Plaquemines

Leg 4
Just the facts, ma'am:

New Orleans to Venice, LA, and back through Plaquemines & St. Bernard Parishes

183 miles through (to name a few, because they’re so great): Belle Chasse, Concession, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Ironton, Point Celeste, Happy Jack, Potash, Port Sulphur, Tropical Bend, Empire, Buras, Fort Jackson, Boothville, Venice, Pointe a la Hache, Cop Land East (yes, really… more later), Nero, Promised Land, Stella, Port Nickel, Braithwaite, Violet, Meraux, and Chalmette

via US 90, LA 23, Tidewater Road, Pointe a la Hache Ferry across the Mississippi, LA 39 and LA 46

There is nothing particularly tall in New Orleans. Someone I read half-joked that overpasses are New Orleans’ primary topography. (Prescient, as it was written before hundreds of New Orleanians took refuge on sun baked highway overpasses for several days after Katrina before being plucked to relative—if questionable—safety.) But the flatness is even more apparent as one approaches the southern delta. Down on LA 23, just past Belle Chasse, there isn’t much to see but sky. Sky and levees.

Route 23 runs along the west bank of the Mississippi from New Orleans south to Venice on the threshold of the Gulf of Mexico. On one side—between the road and the river—is the river levee constructed to protect the road and the small towns down here from being inundated by a swollen Mississippi during the spring and early summer when a third of the US is melting and draining past this point. On the other side of the road—between the road and the Gulf—is the hurricane protection levee constructed to prevent the road and the small towns down here (clusters of homes, really) from being sloshed from the other side by storm surges during the summer and early autumn. The result is that on narrow reaches of land that this road passes along, it’s easy to feel like you’re driving in a ditch hemmed in by levees left and right. On this day, there was the two-lane highway I was on, a grassy berm on either side of me, and brilliant sky. Grey-green-blue. For dozens of miles, I had no idea what it looked like on the river side of the levee and only glimpses of what it looked like on the Gulf side.

So I clambered up at different points to get a glimpse of what I was missing down below. From the river levee, there was no great surprise: the river and, in a few places, some associated industry shoehorned onto the margin of land between the river’s edge and the levee behind it—a precarious and sometimes soggy situation. On the gulf side was a much more varied picture. Some cropland. Some grazing pasture with scrawny cows and a few goats. Some industry. A few towns with rows of trailers.

All of this is Plaquemines Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. There is no question but that what happened in New Orleans was devastating by every standard—and perhaps especially so because of its density and the rapidity with which water came when levees failed in the city. But despite the levees in Plaquemines, I suspect no one on this spit of land here had deluded themselves into thinking they would have been safe. Indeed, when Katrina sent a 20-foot wall of water over the levees, hardly a soul was in any of the towns of Plaquemines Parish. They had all heeded the warning to evacuate.

By the time I headed down this way I had spent a week reviewing applications from small business owners for recovery assistance grants from the State of Louisiana. Many were in New Orleans, but a large number were commercial fishermen—shrimpers—who had been on the water in Plaquemines. Katrina tossed their boats into docks, into other boats, or inland where they wound up beached and broken after the water receded.

As I have come to understand it, these are small one- and two-person operations. They’ll head out for a week or so, pull up shrimp pots out in the Gulf, April and August mostly, and return to sell their catches to distributors on shore. They are simple operations, many of which seem better classified as subsisting, barely making $20,000 a year on the water.

Simple, but not unsophisticated. The shrimpers have a clear division of labor in their families. Among the white fishermen—many Acadian with names that still retain their French lineage, or which were the same as the town names down here—the husbands do the fishing and the wives manage the businesses. For each of the applicants I called to follow up and obtain some additional supporting information, the husband was listed as the business owner. But each asked me to speak to his wife who handled all the taxes, the paperwork, and everything other than the fishing, fixing and selling. I’m told the Vietnamese—of which there is an significant concentration in southern Louisiana have almost reverse roles.

Among the dozens of folks I spoke with in the previous week, especially the fishermen, there was an incredible sense of anticipation, of hope and of pride. But no real expectation. Everyone I spoke to was so pleased that they might finally receive some help to revive their businesses, their boats. Some men—clearly well into their 60s—were breathless with hope and appreciation. A lot of the conversations would end with them saying something like this to me: “I sure do wanna thank you for trying to help us out. I know it may not get approved, but this sure would help us out if it did. I appreciate what you’re doing.”

But almost everyone that I spoke to was already back in the water. It is incredible, really, the ability for folks to suffer, recuperate, and recover to continue to scrape by. In identifying what he might use the grant funding for if approved, this entry was not atypical: “TWO TRUCKS LOSTED PLUS SPAIR PARTS & TOOLS. 1 TRUCK HAS BEEN REPLACED BY USING RETIREMENT FUNDS.” This was a part of the world I was glad to be seeing for myself.

Venice is the southernmost community on this side of the Mississippi that you can reach without a boat. Just south of town, Tidewater Road goes on a bit further out into the marshes to provide access to a large oil refinery and a series of boatyards. It rides barely a foot above the sheen of the brackish marsh here. People talk about how driving across Lake Pontchartrain on the Interstate causeway feels like you’re driving on the water. It doesn’t hold a candle to Tidewater Road. Sneeze too hard and your car is in the water. Truly.


I don’t have a good sense of what it was like down here before Katrina, so it’s hard to compare now. There were fewer visible signs of destruction than I was expecting. Then again, it’s been nearly 18 months. Some of the damage I did see looked as though it was there before the storms and, unbelievably, weathered them… petrified truck chasses, rusting gas pumps that were probably dry of gasoline for a generation. What debris existed was piled into odd collections. One included one of those freezer chests, ubiquitous in front of every gas station or 7-Eleven with “ICE” written in that familiar font was deposited onto a tangle of tree trunks at an improbable angle. It reminded me of something one would see at Dia:Beacon. In each community along the route toward Venice I saw dozens, and sometimes upwards of a hundred, FEMA trailers. So that says something about destruction. On the way back north toward Pointe a la Hache I caught a spray-painted request on a two-story commercial structure just beside the road: “Do Not Demolish.” How many times did that happen accidentally?

On the east side of the Mississippi heading north on LA 39 I flew past a billboard identifying “Cop Land East, PPSO”. I spun back around to check it out and realized it identified the trailer park it was posted out in front of. These few dozen FEMA trailers are where the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office are putting up their deputies and families who lost their homes in the storms. Suddenly the impact of what happened down here became a lot clearer to me.


A word about nutria. Ed Butts, native of Waterproof, Louisiana and Assistant Commissioner in charge of Veterinary Public Health at the NYC DOH, told me to keep an eye out for nutria—that they would give me a whole new perspective on rats which many of you know are near and dear to my heart. “I’ve seen plenty of nutria in the brackish sounds of the eastern Carolinas,” I replied blithely, unfazed, and a little smug in the knowledge that I was one of the few New Yorkers to know what nutria are, let alone to have seen one. These semi-aquatic rodents are native to South America. They were introduced to many other parts of the world to harvest their furs but, in the meantime, have proliferated and become pests. The ones I had seen in North Carolina looked like small otters—cute, almost.

And then I saw what I can only classify as Nutria Mississippus. I was on a small road paralleling the river when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught something moving down the grassy backslope of the levee. I’m embarrassed to say I gasped. No goddamned nutria I’d ever seen looked anything like this, nor half of this. A grey armadillo-pig, I thought. But, realizing there was no such thing as an armadillo-pig, I settled on it being a nutria and could almost hear Ed chuckling. They are livestock-sized down here.