leaves have vanished. Some of the land where gardens once sat remains, but salt rests in the soil; the plants won’t grow, and the land lies fallow. And what was once a wetland rich in fowl is now open water. In the photo Chris shows me, his father stands surrounded by pastures. You can even make out a black cow in the upper right corner. In the sixty years since, the meadows where the cattle used to graze have all slipped beneath the surface of the sea.
“When I was a boy,” Dalton says, “my papa used to go out into the marshes just south of the house. He would be gone all day and would return with a sack full of dead ducks. He gave ’em to people. That’s how many ducks he had. My pa was a good hunter, but back then there was also enough to hunt, enough to go around.”
Today, if you were to open up Chris’s refrigerator, you wouldn’t find ducks, fish, beef, or homegrown vegetables. Instead you would probably discover two gallons of industrial milk, three two-liter bottles of no-name soda pop, and a box of Frosted Flakes.
“Right out there, that’s where the marshes were,” says Chris, pointing south through his paneless window. I look out and see only water. The wind whips up a couple of whitecaps and the sun glitters hard atop each one. “It used to be that you could walk all the way to Montegut without getting your feet wet. Now you can see clear across to the water tower, but you have to take a boat to get there.”
Since the ducks that his father used to hunt no longer nest nearby, Dalton drives to Houma to purchase Purdue’s saline-soaked poultry. Both he and Chris still eat local shrimp, but they supplement that with government-subsidized grains and vegetables grown by agricultural giants.
“Sometimes we have these unplanned reunions at Walmart,” says Chris. “I mean, you can run into a lot of the people who used to live on the island and even those of us that remain. We are all there buying food, catching up. It’s nice to see the people I miss.”
Chris’s statement is so matter-of-fact, so tinged with nostalgia, that I nearly miss its implications. The actions he is describing are not harmless or merely circumstantial; they are a feedback loop, if a relatively slight one. The disappearance of coastal land is causing human beings who were once self-sufficient, whose impact on the planet was slight, to use fossil fuels to procure the food they once were able to grow at home. Every time the islanders drive to Houma they are, in some small way, accelerating the disappearance of this ecosystem. I want to ask if they know the consequences of their new way of life—but I can’t think of a way to formulate this question without sounding rude. Instead I ask for another slice of cake.
By the time I return to my rental house, a dark, sinister feeling has taken root. At first I try to distract myself by watching a bad Sandra Bullock movie on television. Then by boiling the shrimp I was gifted back in Pointe-aux-Chenes. When I fail, I step out onto the front porch and watch islands of water hyacinth floating down the channel. Since coming to Louisiana I have temporarily taken up smoking again. I don’t know what I hate to admit more, that I smoke three Lucky Strikes out there in the storm light, or that after each one, I cry. For all I left behind and for the even more the islanders have lost. But mostly out of fear. Because I know that the future will look nothing like the past.
Months later I read about a bird the size of a clenched fist. Some people call it the red knot. Others call it the moon bird. That’s because it can fly 320,000 miles, or the distance from the Earth to the moon and halfway back again, in a single lifetime. Its migration is one of the longest in the world, stretching between the Arctic and either Patagonia, in Argentina, or Mauritania, in West Africa.
Researchers recently found that the bodies of young moon birds are shrinking because the ice on their arctic breeding grounds melts earlier each year. When the ice melts earlier, the plants bloom earlier, and the insects that eat the plants emerge earlier too, long before the fledgling moon birds are able to feed. Without the nourishment of insect larvae, the juveniles’ bodies do not grow to full size. When they fly south, away from the Arctic and the warmth that is made visible in their shrunken feathered wings, they cross the equator and encounter an inescapable truth. Smaller bodies come with shorter beaks.
Because their beaks are shorter, the moon birds are incapable of digging nutrient-rich mollusks from their wetland winter feeding grounds. The hunger of these abnormally small moon birds forces them to gnaw on seagrass rhizomes, which sit closer to the surface. These interconnected root systems are what hold the marine meadows together. They give them shape. And so with each rhizome-packed nibble the moon birds take, the seagrass beds slump a little more, slowly breaking apart beneath the rising tide. Maybe the moon birds will go with them.
I fall asleep with this image floating in my mind: bite by bite, the short-billed red knots unknowingly unknotting the web of their survival.
Chris urges me to visit with Edison Dardar, another of the holdouts, before I leave Louisiana. Edison’s home is the first on the left along the Island Road in the community of Jean Charles. Across the way is a small, beached orange submarine from the 1950s. In front of it a handmade sign reads, “ISLAND iS NOT FOR SALE. IF YOU Don’t like THE ISLAND STAY OFF. Don’t GiVE uP FigHT For YOUR RighTS. It’s WORTH SaViNG. Edison Jr.”
Chris tells me that Edison doesn’t like to speak to reporters. Still, I stop by a couple times during my month on the bayou. No one is ever home, or so it seems. One day, I leave a long handwritten note, introducing myself, mentioning Chris’s endorsement, and asking if Edison might allow me to call on him. I hear nothing. On my second-to-last morning on the island, as I am driving back toward Pointe-aux-Chenes and another interview, I decide to pull over, park, and try one last time.
I consider walking up the stairs to the house, but if my time on Jean Charles has taught me anything it’s this: most people pass the afternoon beneath their homes or along one of the bayous, where the breeze is strong. I walk across the two-by-fours that connect the road to the concrete slab turned toolshed beneath Edison’s moss-green cottage. There are six cast nets hanging from a beam. Five plastic buckets. A washbasin. A scale. Various wrenches and other rusting tools tacked to the stilts that support the house high overhead. Cans of bug spray and Rust-Oleum line the jerry-rigged shelves. There is a laminated poster of Jesus and a pregnant black-and-white cat lounging atop an overturned crate. Miraculously Edison is also there, standing among it all, cradling a single yellow cucumber.
“What’s that?” I ask by way of greeting, even though I already know.
Edison looks at me, sighs, and says, “It’s yellow, so at least it’s good for seed. I get one or two a day. But it ain’t nothing like it used to be, with cucumber and green bean vines everywhere and a big garden besides.” His voice is low and slow and full of the local drawl I will miss once I am gone. I extend my hand and introduce myself.
“I know who you are,” he replies. His blue eyes search mine while the four plastic pinwheels tacked at the front of his workbench whir.
We walk together through the tall grass that surrounds his home and out to a homemade altar. The altar has four levels; each is wider than the last and is fashioned from found wood. On the platforms are all different kinds of objects—antique soda bottles, oyster shells, fishing buoys, rusting crab cages, and even a couple of strands of faded Mardi Gras beads. Presiding over the pyramid of wonders are two duck-shaped hunting decoys, ceremoniously screwed into place. The whole thing reminds me of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers—those dreamy and reverent
