Atchafalaya

Leg 3
Just the facts, ma'am:
Meridian, MS to New Orleans, LA
425 miles through Vicksburg (MS), Waterproof (LA), Black Hawk Plantation, Morganza, Baton Rouge & New Orleans
via I-20, US 65, LA 568, LA 15, LA 1, US 190 and I-10

I crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg this morning and the landscape changed suddenly—or at least it seemed to. The previous 450 miles had been rolling, pine-covered hills along interstates. The vista was unremarkable, obscured by the tree line. The only sense of rolling was the undulating pavement—a dip, a rise, a bank to the left, another rise. After hundreds of miles, I struggled to recall whether I was in Mississippi or Alabama—or Michigan.

But the northeastern parishes of Louisiana that hug the Great Muddy were quite different.

I read a bunch of stuff leading up to this trip and I’m trying to remember if the deltaic plain of the Mississippi River actually begins this far north of the Gulf. If it doesn’t, you’d have to convince me otherwise. Just beyond the levee, all goes flat. Farmland stretches to the horizon. There is a gentle ridgeline of the levee (sometimes natural, sometimes not) along the Mississippi. US 65 and Louisiana Route 15 both parallel the western bank of the Mississippi toward Baton Rouge, cutting southward toward the Gulf through a landscape whose winter-dormant fields are strewn with the remnants of soy, corn and thirsty, thirsty cotton. It was 70 degrees, but I’d sworn a snow squall had just blown through: along the margins of the pavement were windblown fibers from cotton bolls harvested and lost off the backs of baletrucks on the way to one of the cooperatively owned gins in small towns along the highway. Every few miles, billboards advertised Terral corn seed or “Delta King – Soy of the South!”


I have an affinity for this landscape in its own right. But my main reason for overshooting New Orleans by a half-day this far north and west was to see the hubris of engineers who think they can manage nature: infrastructural marvels of the public fisc euphemistically referred to as “flood control” that try to sculpt the earth—or to prevent Mother Nature from doing it, as is her wont.

I hadn’t checked the map for a bit and was wondering how much further it was to Old River—a formerly natural and now almost wholly engineered connection between the Mississippi and its offspring Atchafalaya River, roughly parallel and a little west. Like most adolescents, the Atchafalaya is dying to become the Mississippi. Old River is what connects the two and mediates this identity crisis. The Atchafalaya is only about 7 miles west of the Mississippi at this point. But the critical figure is that it’s also 30 feet lower in elevation. When the Mississippi floods—as it occasionally and invariably does—it will pour over its bank and down this seven-mile-long hill, through Old River and then some, to the Atchafalaya, gouging an ever deeper basin through the soft, deltaic soil from east to west. And that’s a good thing because were it not for this natural relief valve, Mississippi waters in flood stage would routinely inundate Baton Rouge, New Orleans and two dozen other principal towns further south along the river’s length. But the more flooding water that pours through Old River, and the deeper the gradient that is gouged along it each time, the more water of the Mississippi it will demand to draw. Left unchecked by billions of dollars of steel and cement and hundreds of thousands of man-hours at the Old River Flood Control structures, the Mississippi would, undeniably, become the Atchafalaya. And not in a few thousand years, but in a few decades and maybe sooner. And it may, yet, anyway. Writing in the New Yorker exactly 20 years ago, John McPhee described it elegantly:

“The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river's purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi's main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi… Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century A.D., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river's present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya's conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.”

With so much on the line, and being an infrastructure nerd, I had to see this complex for myself. And that’s what took me south today along LA 15. An hour or so past Vicksburg, up around a bend in the road and behind a stand of cypress, I saw a familiar-looking structure poking up—the only human-made structure in sight for dozens of miles in all directions: a crane used to lift and lower the heavy floodgates of a dam.

Another mile and I was upon it. Literally. LA 15 crosses the channel connecting the Mississippi & the Atchafalaya across the dam. It was more unprepossessing than I would have expected. I drove across it from north to south—a hundred yards, maybe—did a U-turn, and headed back to the north side where I had seen a small building on a rise with a bunch of parked cars in an otherwise empty landscape. And damned if when I got closer it didn’t say Visitors Center out front. I’d be lying if I said my full-on infrastructure geekiness wasn’t wracking my body at that moment. I was elated.

Alas, it was closed up tight. Cobwebs framed the doorjamb. Plexiglass models of the river’s basin, seen in shadow through the windows, were covered with a fine layer of dust—maybe Mississippi River mud. A yellowing notice taped up from the inside said tours available by appointment, to please call. It seemed like a plea, indeed. A lone man in a hard hat walked up the hill toward the parking lot, about 50 yards off. I waved a hello and got a nod of his head, unfazed if not uninterested. I guessed the cars in the lot belonged to workers at the dam who parked here, on high ground. I decided to explore a bit of the grounds anyhow to see for myself, without an appointment. After all, this was the masterful work of staggering scale that was actively and ceaselessly saving New Orleans from becoming a forgotten town on an oxbow lake when the Atchafalaya finally captured the Mississippi’s floodwaters.

It wasn’t all that impressive.

I walked over to the bank and looked down at the dam in profile, expecting to see water crashing through the floodgates on its way to the Atchafalaya. But there was not much more than a slight flow of water moving toward the dam, and a tangle of tree trunks and branches that had floated down the Mississippi and got pulled into this branch, cluttering up the place. This seemed like a rather ignoble engineering accomplishment. Hardly a feat.

I wandered back up toward the parking lot, dejected.

The fellow with the hardhat who had been walking up the hill was now sitting on the porch of the visitor center reading a book in the shade, hardhat beside him. There wasn’t a soul around except for him and me. I approached, excused myself, and asked, hopefully “Could you tell me if this structure behind us is what keeps the Mississippi from becoming the Atchafalaya?”

A pause. “I’m sorry. I can’t understand you,” he called back from the stairs. This is why I hate talking to strangers sometimes. Especially in strange parts, with a New York accent.

I went closer. “I was reading about how the Mississippi keeps trying to flow through Old River here to become the Atchafalaya.”

“It’s called the uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.” I had been saying ATCH-uh-fuh-LIE-uh. He continued in an easy, southern drawl “Well you see, this here is a hydro plant.” HY-dro. “It takes water that’s fallin’ and turns it into electricity.” EE-lectricity. “This here plant takes water from the Mississippi and sends through this dam and down to the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh.

He exuded a kindness, almost a sweetness. Mellifluous voice, sky blue eyes that surprised me, his dark brown hair just beginning to salt around the edges. Still, he was younger than I would have imagined when I was trying to conceive what grizzled old Corpsmen might have seemed like. And he was trim. His walkie-talkie was clipped to his belt with one of those curlie-cue microphone cables running up behind his back and over his shoulder so that it hung down over his chest. Clearly, he was in charge of something, and proud of his plant.

“I thought part of what it was supposed to do is control the flow of the water going through so it doesn’t keep eroding and sending more and more from the Mississippi down the Atchafalaya.” uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh. I was beginning to get it.

“Well, we’re just a hydro plant. We make ee-lectricity. What your talkin’ ‘bout is flood control. Them structures are about a mile down the road.” He turned his head in the general direction. “The first one you’ll come to’ll be the old flood control structure. Then the next one is the big new one they built goin’ on 20 years now. The old one, it’ll just look like a bridge ‘crosst the water. But if you look off the side you’ll see where they can lift up them flood gates if they’re needin’ to. But they don’t hardly ever do that anymore, ‘cept every once in awhile they got to practice it. We’re just a hydro plant. Private corporation.”

“That reminds me of some drawbridges they have over canals where I’m from where boats don’t really need them to open anymore, but they practice opening and closing them anyway—just to keep the gears greased and working—just in case.” Now why’d I have to do down this conversational path, I immediately wondered.

“Oh, yeah? Where’d that be?”

“New Yor-uk City.” I was mimicking his cadence without really meaning to.

“Is that right? What brings you down this way? Got business or somethin’?”

“Nope, just visiting some friends in New Orleans.”

“On vacation?”

“Sort of. And seeing what I can do to help out a little bit after the storms.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” His walkie-talkie crackled with a tinny voice saying dispatcher-sounding things. “I’ve done some work a few times to help folks ‘long the Mississippi coast. I’m from Natchez. That’s up the River just a bit, in Mississippi. You a part of a church group, or somethin’?”

“Nope, independent.”

“Well, that’s just great, spreadin’ good will like that.”

“Just seems like the right thing to do,” I offered. That sat out there for a moment.

“Say, speakin’ of spreadin’ some good will, how’d you like to spread some good will with me right now?” He looked down at the book that he’d been reading and had placed on the top step, beside where he was sitting, when I interrupted. My eyes followed and I saw a little leatherbound volume, gold leaf around the edges, a red ribbon to hold his place coming from the binding. It looked small to be a bible. Probably just a book of daily devotionals. I admired his sense of mission. Nevertheless, I felt awfully alone at that moment.

“You know, I think I’m alright right now. What’s your name, sir?”

“Kelly Johnston. You sure? Won’t take but a couple minutes.”

I quickly extended my hand. “Mark Foggin. Thanks for taking the time to tell me about your hydro plant.”

“Oh, it wasn’t nothin’.”

“Well thanks just the same!” And with that I kept smiling and started to leave.

He rose to walk toward a big pickup that was approaching our lonely perch. Over the engine and just as I was reaching my car he called out “Hey, Mark, you do know all great things come from Jesus Christ, right?”

I turned back around and smiled, thinking for a moment about how to respond to this decidedly non-rhetorical question, across the parking lot.

“Never hurts to be reminded,” I hollered.

We got into our respective vehicles. I followed slowly behind them down the hill. They turned left before the main road, into the plant. I kept on until the main road, waving as I passed behind them in case they were looking at that strange guy in a Toyota from New York. Kelly waved back. And that was that.

Further on down LA 15 I found them finally. And while they still weren’t as grand as I’d imagined—perhaps I had the Hoover in mind?—they were notably more impressive than the hydro plant was. At least the new one was. But still, for a structure whose very existence is depended upon so utterly by two major cities, I found it to be almost abandoned. This was no beehive of activity that one might imagine: folks throwing levers to lift gates and channel water away from large populations. There were even fewer cars here than at the electric plant. But then again, it might be a little different in a month or so when the snow on the eastern rampart of the Rockies begins to melt, along with everything in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest, and sends all of that thaw down past this point at the astounding rate of 65,000 kilotons of water per second.