Podcast Play Podcast Podcast Play Podcast Play Podcast Play Podcast herunterladen Red River Farm Network News Das Red River Farm Network reist über das Land zur Sitzungssaison, es scheint vorsichtiger Optimismus über eine neue Verwaltung zu sein. Die Landwirtschaftssekretärentscheidung ist noch nicht bekannt, die auch in den Fluren der großen Kongresse diskutiert wird. In der vergangenen Woche war RRFN in San Fransisco für die National Potato Expo Phoenix für die American Farm Bureau Federation jährlichen Tagung Devils Lake für die Lake Region Extension Roundup und Fergus Falls für die Minnesota Crop Improvement Association jährlichen Sitzung. Mehr Geschichten und mehr Meilen werden in der Woche vor. Hören Sie RRFN täglich auf Ihrem lokalen RRFN Radioteilnehmer. Sie finden uns auch auf Facebook und Twitter für Neuigkeiten und Event-Updates und Fotos. Das RRFN-Team, Carah. Mike. Geil. Jay und Don. Sind auch auf Twitter. Gemeinsam zu erzählen Agrargeschichte mdash Cottonwood, Minnesota Landwirt Carolyn Olson Stühle der American Farm Bureau Verband Organic und Direct Marketing Issue Advisory Committee. Olson sieht die Bedeutung aller Segmente der Landwirtschaft zusammen. Seine nicht uns-gegen-sie waren alle in diesem zusammen in der Landwirtschaft. In Olsonrsquos Ansicht ist es für organische Landwirte wichtig, ihre Geschichte zu erzählen. Das Unbekannte schafft falsche Vorstellungen. Das Unbekannte schafft Spekulationen. Wenn wir nur erklären können, was getan wurde und was die ökologische Landwirtschaft einzigartig macht, ohne irgendjemanden zu zerstreuen, sollte das unser Ziel sein. Mitgliedschaft ist wichtig mdash Mitgliedschaft hat Wert. Das ist die Meinung von South Dakota Farm Bureau Vorstandsmitglied Stacy Hadrick von Faulkton. Die basispolitische Komponente ist absolut kritisch. Wir haben eine Stimme und wir können dazu beitragen, Politik auf Kreisebene und auf nationaler und nationaler Ebene zu gestalten. Während der jährlichen Sitzung des American Farm Bureau Federation, sagte Hadrick, sie schätze die breite Herangehensweise der Organisation. Es hilft uns auch, sich darauf zu konzentrieren, ein Teil des gleichen Teams innerhalb der Landwirtschaft zu sein. RRFNs Abdeckung der AFBF Jahrestagung wird gefördert, teilweise durch South Dakota Farm Bureau. Batta zieht von USDA nach FCA mdash Todd Batta ist der neue stellvertretende Direktor für Kongress-Angelegenheiten für die Farm Credit Administration. Zuletzt war Batta der stellvertretende Sekretär für Kongressbeziehungen bei USDA. Zu Beginn seiner Karriere arbeitete Batta für Senatoren Tom Harkin von Iowa und Herb Kohl von Wisconsin. Batta ist Absolvent der Winona State University. Woodey schließt amerikanisches Nahrungsmittelinstitut mdash an Der vorherige Direktor der gesetzgebenden Angelegenheiten für die internationale Molkerei-Nahrungsmittelverbindung, Chelsee Woodey, hat das amerikanische gefrorene Nahrungsmittelinstitut angeschlossen, um der neue Vizepräsident der Regierungsangelegenheiten zu sein. Woodey diente vorher auch als gesetzgebende Hilfe zum ehemaligen Kentucky-Senator Jim Bunning. MFU Legislative Minute mdash Schauen Sie sich dieses Update von der Minnesota Farmers Union auf Minnesotas aktuellen Legislaturperiode. Mais-Angelegenheiten mdash Hören Sie die Minnesota Mais-Züchter-Vereinigungen Mais-Angelegenheiten Programm. Erfahren Sie mehr über die Minn Ag Expo. Trockene Bohnen-Szene mdash Die trockene Bohnen-Szene ist auf der Luft, mit Informationen über Ernte in der Northarvest Region. Diese Sendung lüftet jeden Freitag um 12:37 Uhr. ND Soybean Minute mdash Hören Sie die neueste North Dakota Sojamilch Minute aus dem North Dakota Soybean Council und die Sojabohne checkoff. Überprüfen Sie zukünftige Führungsmöglichkeiten. ND Wheat Link mdash Hören Sie die North Dakota Weizen Kommissionen Weizen Link. Erfahren Sie mehr über Ihre Weizen-Check-out-Investitionen. Canola Minute mdash Heres die neueste Canola Minute von der Northern Canola Growers Association. Hören Sie mehr über Neujahrsvorsätze. MN Rindfleisch-Update mdash Hören Sie vom Minnesota Rindfleisch-Rat und vom Minnesota-Zustand Cattlemens Verbindung in ihrem wöchentlichen MN Rindfleisch-Update. Erfahren Sie mehr über Regierungswahl. RRFN On-Air, Online und auf Ihrem Smartphone mdash Das Red River Farm Netzwerk dient seinem Publikum on-air, online und auf Ihrem Smartphone. Wenn Sie Farm Nachrichten Schlagzeilen, agronomischen Informationen, Wetter, Marktanalyse und RRFNs täglich Sendungen wollen, gibt es mehrere Möglichkeiten, um es den ganzen Tag. Hören Sie sich einen unserer 19 Radiopartner an. Wie die RRFN Facebook-Seite. Überprüfen Sie die Schlagzeilen, unsere täglichen Programme, den Kalender der Ereignisse und mehr bei rrfn. Oder laden Sie die kostenlose RRFN-Smartphone-App herunter. Die App ist sowohl für iPhone und Android. Ihren Weg. Wenn du es willst. Die Red River Farm Netzwerk ist Reporting Agricultures Geschäft. Letzte Woche Trivia mdash Wer ist Alex Trebeck Hes Gastgeber der Jeopardy TV-Show und das beantwortet unsere aktuelle Trivia Frage. Crookston Landwirt Ron Lanctot war der erste mit der richtigen Antwort. Gary Sloan von der BMO Harris Bank, Josh Tjosaas von Northland Farm Business Management, Tim Book of Verdesian Life Sciences und Keith Rekow von Dairyland Seed verdienen Vizemehrer. Die ersten 20 Runden mit Todd Good von Agcountry Farm Credit Services, Chelsea Vilchis von Canterbury Park, Douglas Brown von AGP Grain Marketing, Angie Skochdopole von Adfarm, Mandy Kvale von Farm Credit Services von Mandan, Rene Scheurer von Betaseed, Dan Filipi von Amerikaner Bundesbank, Marvin Ebach von Centrol Ag Consulting, Kevin Praska von Stones Mobilfunk, UM Extension Regisseur Chuck Schwartau, Jim Linn von United Farmers Co-op, Fred Parnow von Nuseed, Paul Sproule von Sproule Farms, Crookston Bauer Tim Dufault und Jeanne Miller Mansk von JL Farmakis. Atchafalaya Der niedrige Schwelle an der alten Fluss-Gutschrift Abbildung durch Tom-Funk Dreihundert Meilen herauf den Mississippi von seinen mouthmany Pfarreien über New Orleans und gut nördlich von Baton Rougea Navigationsschloss in der Mississippis-rechten Bank lässt Schiffe heraus fallen lassen auf dem Fluss. In der offensichtlichen Trotz der Natur, sie sinken so viel wie dreiunddreißig Fuß, dann gehen Sie nach Westen oder Süden. Dies, um es gelinde auszudrücken, spricht eine seltene Beziehung zwischen einem Fluss und angrenzendem Terrain-Fluss, irgendwo, ganz zu schweigen von der dritten Reihe auf der Erde. Das angrenzende Terrain ist Cajun Land, im geographischen Sinne die Spitze der französischen Acadian Welt, die ein Dreieck im südlichen Louisiana bildet, mit seiner Basis die Golfküste von der Mündung des Mississippi fast bis Texas, seine beiden Seiten konvergieren hier in der Nähe Das Schloss und weder New Orleans noch Baton Rouge. Die Bewohner der örtlichen Pfarreien (Pfarrgemeinde Pointe Coupee, Avoyelles Pfarrgemeinde) nennen dies die Spitze des Cajunlandes in jeder möglichen Art und Weise, und zwar nachdrücklicher als der Schleusenmeister, auf dessen Gesicht ich eines Tages ein verbreitetes Erstaunen feststellte, als er mich von mir entfernte Tasche ein rotes Bandana. Sie sind ein Coonass mit dem roten Taschentuch, sagte er. Ein Coonass, ein Cajun, warf ich ihm ein dankbares Lächeln zu. Ich sagte ihm, dass ich immer ein Bandana in meiner Tasche habe, wo immer ich zufällig in New York bin wie in Maine oder Louisiana, ganz zu schweigen von New Jersey (mein Zuhause) und manchmal ist die Farbe blau. Er sagte, Blau ist das Zeichen eines Yankee. Aber das rote Taschentuch, das bist du reiner Coonass. Der Lockmaster trug einen weißen, harten Hut über seinem zerknitterten und tief gebräunten Gesicht, seinen vollen, aber nicht überlasteten Rahmen. Das Namensschild auf seinem Schreibtisch sagte rabalais. Die Navigationssperre ist kein formaler Platz. Als ich Rabalais zum ersten Mal traf, saß er sechs Monate zuvor mit seinem Stab um 10 Uhr. Essen hausgemachte Brot, Makkaroni und Käse, und ein Hügel von Reis, die unter dem, was er genannt geräuchert alt-Huhn Soße verborgen war. Er sagte: Erhalten Sie sich einen Teller davon. Als ich etwas schwer für das alte Huhn ging, sagte Rabalais zu den anderen, Hes reiner Coonass. Ich wusste es. Wenn ich reiner Coonass wäre, würde ich gerne wissen, was das RabalaisNorris F. Rabalais machte, geboren und auf einem Bauernhof in der Nähe von Simmesport aufgewachsen, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Als Rabalais ein Kind war, gab es keine Navigationssperre, um Schiffe aus dem Mississippi zu senken. Das Wasser strömte nur mit Booten aus und strömte in eine riesige Wasserlandschaft, die als Atchafalaya bekannt war. In jedem Jahrzehnt seit etwa 1860 hatte der Atchafalaya-Fluß mehr Wasser aus dem Mississippi abgezogen als im vorigen Jahrzehnt. In den späten vierziger Jahren, als Rabalais in seiner Jugend war, näherte sich das Volumen ein Drittel. Als sich die Atchafalaya verbreiterte und vertiefte, erodierte sie nach vorne und bot dem Mississippi eine zunehmend attraktive Alternative an. Sie bereitet sich auf nichts weniger als auf eine absolute Erfassung vor: Sie würde den Mississippi nehmen und selbst zum Masterstrom werden. Rabalais sagte: "Sie haben uns in der High School unterrichtet, dass es eines Tages dort Strukturen geben würde, um den Fluss des Wassers zu kontrollieren, aber ich habe nie davon geträumt, dass ich auf einem werden würde. Jemand Weg zurück jenseits, die tot ist und gegangen jetzt visited it. Wir hatten einige scharfe Lehrer. Der Mississippi-Fluss, mit seinem Sand und Schlamm, hat die meisten von Louisiana erstellt, und es hätte nicht tun können, indem sie in einem Kanal. Wenn es war, würde Southern Louisiana eine lange schmale Halbinsel sein, die in den Golf von Mexiko reicht. Southern Louisiana existiert in seiner jetzigen Form, weil der Mississippi hier und da in einem Bogen von ungefähr zweihundert Meilen breit gesprungen ist, wie ein Pianist, der mit einer Hand häufig und radikal ändernden Kurs spielt, der über die linke oder die rechte Bank springt, um vollständig auszugehen Neue Richtungen. Immer ist es die Flüsse Zweck, um den Golf durch die kürzeste und steilste Steigung zu bekommen. Wenn der Mund nach Süden vorrückt und der Fluss sich verlängert, sinkt die Steigung, die Strömung verlangsamt sich, und das Sediment baut das Bett auf. Schließlich baut es so viel auf, dass der Fluss zu einer Seite verschüttet wird. Bedeutende Verschiebungen dieser Art haben sich in etwa auf ein Jahrtausend beschränkt. Der Mississippishauptkanal von dreitausend Jahren ist jetzt das ruhige Wasser von Bayou Teche, das die Form des Mississippi nachahmt. Entlang von Bayou Teche, auf dem hohen Boden der alten natürlichen Levees, sind Jeanerette, Breaux-Brücke, Broussard, Olivierarcuate Strings von Cajun Städte. Achthundert Jahre vor der Geburt Christi wurde der Kanal von Osten erfasst. Es verlagerte sich plötzlich und floss in diese Richtung für etwa tausend Jahre. Im 2. Jahrhundert a. d. Wurde es wieder gefangen genommen und nach Süden durch die jetzt unbesessene Bayou Lafourche, die, bis zum Jahr 1000, wurde seine Hegemonie zu den Flüssen gegenwärtigen Kurs, durch die Region, die als Plaquemines bekannt sein wollte verlieren. In den 1960er Jahren war der Mississippi so weit vorbei an New Orleans und hinaus in den Golf, dass es wieder zu verschieben, und seine Nachkommen Atchafalaya war bereit, es zu empfangen. Auf dem Weg der Atchafalaya war der Abstand über die Delta-Ebene hundertfünfundvierzig Meilen unter der Hälfte der Streckenlänge. Für den Mississippi, um eine solche Veränderung war völlig natürlich, aber in der Zwischenzeit seit der letzten Schicht die Europäer hatten sich neben dem Fluss, eine Nation entwickelt hatte, und die Nation konnte nicht leisten, die Natur. Die Konsequenzen der Eroberung des Mississippi von Atchafalayas umfassen, aber nicht beschränkt auf den Tod von Baton Rouge und die virtuelle Zerstörung von New Orleans. Mit seinem frischen Wasser gegangen, seinen Hafen eine Schlick-Bar, seine Wirtschaft vom Binnenhandel getrennt, würde New Orleans in New Gomorrah verwandeln. Außerdem gab es so viele große Industrien zwischen den beiden Städten, die nachts den Fluß wie ein Wurm glühten. Als Ergebnis der Siedlungsmuster war diese Reichweite des Mississippi seit langem als deutsche Küste bekannt und jetzt mit BF Goodrich, EI du Pont, Union Carbide, Reynolds Metals, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Georgien-Pazifik, Kohlenwasserstoff-Industrie, Vulcan-Materialien, Nalco Chemical, Freeport Chemical, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, Stauffer Chemical, Hooker Chemicals, Rubicon Chemicals, American Petrofinawith eine Infrastruktur-Konzentration in wenigen anderen Orten gleichgesetzt wurde oft als das amerikanische Ruhrgebiet. Die Industrien waren wegen des Flusses da. Sie waren für ihre Navigations-und seine frisches Wasser gekommen. Sie würden nicht, und konnten nicht, neben einem Tidal Creek verweilen. Denn die Natur war einfach nicht denkbar. Der sechste Weltkrieg würde dem südlichen Louisiana weniger Schaden zufügen. Die Natur war an dieser Stelle zum Feind des Staates geworden. Rabalais arbeitet für das U. S. Armeekorps der Ingenieure. Vor einigen Jahren machte das Corps einen Film, der die Navigationssperre und einen Komplex von verknüpften Strukturen zeigte, die gebaut wurden, um die Erfassung des Mississippi zu verhindern. Der Erzähler sagte, Diese Nation hat einen großen und mächtigen Gegner. Unser Gegner könnte die Vereinigten Staaten dazu veranlassen, fast ihren ganzen Handel zu verlieren, um ihre Stellung als erste unter den Handelsnationen zu verlieren. Wir kämpfen gegen die Natur. Es ist ein Kampf, den wir Tag für Tag kämpfen müssen, Jahr für Jahr hängt die Gesundheit unserer Wirtschaft vom Sieg ab. Rabalais war von Anfang an im Einsatz und arbeitete als Bauinspektor. Hier an der Stelle der Navigationssperre war, wo die Schlacht begonnen hatte. Eine alte Mäanderkurve des Mississippi war die Leitung, durch die Wasser in die Atchafalaya geflüchtet war. Um die Szene zu komplizieren, hatte die alte Mäanderkurve auch als die Mündung des Red River gedient. Vom Nordwesten kommend, von Texas über Shreveport, war der Red River ein Nebenfluss des Mississippi für ein paar tausend Jahre bis zu den vierziger Jahren, als die Atchafalaya es gefangen und zog es weg. Die Gefangennahme des Roten erhöhte die Atchafalayas-Macht, während sie das Land neben dem Mississippi reduzierte. Auf einer Karte waren diese verschlungenen Wasserläufe gekommen, um wie der Buchstabe H auszusehen. Der Mississippi war die rechte Seite. Die Atchafalaya und der gefangene Rot waren die linke Seite. Die kaum sieben Meilen lange Strecke war die ehemalige Mäanderkurve, die das Volk der Pfarrei längst zum alten Fluß benannt hatte. Manchmal strömte genug Wasser aus dem Mississippi und durch den alten Fluss, um die Wasserfälle in Niagara zu füllen. Es war im Old River, dass die Vereinigten Staaten ihren Status unter den Welthandelsnationen verlieren würden. Es war im Old River, dass New Orleans verloren würde, würde Baton Rouge verloren gehen. Im Old River würden wir das amerikanische Ruhrgebiet verlieren. Der Armys-Name für seine Operation gab es Old River Control. Rabalais gestikulierte über das Schloss zu dem, was scheinbar ein Paar ruhiger Seen zu sein schien, die durch einen trapezförmigen Erddamm getrennt waren, der hundert Fuß hoch war. Er wog fünf Millionen Tonnen, und es hatte den alten Fluss aufgehalten. Es hatte den alten Fluss in zwei geschnitten. Die abgetrennten Enden saßen dort und füllten sich mit Unkraut. Wo die Atchafalaya den Mississippi eingeschlossen hatte, war nun der Big-Bulled-Bass zuständig. Die Navigationsschleuse war neben diesem Denkmal gegraben worden. Der große Damm, wie das Schloss, wurde in den Hauptdamm des Mississippi eingepasst. In Rabalaiss Pick-up, fuhren wir auf der Spitze des Dammes, und trieb als wed durch Old River Land. An diesem Tag sagte er, das Wasser auf der Mississippi Seite war achtzehn Meter über dem Meeresspiegel, während das Wasser auf der Atchafalaya Seite war fünf Meter über dem Meeresspiegel. Vieh weideten an den Hängen der Deiche und weiße Pferde mit weißen Hengsten im tiefgrünen Gras. Hinter den Deichen waren die Felder flach und erreichten Reihen von fernen Bäumen. Sehr früh am Morgen hatte ein leichter Nebel die Felder bedeckt. Die Sonne, gerade oberhalb des Horizonts, war groß und rötlich im Nebel und stieg langsam auf, wie ein Heißluftpavian. Das war eine Landschaft von Mais und Sojabohnen, von Getreide-gefütterten Wels-Teichen, von Futterhäusern und Königreichshallen in Kreuzungsstädten. Es gab kleine, ordentliche Friedhöfe mit weißen Reihen von weißen Sarkophagen, die, ungeachtet des Schutzes der Deiche, einen Fuß oder zwei oberirdisch erhob. Auf Betonmasten gab es zeltförmige Hütten und niedrige Ziegelhäuser unter bepflanzten Kiefern. Pickups unter den Kiefern. Wenn dies eine Form des Schlachtfeldes war, war es nicht unähnlich vieler Schlachtfeldlandschaften, so still sie ihre Geschichte glauben. Die meisten Schlachtfelder sind jedoch Orte, an denen etwas einmal passiert ist. Hier würde es auf unbestimmte Zeit geschehen. Wir gingen zum Mississippi. Noch immer undeutlich im Nebel, sah es aus wie ein Stück vom Meer. Rabalais sagte, das ist eine breite Booger, genau dort. Im Frühjahr hohen Wasser von Jahrgang 1927, 1937, 1973mehr als zwei Millionen Kubikfuß Wasser war von diesem Ort in jeder Sekunde gegangen. Fünfundsechzig Kilotonnen pro Sekunde. Durch die Öffnung des Zuflusskanals, der zum Schloss führte, waren Felsenanlegestellen, Gelenkbetonmatratzenverkleidungen und andere schwere Verteidigungen. Rabalais beobachtete, dass diese besondere Stelle nicht mehr anfällig war als fast jeder andere Punkt in dieser Reichweite des Flusses, der so nah an der Atchafalaya Ebene lief. Es gab unzählige Orte, an denen ein Ausbruch stattfinden könnte: Es hat eine Tendenz, durch nur anywheres zu gehen, die Sie fordern können. Warum also hatte der Mississippi nicht die Bank gesprungen und schon längst zum Atchafalaya umgeleitet, weil sie es sich anschlossen, sagte Rabalais. Seine unter enger Überwachung. Nachdem das Corps 1963 den alten Fluss gestaut hatte, konnten die Ingenieure nicht einfach weggehen, wie Dachdecker, die ein Leck fixiert hatten. In den frühen Planungsphasen hatten sie das in Betracht gezogen, aber es gab gewisse Effekte, die sie nicht übersehen konnten. Die Atchafalaya war schließlich ein Verteiler des Mississippithe major und, wie es geschah, der einzige, der erwähnenswert war, dass das Corps nicht bereits angeschlossen hatte. In der Zeit der donnernden Überschwemmung wurde die Atchafalaya als Sicherheitsventil verwendet, um einen großen Druck zu entlasten und zu helfen, New Orleans davon abzuhalten, in Yucatn zu enden. Die Atchafalaya war auch die Quelle des Wassers in den Sümpfen und bayous der Cajun Welt. Es war die Wasserversorgung von kleinen Städten und unzähligen Städten. Seine Oberläufe waren von Bauernhöfen umgeben. Das Korps war nicht in einer politischen oder moralischen Position, um die Atchafalaya zu töten. Es musste es Wasser zu füttern. Durch die Prinzipien der Natur, je mehr die Atchafalaya gegeben wurde, desto mehr würde sie nehmen wollen, denn es war der steilere Strom. Je mehr es gegeben wurde, desto tiefer würde es sein Bett machen. Der Höhenunterschied zwischen dem Atchafalaya und dem Mississippi würde weiter zunehmen und die Bedingungen für die Erfassung vergrößern. Das Korps hätte damit zu tun. Das Korps müsste etwas bauen, das der Atchafalaya einen Teil des Mississippi geben könnte und gleichzeitig verhindern würde, In Wirklichkeit müsste das Korps ein Fort Laramie bauen: einen Ort, an dem die Einheimischen Mehl und Schusswaffen kaufen konnten, aber wo die Tore geschlossen werden konnten, wenn sie angegriffen wurden. Zehn Meilen flussaufwärts von der Navigationssperre, wo die kollektiven Sedimente als fester angesehen wurden, gruben sie sich in ein Stück trockenen Bodens und bauten, was für eine Zeit, eine unangemessene, wasserlose Brücke zu sein schien. Fünfhundertsechsundsechzig Fuß lang, stand er parallel zum Mississippi und etwa tausend Meter vom Wasser zurück. Zwischen seinen Anschlägen befanden sich zehn Pfeiler, die elf Tore schlossen, die aufgehoben oder fallengelassen, geöffnet oder geschlossen werden konnten, wie Fenster. Zu dieser Struktur und durch sie, kam bald ein neuer alter Riveran ausgegrabener Kanal, der in vom Mississippi und heraus sieben Meilen zur Red-Atchafalaya führte. Das Korps wollte die Natur nicht beherbergen. Seine Ingenieure beabsichtigten, es im Raum zu kontrollieren und in der Zeit festzuhalten. 1950, kurz vor Beginn des Projekts, nahm die Atchafalaya dreißig Prozent des Wassers ein, das vom Norden nach dem alten Fluss herunterkam. Dieses Wasser wurde als Breitengrad bekannt, und es bestand aus ein wenig in den roten, viel in den Mississippi. Der Kongress der Vereinigten Staaten hat in seinen Beratungen entschieden, dass die Verteilung der Strömung und des Sediments in den Flüssen Mississippi und Atchafalaya jetzt in wünschenswerten Proportionen ist und so beibehalten werden sollte. Das Korps wurde damit bestellt, um 1950 zu bewahren. Im Alten Fluss sollten 30% des Breitengrades zur Atchafalaya übergehen. Die Vorrichtung, die einer Zehnpier-Brücke ähnelte, war technisch eine Schwelle oder ein Wehr, und es wurde auf Linie im Jahre 1963, in einer orchestrierten Folge von Ereignissen, die die Kunst des Tiefbaus blühten. Der alte alte Fluss war geschlossen. Der neue alte Fluss wurde eröffnet. Das Wasser, als es die Schwelle von der Mississippis-Ebene zu den Atchafalayas überquerte, zerriss an weißen Fetzen in der ohrenbetäubenden Turbulenz eines großen neuen Falls, von Lippe zu Becken der Bau des Korps. Mehr oder weniger gleichzeitig öffnete das Navigationsschloss seine Kammer. Nun hatte sich alles verändert und nichts hatte sich geändert. Boote konnten noch vom Fluss weg fallen. Das Verhältnis der Gewässer setzte sich fort wie für das amerikanische Ruhrgebiet, das für die Ökosysteme der Cajun-Sümpfe. Innerlich gab es einen Befehlswechsel, da die Armee die Natur ersetzte. Im Laufe der Zeit würden die Leute kommen zu deuten darauf hin, dass es über diese Unternehmen ein Element der hauteur. Ein Professor des Rechts an der Universität Tulane zum Beispiel würde ihm den dritten Platz in den Annalen der Arroganz zuweisen. Sein Name war Oliver Houck. Die größte Arroganz war der Diebstahl der Sonne, sagte er. Die zweitgrößte Arroganz führt die Flüsse zurück. Die drittgrößte Arroganz versucht, den Mississippi an Ort und Stelle zu halten. Die alten Kanäle des Flusses gehen fast nach Texas. Die Menschen haben versucht, den Fluss zu einem Coursethat, wo die Arroganz begann zu beschränken. Das Korps hört genau auf solche Dinge und archiviert sie in ihren Archiven. Houck hatte einen Punkt. Kühn war es tatsächlich, einen neuen Kanal in den Boden zu graben, wo ein Fluß vorbereitet hatte, einen anderen zu fangen, noch kühner, um dort eine Struktur zu bauen, die für das zuständig war, was geschehen konnte. Einige Leute gingen weiter als Houck und sagten, dass sie glaubten, dass die Struktur scheitern würde. Im Jahr 1980, zum Beispiel, veröffentlichte eine Studie des Water Resources Research Institute an der Louisiana State University, Old River als die Szene einer direkten Konfrontation zwischen der Vereinigten Staaten Regierung und dem Mississippi River, und alle Konstruktionen des Corps ungeachtet des Sieges zu Der Mississippi. Nur wenn dies geschehen kann nicht vorhergesagt werden, schloss der Bericht. Es könnte im nächsten Jahr, im nächsten Jahrzehnt oder irgendwann in den nächsten dreißig oder vierzig Jahren passieren. Aber das Endergebnis ist einfach eine Frage der Zeit, und es ist nur umsichtig, darauf vorzubereiten. Das Korps dachte anders und sagte: Wir können das nicht zulassen. Wir werden vom Kongress aufgefordert, das nicht zuzulassen. Sein Werbefilm bezog sich auf Old River Control als guten Soldaten. Old River Control war darüber hinaus der Grundstein des umfassenden Hochwasserschutzprojekts für das untere Mississippi-Tal, und nichts würde den Grundstein entfernen. Menschen, die am New Orleans District Headquarters, dem US Army Corps von Ingenieuren ankamen, wurden an der Tür durch eine murgelte Collage von Karten und Bildern und mutigen Buchstaben konfrontiert, die unmissverständlich erklären, die Old River Control Structures, die etwa zweihundert Meilen oberhalb von New Orleans am Mississippi gelegen sind River, verhindern, dass der Mississippi den Kurs wechselt, indem er die in das Atchafalaya-Becken abgelenkten Flüsse kontrolliert. Keine Meinungen basierten auf intimerem Wissen als die von LeRoy Dugas, Rabalaiss stromaufwärts Gegenüber dem Manager des Apparates, der den Fluss am Old River kontrollierte. Wie Rabalais war er Acadian und des Landes. Dugieas, die er allgemein genannt wurde, arbeiteten bei Old River Control seit 1963, als das Wasser anfing zu fließen. In den folgenden Jahren sollten Oberstleutnants und Generäle seinen Rat suchen. Diese Professoren bei L. S.U. Sagen, dass, was auch immer wir tun würden, das System zu verlieren, bemerkte er eines Tages an Old River, und nach einer Pause, fügte hinzu, Vielleicht theyre Recht. Seine Stimme hatte das Geräusch von Wasser über Felsen. In der Tonhöhe war es niedriger als ein Helikontubus. Besser zu hören, ihn drinnen, in seinem Operationsbüro, weg von den Strukturen konkurrierenden Donnern. Vielleicht sind sie richtig, wiederholte er. Wir fühlen, dass wir den Fluss halten können. Wurden zu versuchen. Wenn Sie versuchen, die Natur zu kontrollieren, haben Sie einen Schlag gegen Sie. Dugies Gesicht, verwittert und tief gebräunt, wurde von der Suche erschöpft durch die Wachsamkeit und den Humor in seinen Augen gespeichert. Er trug eine große, beschriftete Gürtelschnalle, die die Kontrolle über den Mississippi unterstützte. Ich war ursprünglich in Morganza geboren, sagte er mir. Dreißig Meilen die Straße hinunter. Ich habe mein ganzes Leben in Pointe Coupee Parish gelebt. Einmal habe ich sogar mein Wohnsitz geschlossen und ging zur Arbeit in Texas für die Corpsbut Sie immer wieder kommen. (Rabalais setzt er auch hier ein Mal aus, aber nicht lange). Durch die Jugend von Dugies war natürlich der Mississippi frei, um die Atchafalaya zu füttern. Er nahm die Launen der Gewässer für selbstverständlich, ganz zu schweigen von der Vorherrschaft ihrer Kraft in der Flut. Während des zweiten Weltkrieges war er ein Seeschießer auf Freiheitsschiffen im Südpazifik, und innerhalb eines Jahres oder zwei seiner Rückkehr war erstaunt zu hören, dass das Korps der Ingenieure beabsichtigte, den alten Fluss zurückzuhalten. Sie würden versuchen, den Fluss zu kontrollieren, sagte er. Ich dachte, sie hätten ihre Murmeln verloren. Draußen, auf der Fahrbahn, die die fünfhundertfünfzigtausend Fuß überquert, konnte man leicht verstehen, wo die Murmeln gegangen sein könnten. Sogar in dieser Zeit des bescheidenen normalen Flusses sahen wir in eine Wut des Wassers. Es lief ungefähr zwölf Meilen pro Stunde signifikant schneller als der Yukon nach dem Breakup und es schlug in das so genannte Stillbeck auf der Downstream-Seite, die am wenigsten noch Platz, den Sie jemals sehen würden. Die Stromschnellen des Grand Canyon, die nicht ohne Lebensgefahr laufen können, ähneln dem alten Flussschacht, aber die Stromschnellen der Schlucht sind eine fünfte Breite. Der Susitna River ist manchmal mehr wie esmelted Gletschereis aus der Alaska Range. Riesige LKWs voller Laubholzstämme kamen von Norden her, um die Struktur zu überqueren, auf dem Weg zu einer Zerspanungsfabrik am Simmesport. Man konnte sie kaum hören, wenn sie vorüberkamen. Es war eine hohe Schwelle daneben ein einzelnes Wehr, zwei Drittel von einer Meile lang und zwei Fuß über dem lokalen Hochwasserschutzstadium, sein Zweck ist, um zu helfen, den Fluss von extrem hohem Wasser zu regulieren. Die niedrige Schwelle, wie die, auf die wir standen, wurde häufig genannt, war das Hauptventil am Old River, und beschäftigte sich mit dem Wasser jeden Tag. Das Schicksal des Projekts hing von der niedrigen Schwelle ab, und es war, was die Leute meinten, wenn sie, wie oft, einfach die Struktur sagten. Die Struktur und die hohe silllike die Navigationssperre stromabwärts wurden in die Mississippis mainline levee gefüllt. Jenseits des Klanges des Wassers war das breite, niedrige Land um diese Strukturen still und wirklich still. Immer wieder auf den Feldern, pumpen Jacks bobed für Öl. In der Flußschar saß das Schlick-kehrte niemandes Land zwischen Wasserlinie und leveelone Reiher saß in den Bäumen und wartend für die folgende Kuh. Dugie bemerkte, dass er bald in Rente gehen würde, dass er alt und abgenutzt vom Kämpfen des Flusses fühlte. Ich sagte zu ihm: Alles was Sie brauchen ist eine gute Flut. Und er sagte: Oh, nein. Sprechen Sie nicht so, Mann. Sie sprechen vulgär. Es war merkwürdig, auf den Hauptstamm Mississippi zu schauen, kaum eine halbe Meile entfernt, und sehen Sie seinen Inhalt verschütten seitwärts, wie Maismehl Ausgießen aus einem Loch in einem Sack Tasche. Dugie sagte, daß so viel Wasser, das aus dem Mississippi herauskam, eine leistungsfähige und täuschende Zeichnung schuf, etwas wie ein Vakuum, das in Booten jeder möglicher Größe saugen konnte. Er hatte einige große gegen die Struktur gesehen. Mitte der Sechzigerjahre war ein Mann allein aus Wisconsin in einem kleinen, doppelstöckigen Schiff mit kräuselnden Enden und tumblehomea Handwerk herabgestiegen, das den Algonquiern, die den Mississippi nannten, nicht fremd gewesen wäre. Dugie nannte dieses Boot ein Piroge. Was auch immer es war, der Mann hatte es den ganzen Weg von Wisconsin gepaddelt, mit dem Ziel, New Orleans zu erreichen. Als er den Mississippi fast erobert hatte, wurde er von der Atchafalaya gefangengenommen. Old River fing ihn, zog ihn aus dem Mississippi und schoss ihn durch die Struktur. Er war unter Schock, aber er lebte, sagte Dugie. Wir brachten ihn ins Krankenhaus in Natchez. Nach einem Moment, sagte ich, Dies ist ein spannender Ort. Und Dugie sagte, Sie haben gehört, MurphyWas kann passieren wird passieren Dies ist, wo Murphy lebt. Ein Segelboot, das die Atchafalaya heraufkommt, kann von Corpus Christi nach Vicksburg mit einer Ladung Benzin oder von Houston nach St. Paul mit Ethylenglykol laufen. Gelegentlich sieht Rabalais ein Segelboot, seltener ein Kanu. Einmal ging ein Pappelstock mit einem hohen Wikingerbogen vorbei an Old River. Ein Schiff mit Leif Eriksson selbst wäre jedoch weniger wahrscheinlich, um die ungeteilte Aufmerksamkeit der Lockmaster als ein bestimmtes rot-getrimmten Sahnehäubchen-Schiff namens Mississippi, mit Generalmajor Thomas Sands. Jedes Jahr, im Spätsommer oder frühen Herbst, kommt der Mississippi seinen gleichnamigen Fluss und Nasen in das Schloss. Dies ist die Niedrigwasser-Inspektionsreise, wenn der General eine Reise von St. Louis und in die Atchafalaya macht und auf dem Weg zu den Flussstädten vorbeiführt, Besucher aufnimmt und Beschwerden hört. In der äußeren Konfiguration ist der Mississippi ein regelmäßiges towboxtwo hundert und siebzehn Fuß lang, fünfzig Fuß breit, seine Pferdestärke, die sich viertausend nähert. Der Begriff Schleppboot ist eine falsche Bezeichnung, denn die Flussschlepper schieben alle ihre zusammengebauten Lastkähne und sind daher mit breiten flachen Bögen ausgelegt. Ihre unangenehmen Profile scheinen prekär, als wären sie die hinteren Hälften der in zwei geschnittenen Schiffe. Der Mississippi triumphiert über diese Nachteile. Beabsichtigt als Träger von beeinflussbaren Menschen, macht es in Luxus, was es in Form leidet. Nur seine rote Ordnung ist kriegerisch. Seine vor allem helle Creme schlägt Kügelchen, die an die Spitze gestiegen sind. Seine breite flache Vorderseite ist eine Wand aus Bildfenstern, von Fluss-Panoramas, mit cremefarbenen Sofas zwischen Couchtischen und Stehlampen konfrontiert. Ein Flussschlepper wird so viele wie fünfzig Lastkähne auf einmal drücken. Was dieses Boot drückt, ist das Programm des Korps. Der Mississippi, auf seinem Fallausflug, ist der Aufstellungsort der an Bord Anhörungen am Kap Girardeau, Memphis, Vicksburg und schließlich Morgan-Stadt. Normalerweise kommt es am Old River in den frühen Morgenstunden. Bevor das Boot durch das Schloss geht, kommen Leute mit Namen wie Broussard, Brignac, Begnaud, Blanchard, Juneau, Gautreau, Caillouet und Smith aus dem Atchafalaya Basin Levee Board, dem East Jefferson Levee Board, dem Pontchartrain Levee Board, dem Louisiana Office of Public Works, die Vereinigten Staaten Fisch und Wildlife Service, die Teche-Vermilion Süßwasser-Bezirk. Oliver Houck, der Tulane-Professor, kommt, und neun peopleseven Zivilisten und zwei Obersten aus dem New Orleans District des Corps of Engineers. Dies ist die ultimative Kommunikation, sagt der begeisterte General Sands, während er seine Kollegen und Gäste begrüßt. Die Tore schließen sich hinter dem Mississippi. Die Liegeplätze im Schloß heulen wie Kojoten, wie das Wasser und das Boot nach unten gehen. Das Pilothouse des Mississippi ist ein weites schönes Zimmer direkt über der Lounge und ähnlich mit einer Wand aus Fenstern konfrontiert. Es verfügt über Karten-und-Tabelle-Tabellen, Konsolen von elektronischen Geräten, redundante Radare. Die Piloten stehen vorne und in der Mitte, wie Trimm und Trigon als Piloten der airJohn Dugger, von Collierville, Tennessee (der Schiffe Heimathafen ist Memphis) und Jorge Cano, ein lokaler Kontaktpilot, der hier ist, um den regelmäßigen Piloten zu helfen, das zu spüren Schwärme der Atchafalaya. Unter den veränderten Profilen des Flusses, ist ihre Arbeit kompliziert. Mark Twain schrieb von Flusspiloten, Zwei Dinge schienen mir ziemlich klar zu sein. Eins war, dass ein Mann, um ein Pilot zu sein, mehr lernen musste als jeder andere Mann wissen durfte, und der andere war, dass er es alle vierundzwanzig Stunden anders lernen müsse. Ihr wahrer Pilot kümmert sich nicht um alles auf der Erde, aber der Fluss, und sein Stolz auf seinen Beruf übertrifft den Stolz der Könige. Cano, für seinen Teil, ist etwas weniger schmeichelhaft auf das Thema Twain. Er sagt, dass es ihm verblüfft, dass Twain so einen großen Ruf für jemanden hat, der so wenig Zeit auf dem Fluss verbracht hat. Heute sind die Atchafalaya-Gewässer zwölf Fuß niedriger als die Mississippis. Cano sagt, dass der Unterschied oft so viel wie zwanzig. Jetzt öffnen sich die Tore langsam und zeigen den Abflusskanal, der in den alten alten Fluss und bald zur Atchafalaya führt. Die Mississippi-Flußkommission, die Teil des zivilen und militärischen Teils ist, mit General Sands als Präsidenten, ist gesetzlich verpflichtet, diese Tripsto zu machen, um die Hochwasserschutz - und Navigationssysteme von Illinois bis zum Golf zu untersuchen und die Anhörungen durchzuführen. Dementsprechend gibt es zwei große Generäle und einen Brigadier an Bord, mehrere Obersten, verschiedene Majors in allen, eine militärische Konzentration, die eigentlich untypisch für die US Army Corps of Engineers ist. Das Korps besteht im Wesentlichen aus Zivilisten, mit einem Furnier von militärischen Menschen an und in der Nähe der Spitze. Zum Beispiel hat Sands mit ihm seinen Chef-Assistenten, seinen Chefingenieur, seinen Chefplaner, seinen Chef der Operationen und seinen Programmführer. Alle diese Häuptlinge sind Zivilisten. Sands ist Kommandeur des Corps Lower Mississippi Valley Division, die die New Orleans District, die Old River umfasst, ist ein Teil. Der New Orleans District, U. S. Armeekorps der Ingenieure, besteht aus so etwas wie zehn Armeeoffiziere und vierzehnhundert Zivilisten. Warum die Armee überhaupt mit Deichsystemen, Navigationsschlössern, Felsenanbindungen, Betonverkleidungen und den strengen Realitäten der deltaischen Geomorphologie einbezogen werden sollte, ist eine Frage, die keine offensichtliche Antwort auf sich zieht. Das Korps ist hier, weil es hier ist. Seine Präsenz ist ein Ausdruck nicht der gegenwärtigen militärischen Strategie, sondern der reinen evolutionären Tradition, deren Ursprung um ein Jahrhundert und drei Viertel. Das Korps ist hier speziell, um die Nation gegen jede Wiederholung des Krieges von 1812 zu schützen. Als dieses ungewöhnliche Jahr in seinem sechsunddreißigsten Monat war, landete die britische Armee auf der Golf-Küste und marschierte gegen New Orleans. Der Krieg war gefördert worden, nicht zu provozieren, durch territorial aggressive amerikanische Midwesterners, die im ganzen Land bekannt waren als Falken. Es hatte bis jetzt einige belebende amerikanische Momente produziert (wir haben den Feind getroffen und sie sind unsere), einschließlich der bedeutenden Seesiege von Schiffen wie der Hornisse und der Wespe. Im großen und ganzen aber waren die Triumphe britisch gewesen. Die Briten hatten zahlreiche Angriffe auf Kanada abgestoßen. Sie hatten eine Basis in Maine gegründet. In Washington hatten sie das Kapitol und das Weiße Haus verbrannt, und mit ihren rutilanten Raketen und Airburst-Ballistik versuchten sie, Baltimore zu zerstören. New Orleans war nicht bewusst von diesen Ereignissen und sehr gefürchtete Invasion. Als es kam, zogen militärisch ungeübte amerikanische Backwoods-Scharfschützen, die hinter Sachen wie Baumwollballen steckten, zweitausend Soldaten des Königs ab, während sie einundsiebzig davon verloren. Nichtsdestotrotz überdauerte die Angst vor der Invasion der Stadt den Krieg. Trotz des Vertrags von Gent gab es eine weit verbreitete Annahme, dass die Briten wieder angreifen würden, und wenn ja, würde sicherlich angreifen, wo sie zuvor angegriffen hatten. Man musste nicht zum War College gehen, um zu erfahren, dass der Blitz eine zweite Chance genießt. In der Umgebung von New Orleans waren daher Befestigungsanlagen erforderlich. Dass dies eine Aufgabe für das Armeekorps der Ingenieure war, war in mehr als einem militärischen Sinne offensichtlich. Es gab und für ein weiteres Jahrzehnt wäre eine einzige Ingenieurschule in Amerika. Dies war die United States Military Academy, in West Point, New York. Die Akademie war im Jahre 1802 gegründet worden. Die Anfänge des Armeekorps der Ingenieure tatsächlich bis zur amerikanischen Revolution. General Washington, der unter seinen erregten Kolonisten wenige Ingenieure fand, die das Wort würdig waren, beauftragte Ingenieure von Louis XVI, und das erste Korps war zum größten Teil Französisch. Die Armee-Ingenieure wählten ein halbes Dutzend Standorten in der Nähe von New Orleans und unterzeichneten ein Muster, unterzeichneten einen zivilen Auftragnehmer, um die Befestigungsanlagen zu bauen. Der Kongress beauftragte die Armee, den Mississippi und seine Nebenflüsse mit Blick auf die Sicherung und Verbesserung der Binnenschifffahrt zu begutachten. So breitete sich das Korps nach Norden von seinen militärischen Befestigungen in zivile Arbeiten entlang der Flüsse aus. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, many of these projects were advanced under the supervision of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, West Point 38, a native of St. Bernard Parish, and ranking military engineer in the district. Late in 1860, Beauregard was named superintendent of the United States Military Academy. He served five days, resigned to become a Confederate general, and opened the Civil War by directing the bombardment of Fort Sumter. So much for why there are military officers on the towboat Mississippi inspecting the flood controls of Louisianas delta plain. Thomas Sands with his two stars, his warm smile, his intuitive sense of people, and his knowledge of hydrologyis Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregards apostolic successor. Sands is trim, athletic, and, in appearance, youthful. Only in his Vietnam ribbons does he show the effects of his assignments as a combat engineer. One of his thumbs is larger and less straight than the other, but that is nothing more than an orthopedic reference to the rigors of plebe lacrosseWest Point 58. He grew up near Nashville, and has an advanced degree in hydrology from Texas A. amp M. and a law degree he earned at night while working in the Pentagon. As a colonel, he spent three years in charge of the New Orleans District. As a brigadier general, he was commander of the Corps North Atlantic Division, covering military and civil works from Maine to Virginia. Now, from his division headquarters, in Vicksburg, he is in charge of the Mississippi Valley from Missouri to the Gulf. On a wall of his private office is a board of green slate. One day when I was interviewing him there, he spent much of the time making and erasing chalk diagrams. Man against nature. Thats what lifes all about, he said as he sketched the concatenating forces at Old River and the controls the Corps had applied. He used only the middle third of the slate. The rest had been preempted. The words Be Innovative, Be Responsive, and Operate with a Touch of Class were chalked across the bottom. Old River is a true representation of a confrontation with nature, he went on. Folks recognized that Mother Nature, being what she ishaving changed course many timeswould do it again. Today, Mother Nature is working within a constrained environment in the lower Mississippi. Old River is the key element. Every facet of law below there relates to what goes on in this little out-of-the-way point that most folks have never heard about. Chalked across the upper third of the state were the words Do Whats Right, and Be Prepared to Fight as Infantry When Required . Now, aboard the towboat Mississippi, the General is saying, In terms of hydrology, what weve done here at Old River is stop time. We have, in effect, stopped time in terms of the distribution of flows. Man is directing the maturing process of the Atchafalaya and the lower Mississippi. There is nothing formal about these remarks. The General says that this journey downriver is meant to be a floating convention. Listening to him is not a requirement. From the pilothouse to the fantail, people wander where they please, stopping here and again to converse in small groups. Two floatplanes appear above the trees, descend, flare, and land side by side behind the Mississippi. The towboat reduces power, and the airplanes taxi into its wake. They carry four passengers from Morgan Citylatecomers to the floating convention. They climb aboard, and the airplanes fly away. These four, making such effort to advance their special interests, are four among two million nine hundred thousand people whose livelihoods, safety, health, and quality of life are directly influenced by the Corps controls at Old River. In years gone by, when there were no control structures, naturally there were no complaints. The water went where it pleased. People took it as it came. The delta was in a state of nature. But now that Old River is valved and metered there are two million nine hundred thousand potential complainers, very few of whom are reluctant to present a grievance to the Corps. When farmers want less water, for example, fishermen want more, and they all complain to the Corps. In General Sands words, Were always walkin around with, by and large, the black hat on. Theres no place in the U. S. where there are so many competing interests relating to one water resource. Aboard the Mississippi, this is the primary theme. Oliver Houck, professor of ecoprudence, is heard to mutter, What the Corps does with the water decides everything. And General Sands cheerfully remarks that every time he makes one of these trips he gets beaten on the head and shoulders. He continues, In most water-resources stories, you can identify two sides. Here there are many more. The crawfisherman and the shrimper come up within five minutes asking for opposite things. The crawfishermen say, Put more water in, the water is low. Shrimpers dont want more water. They are benefitted by low water. Navigation interests say, The water is too low, dont take more away or youll have to dredge. Municipal interests say, Keep the water high or youll increase saltwater intrusion. In the high-water season, everybody is interested in less water. As the water starts dropping, upstream farmers say, Get the water off of us quicker. But folks downstream dont want it quicker. As water levels go up, we divert some fresh water into marshes, because the marshes need it for the nutrients and the sedimentation, but oyster fishermen complain. They all complain except the ones who have seed-oyster beds, which are destroyed by excessive salinity. The variety of competing influences is phenomenal. In southern Louisiana, the bed of the Mississippi River is so far below sea level that a flow of at least a hundred and twenty thousand cubic feet per second is needed to hold back salt water and keep it below New Orleans, which drinks the river. Along the ragged edges of the Gulf, whole ecosystems depend on the relationship of fresh to salt water, which is in large part controlled by the Corps. Shrimp people want water to be brackish, waterfowl people want it fresha situation that causes National Marine Fisheries to do battle with United States Fish and Wildlife while both simultaneously attack the Corps. The industrial interests of the American Ruhr beseech the Corps to maintain their supply of fresh water. Agricultural pumping stations demand more fresh water for their rice but nervily ask the Corps to keep the sediment. Morgan City needs water to get oil boats and barges to rigs offshore, but if Morgan City gets too much water its the end of Morgan City. Port authorities present special needs, and the owners of grain elevators, and the owners of coal elevators, barge interests, flood-control districts, levee boards. As General Sands says, finishing the list, A guy who wants to put a new dock in has to come to us. People suspect the Corps of favoring other people. In addition to all the things the Corps actually does and does not do, there are infinite actions it is imagined to do, infinite actions it is imagined not to do, and infinite actions it is imagined to be capable of doing, because the Corps has been conceded the almighty role of God. The towboat enters the Atchafalaya at an unprepossessing T in a jungle of phreatophytic Trees. Atchafalaya. The as are broad, the word rhymes with jambalaya, and the accents are on the second and fourth syllables. Among navigable rivers, the Atchafalaya is widely described as one of the most treacherous in the world, but it just lies there quiet and smooth. It lies there like a big alligator in a low slough, with time on its side, waitingwaiting to outwit the Corps of Engineersand hunkering down ever lower in its bed and presenting a sort of maw to the Mississippi, into which the river could fall. In the pilothouse, standing behind Jorge Cano and John Dugger as they swing the ship to port and head south, I find myself remembering an exchange between Cano and Rabalais a couple of days ago, when Cano was speculating about the Atchafalayas chances of capturing the Mississippi someday despite all efforts to prevent it from doing so. Mother Nature is patient, he said. Mother Nature has more time than we do. Rabalais said, She has nothing but time. Frederic Chatry happens to be in the pilothouse, too, as does Fred Bayley. Both are civilians: Chatry, chief engineer of the New Orleans District Bayley, chief engineer of the Lower Mississippi Valley Division. Chatry is short and slender, a courtly and formal man, his uniform a bow tie. He is saying that before the control structures were built water used to flow in either direction through Old River. It would flow into the Mississippi if the Red happened to be higher. This was known as a reversal, and the last reversal occurred in 1945. The enlarging Atchafalaya was by then so powerful in its draw that it took all of the Red and kept it. The more water the Atchafalaya takes, the bigger it gets the bigger it gets, the more water it takes. The only thing that interrupts it is Old River Control. If we had not interrupted it, the main river would now be the Atchafalaya, below this point. If you left it to its own devices, the end result had to be that it would become the master stream. If that were to happen, below Old River the Mississippi reach would be unstable. Salt would fill it in. The Corps could not cope with it. Old River to Baton Rouge would fill in. River traffic from the north would stop. Everything would go to pot in the delta. We couldnt cope. It would be plugged. I ask to what extent they ever contemplate that the structures at Old River might fail. Bayley is quick to answerFred Bayley, a handsome sandy-haired man in a regimental tie and a cool tan suit, with the contemplative manner of an academic and none of the defenses of a challenged engineer. Anything can fail, he says. In most of our projects, we try to train natural effects instead of taking them head on. I never approach anything we do with the idea that it cant fail. That is sticking your head in the sand. We are making twelve knots on a two-and-a-half-knot current under bright sun and cottony bits of cloudflying along between the Atchafalaya levees, between the river-batcher trees. We are running down the reach above Simmesport, but only a distant bridge attests to that fact. From the river you cannot see the country. From the country you cannot see the river. I once looked down at this country from the air, in a light plane, and although it is called a floodwaythis segment of it the West Atchafalaya Floodwayit is full of agriculture, in plowed geometries of brown, green, and tan. The Atchafalaya from above looks like the Connecticut winding past New Hampshire floodplain farms. If you look up, you do not see Mt. Washington. You see artificial ponds, now and again, as far as the horizonsquare ponds, dotted with the cages of crawfish. You see dark-green pastureland, rail fences, cows with short fat shadows. The unexpected happensunthinkable, unfortunate, but not unimaginable. At first with a modest lurch, and then with a more pronounced lurch, and then with a profound structural shudder, the Mississippi is captured by the Atchafalaya. The mid-American flagship of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has run aground. After going on line, in 1963, the control structures at Old River had to wait ten years to prove what they could do. The nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties were secure in the Mississippi Valley. In human terms, a generation passed with no disastrous floods. The Mississippi River and Tributaries Projectthe Corps total repertory of defenses from Cairo, Illinois, southwardseemed to have met its design purpose: to confine and conduct the run of the river, to see it safely into the Gulf. The Corps looked upon this accomplishment with understandable pride and, without intended diminution of respect for its enemy, issued a statement of victory: We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it. Then, in the fall of 1972, the winter of 1973, river stages were higher than normal, reducing the systems tolerance for what might come in spring. In the upper valley, snows were unusually heavy. In the South came a season of exceptional rains. During the uneventful era that was about to end, the Mississippis main channel, in its relative lethargy, had given up a lot of volume to accumulations of sediment. High water, therefore, would flow that much higher. As the spring runoff came down the tributaries, collected, and approached, computers gave warning that the mainline levees were not sufficient to contain it. Eight hundred miles of frantically filled sandbags were added to the levees. Bulldozers added potato ridgesbarriers of uncompacted dirt. While this was going on, more rain was falling. In the southern part of the valley, twenty inches fell in a day and a half. At Old River Control on an ordinary day, when the stilling basin sounds like Victoria Falls but otherwise the country is calm and drywhen sandy spaces and stands of trees fill up the view between the structure and the Mississippian almost academic effort is required to visualize a slab of water six stories high, spread to the ends of perspective. That is how it was in 1973. During the sustained spring high waterweek after week after weekthe gathered drainage of Middle America came to Old River in units exceeding two million cubic feet a second. Twenty-five per cent of that left the Mississippi channel and went to the Atchafalaya. In aerial view, trees and fields were no longer visible, and the gated stronghold of the Corps seemed vulnerable in the extremea narrow causeway, a thin fragile line across a brown sea. The Corps had built Old River Control to control just about as much as was passing through it. In mid-March, when the volume began to approach that amount, curiosity got the best of Raphael G. Kazmann, author of a book called Modern Hydrology and professor of civil engineering at Louisiana State University. Kazmann got into his car, crossed the Mississippi on the high bridge at Baton Rouge, and made his way north to Old River. He parked, got out, and began to walk the structure. An extremely low percentage of its five hundred and sixty-six feet eradicated his curiosity. That whole miserable structure was vibrating, he recalled in 1986, adding that he had felt as if he were standing on a platform at a small rural train station when a fully loaded freight goes through. Kazmann opted not to wait for the caboose. I thought, This thing weighs two hundred thousand tons. When two hundred thousand tons vibrates like this, this is no place for R. G. Kazmann. I got into my car, turned around, and got the hell out of there. I was just a professorand, thank God, not responsible. Kazmann says that the Tennessee River and the Missouri River were the two main culprits in the 1973 flood. In one high water and another, the big contributors vary around the watershed. An ultimate deluge might possibly involve them all. After Kazmann went home from Old River that time in 1973, he did his potamology indoors for a while, assembling daily figures. In some of the numbers he felt severe vibrations. In his words, I watched the Ohio like a hawk, because if that had come up, I thought, Katie, bar the door The water was plenty high as it was, and continuously raged through the structure. Nowhere in the Mississippi Valley were velocities greater than in this one place, where the waters made their hydraulic jump, plunging over what Kazmann describes as concrete falls into the regime of the Atchafalaya. The structure and its stilling basin had been configured to dissipate energybut not nearly so much energy. The excess force was attacking the environment of the structure. A large eddy had formed. Unbeknownst to anyone, its swirling power was excavating sediments by the inflow apron of the structure. Even larger holes had formed under the apron itself. Unfortunately, the main force of the Mississippi was crashing against the south side of the inflow channel, producing unplanned turbulence. The control structure had been set up near the outside of a bend of the river, and closer to the Mississippi than many engineers thought wise. On the outflow sidewhere the water fell to the level of the Atchafalayaa hole had developed that was larger and deeper than a football stadium, and with much the same shape. It was hidden, of course, far beneath the chop of wild water. The Corps had long since been compelled to leave all eleven gates wide open, in order to reduce to the greatest extent possible the force that was shaking the structure, and so there was no alternative to aggravating the effects on the bed of the channel. In addition to the structures weight, what was holding it in place was a millipede of stiltssteel H-beams that reached down at various angles, as pilings, ninety feet through sands and silts, through clayey peats and organic mucks. There never was a question of anchoring such a fortress in rock. The shallowest rock was seven thousand feet straight down. In three places below the structure, sheet steel went into the substrate like fins but the integrity of the structure depended essentially on the H-beams, and vehicular traffic continued to cross it en route to San Luis Rey. Then, as now, LeRoy Dugas was the person whose hand controlled Old River Controla thought that makes him smile. We couldnt afford to close any of the gates, he remarked to me one day at Old River. Too much water was passing through the structure. Water picked up riprap off the bottom in front, and rammed it through to the tail bed. The riprap included derrick stones, and each stone weighed seven tons. On the level of the road deck, the vibrations increased. The operator of a moving crane let the crane move without him and waited for it at the end of the structure. Dugie continued, You could get on the structure with your automobile and open the door and it would close the door. The crisis recalled the magnitude of the 27 high water, when Dugie was a baby. Up the valley somewhere, during the 27 high water, was a railroad bridge with a train sitting on it loaded with coal. The train had been put there because its weight might help keep the bridge in place, but the bridge, vibrating in the floodwater, produced so much friction that the coal in the gondolas caught fire. Soon the bridge, the train, and the glowing coal fell into the water. One April evening in 1973at the height of the flooda fisherman walked onto the structure. There is, after all, order in the universe, and some things take precedence over impending disasters. On the inflow side, facing the Mississippi, the structure was bracketed by a pair of guide walls that reached out like curving arms to bring in the water. Close by the guide wall at the south end was the swirling eddy, which by now had become a whirlpool. There was other motion as wellor so it seemed. The fisherman went to find Dugas, in his command post at the north end of the structure, and told him the guide wall had moved. Dugie told the fisherman he was seeing things. The fisherman nodded affirmatively. When Dugie himself went to look at the guide wall, he looked at it for the last time. It was slipping into the river, into the inflow channel. Slowly it dipped, sank, broke. Its foundations were gone. There was nothing below it but water. Professor Kazmann likes to say that this was when the Corps became scared green. Whatever the engineers may have felt, as soon as the water began to recede they set about learning the dimensions of the damage. The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where What was solid, what was not What was directly below the gates and the roadway With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish. This was scarcely the first time that an attempt to control the Mississippi had failed. Old River, 1973, was merely the most emblematic place and moment where, in the course of three centuries, failure had occurred. From the beginnings of settlement, failure was the par expectation with respect to the rivera fact generally masked by the powerful fabric of ambition that impelled people to build towns and cities where almost any camper would be loath to pitch a tent. If you travel by canoe through the river swamps of Louisiana, you may very well grow uneasy as the sun is going down. You look around for a sitea place to sleep, a place to cook. There is no terra firma. Nothing is solider than duckweed, resting on the water like green burlap. Quietly, you slide through the forest, breaking out now and again into acreages of open lake. You study the dusk for some dark cap of uncovered ground. Seeing one at last, you occupy it, limited though it may be. Your tent site may be smaller than your tent, but in this amphibious milieu you have found yourself terrain. You have established yourself in much the same manner that the French established New Orleans. So what does it matter if your leg spends the night in the water. The water is from the state of New York, the state of Idaho, the province of Alberta, and everywhere below that frame. Far above Old River are places where the floodplain is more than a hundred miles wide. Spaniards in the sixteenth century came upon it at the wrong time, saw an ocean moving south, and may have been discouraged. Where the delta began, at Old River, the water spread out even morethrough a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basinsbut this did not dissuade the French. For military and commercial purposes, they wanted a city in such country. They laid it out in 1718, only months before a great flood. Even as New Orleans was rising, its foundations filled with water. The message in the landscape could not have been more clear: like the aboriginal people, you could fish and forage and move on, but you could not build thereyou could not create a city, or even a cluster of modest steadingswithout declaring war on nature. You did not have to be Dutch to understand this, or French to ignore it. The people of southern Louisiana have often been compared unfavorably with farmers of the pre-Aswan Nile, who lived on high ground, farmed low ground, and permitted floods to come and go according to the rhythms of nature. There were differences in Louisiana, though. There was no high ground worth mentioning, and planters had to live on their plantations. The waters of the Nile were warm the Mississippi brought cold northern floods that sometimes stood for months, defeating agriculture for the year. If people were to farm successfully in the rich loams of the natural leveesor anywhere nearbythey could not allow the Mississippi to continue in its natural state. Herbert Kassner, the divisions public-relations director, once remarked to me, This river used to meander all over its floodplain. People would move their tepees, and that was that. You cant move Vicksburg. When rivers go over their banks, the spreading water immediately slows up, dropping the heavier sediments. The finer the silt, the farther it is scattered, but so much falls close to the river that natural levees rise through time. The first houses of New Orleans were built on the natural levees, overlooking the river. In the face of disaster, there was no better place to go. If there was to be a New Orleans, the levees themselves would have to be raised, and the owners of the houses were ordered to do the raising. This law (1724) was about as effective as the ordinances that compel homeowners and shopkeepers in the North to shovel snow off their sidewalks. Odd as it seems now, those early levees were only three feet high, and they were rife with imperfections. To the extent that they were effective at all, they owed a great deal to the country across the river, where there were no artificial levees, and waters that went over the bank flowed to the horizon. In 1727, the French colonial governor declared the New Orleans levee complete, adding that within a year it would be extended a number of miles up and down the river, making the community floodproof. The governors name was Perrier. If words could stop water, Perrier had found theminitiating a durable genre. In 1735, New Orleans went underand again in 1785. The intervalslike those between earthquakes in San Franciscowere generally long enough to allow the people to build up a false sense of security. In response to the major floods, they extended and raised the levees. A levee appeared across the river from New Orleans, and by 1812 the west bank was leveed to the vicinity of Old River, a couple of hundred miles upstream. At that time, the east bank was leveed as far as Baton Rouge. Neither of the levees was continuous. Both protected plantation land. Where the country remained as the Choctaws had known it, floodwaters poured to the side, reducing the threat elsewhere. Land was not cheapforty acres cost three thousand dollarsbut so great was the demand for riverfront plantations that by 1828 the levees in southern Louisiana were continuous, the river artificially confined. Just in case the levees should fail, some plantation housesamong their fields of sugarcane, their long bright rows of orangeswere built on Indian burial mounds. In 1828, Bayou Manchac was closed. In the whole of the Mississippis delta plain, Bayou Manchac happened to have been the only distributary that went east. It was dammed at the source. Its discharge would no longer ease the pressures of the master stream. By this time, Henry Shreve had appeared on the scenein various ways to change it forever. He was the consummate riverman: boatman, pilot, entrepreneur, empirical naval architect. He is noted as the creator of the flat-hulled layer-cake stern-wheel Mississippi steamboat, its shallow draft result of moving the machinery up from below to occupy its own deck. The Mississippi steamboat was not invented, however. It evolved. And Shreves contribution was less in its configuration than its power. A steamboat built and piloted by Henry Shreve travelled north against the current as far as Louisville. He demonstrated that commerce could go both ways. Navigation was inconvenienced, though, by hazards in the riverthe worst of which were huge trees that had drifted south over the years and become stuck in various ways. One kind was rigid in the riverbed and stood up like a spear. It was called a planter. Another, known as a sawyer sawed up and down with the vagaries of the current, and was likely to rise suddenly in the path of a boat and destroy it. In the Yukon River, such logseternally bowingare known as preachers. In the Mississippi, whatever the arrested logs were called individually, they were all snags, and after the Army engineers had made Shreve, a civilian, their Superintendent of Western River Improvements he went around like a dentist yanking snags. The multihulled snag boats were devices of his invention. In the Red River, he undertook to disassemble a raftuprooted trees by the tens of thousands that were stopping navigation for a hundred and sixty miles. Shreve cleared eighty miles in one year. Meanwhile, at 31 degrees north latitude (about halfway between Vicksburg and Baton Rouge) he made a bold move on the Mississippi. In the sinusoidal path of the river, any meander tended to grow until its loop was so large it would cut itself off. At 31 degrees north latitude was a west-bending loop that was eighteen miles around and had so nearly doubled back upon itself that Shreve decided to help it out. He adapted one of his snag boats as a dredge, and after two weeks of digging across the narrow neck he had a good swift current flowing. The Mississippi quickly took over. The width of Shreves new channel doubled in two days. A few days more and it had become the main channel of the river. The great loop at 31 degrees north happened to he where the Red-Atchafalaya conjoined the Mississippi, like a pair of parentheses back to back. Steamboats had had difficulty there in the colliding waters. Shreves purpose in cutting off the loop was to give the boats a smoother shorter way to go, and, as an incidental, to speed up the Mississippi, lowering, however slightly, its crests in flood. One effect of the cutoff was to increase the flow of water out of the Mississippi and into the Atchafalaya, advancing the date of ultimate capture. Where the flow departed from the Mississippi now, it followed an arm of the cutoff meander. This short body of water soon became known as Old River. In less than a fortnight, it had been removed as a segment of the main-stem Mississippi and restyled as a form of surgical drain. In city and country, riverfront owners became sensitive about the fact that the levees they were obliged to build were protecting not only their properties but also the properties behind them. Levee districts were establishedadministered by levee boardsto spread the cost. The more the levees confined the river, the more destructive it became when they failed. A place where water broke through was known as a crevassea source of terror no less effective than a bursting damand the big ones were memorialized, like other great disasters, in a series of proper names: the Macarty Crevasse (1816), the Sauv Crevasse (1849). Levee inspectors were given power to call out male slavesaged fifteen to sixtywhose owners lived within seven miles of trouble. With the approach of mid-century, the levees were averaging six feettwice their original heightand calculations indicated that the flow line would rise. Most levee districts were not populous enough to cover the multiplying costs, so the United States Congress, in 1850, wrote the swamp and Overflow Land Act. It is possible that no friend of Peter had ever been so generous in handing over his money to Paul. The federal government deeded millions of acres of swampland to states along the river, and the states sold the acreage to pay for the levees. The Swamp Act gave eight and a half million acres of river swamps and marshes to Louisiana alone. Other states, in aggregate, got twenty million more. Since time immemorial, these river swamps had been the natural reservoirs where floodwaters were taken in and held, and gradually released as the flood went down. Where there was timber (including virgin cypress), the swampland was sold for seventy-five cents an acre, twelve and a half cents where there were no trees. The new owners were for the most part absentee. An absentee was a Yankee. The new owners drained much of the swampland, turned it into farmland, and demanded the protection of new and larger levees. At this point, Congress might have asked itself which was the act and which was the swamp. River stages, in their wide variations, became generally higher through time, as the water was presented with fewer outlets. People began to wonder if the levees could ever be high enough and strong enough to make the river safe. Possibly a system of dams and reservoirs in the tributaries of the upper valley could hold water back and release it in the drier months, and possibly a system of spillways and floodways could be fashioned in the lower valley to distribute water when big floods arrived. Beginning in the eighteen-fifties, these notions were the subject of virulent debate among civilian and military engineers. Four major floods in ten years and thirty-two disastrous crevasses in a single spring were not enough to suggest to the Corps that levees alone might never be equal to the job. The Corps, as things stood, was not yet in charge. District by district, state by state, the levee system was still a patchwork effort. There was no high command in the fight against the water. In one of the Corps official histories, the situation is expressed in this rather preoccupied sentence: By 1860, it had become increasingly obvious that a successful war over such an immense battleground could be waged only by a consolidated army under one authority. While the Civil War came and went, the posture of the river did not change. Vicksburg fell but did not move. In the floods of 1862, 1866, and 1867, levees failed. Catastrophes notwithstanding, Bayou Plaqueminea major distributary of the Mississippi and a natural escape for large percentages of spring high waterwas closed in 1868, its junction with the Mississippi sealed by an earthen dam. Even at normal stages, the Mississippi was beginning to stand up like a large vein on the back of a hand. The river of the eighteen-seventies ran higher than it ever had before. In 1879, Congress at last created the Mississippi River Commission, which included civilians but granted hegemony to the Corps. The president of the commission would always be an Army engineer, and all decisions were subject to veto by the commandant of the Corps. Imperiously, Congress ordered the commission to prevent destructive floods, and left it to the Corps to say how. The Corps remained committed to the argument that tributary dams and reservoirs and downstream spillways would create more problems than they would solve. Hold by levees was the way to do the job. The national importance of the commission is perhaps illuminated by the fact that one of its first civilian members was Benjamin Harrison. Another was James B. Eads, probably the most brilliant engineer who has ever addressed his attention to the Mississippi River. As a young man, he had walked around on its bottom under a device of his own invention that he called a submarine. As a naval architect in the Civil War, he had designed the first American ironclads. Later, at St. Louis, he had built the first permanent bridge across the main stem of the river south of the Missouri. More recently, in defiance of the cumulative wisdom of nearly everyone in his profession, he had solved a primal question in anadromous navigation: how to get into the river. The mouth was defended by a mud-lump blockadeimpenetrable masses of sediment dumped by the river as it reached the still waters of the Gulf. Dredging was hopeless. What would make a channel deep enough for ships The government wouldnt finance him, so Eads bet his own considerable fortune on an elegant idea: he built parallel jetties in the rivers mouth. They pinched the currents. The accelerated water dug out and maintained a navigable channel. To the Corps belief that a river confined by levees would similarly look after itself the success of the jetties gave considerable reinforcement. And Eads added words that spoke louder than his actions. If the profession of an engineer were not based upon exact science, he said, I might tremble for the result, in view of the immensely of the interests dependent on my success. But every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the riverits scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and depositsis controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at. When the commission was created, Mark Twain was forty-three. A book he happened to be working on was Life on the Mississippi. Through a character called Uncle Mumford, he remarked that four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it wont learn him the river. Twain also wrote, One who knows the Mississippi will promptly avernot aloud but to himselfthat ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey cannot save a shore which it has sentenced cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere they know all that can be known of their abstruse science and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct. In 1882 came the most destructive flood of the nineteenth century. After breaking the levees in two hundred and eighty-four crevasses, the water spread out as much as seventy miles. In the fertile lands on the two sides of Old River, plantations were deeply submerged, and livestock survived in flatboats. A floating journalist who reported these scenes in the March 29th New Orleans Times-Democrat said, The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that rivers desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf. The capture of the Mississippi, in other words, was already obvious enough to be noticed by a journalist. Seventy-eight years earlierjust after the Louisiana Purchasethe Army officer who went to take possession of the new country observed the Atchafalaya completely obstructed by logs and other material and said in his report, Were it not for these obstructions, the probability is that the Mississippi would soon find a much nearer way to the Gulf than at present, particularly as it manifests a constant inclination to vary its course. The head of the Atchafalaya was plugged with logs for thirty miles. The raft was so compact that El Camino Real, the Spanish trail coming in from Texas, crossed the Atchafalaya near its head, and cattle being driven toward the Mississippi walked across the logs. The logjam was Old River Control Structure No. O. Gradually, it was disassembled, freeing the Atchafalaya to lower its plain. Snag boats worked on it, and an attempt was made to clear it with fire. The flood of 1863 apparently broke it open, and at once the Atchafalaya began to widen and deepen, increasing its draw on the Mississippi. Shreves clearing of the Red River had also increased the flow of the Atchafalaya. The interventional skill of human engineers, which would be called upon in the twentieth century to stop the great shift at Old River, did much in the nineteenth to hurry it up. For forty-eight years, the Mississippi River Commission and the Corps of Engineers adhered strictly to the hold by levees policylevees, and levees only. It was important that no water be allowed to escape the river, because its full power would be most effective in scouring the bed, deepening the channel, increasing velocity, lowering stages, and preventing destructive floods. This was the hydraulic and hydrological philosophy not only of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers but also of the great seventeenth-century savant Domenico Guglielmini, whose insights, ultimately, were to prove so ineffective in the valley of the Po. In 1885, one of General Sands predecessors said, The commission is distinctly committed to the idea of closing all outlets. It has consistently opposed the fallacy known as the Outlet System. Slaves with wheelbarrows started the levees. Immigrants with wheelbarrows replaced the slaves. Mule-drawn scrapers replaced the wheelbarrows, but not until the twentieth century. Fifteen hundred miles of earthen wallsroughly six, then nine, then twelve feet high, and a hundred feet from side to sidewere built by men with shovels. They wove huge mats of willow poles and laid them down in cutbanks as revetments. When floods came, they went out to defend their defenses, and, in the words of a Corps publication, the effort was comparable to the rigors of the battlefield. Nature was not always the only enemy. Anywhere along the river, people were safer if the levee failed across the way. If you lived on the east side, you might not be sad if water flooded west. You were also safer if the levee broke on your own side downstream. Armed patrols went up and down the levees. They watched for sand boilssigns of seepage that could open a crevasse from within. And they watched for Private commandos, landing in the dark with dynamite. Bayou Lafourche, a major distributary, was dammed in 1904. In something like twenty years, the increased confinement of the river had elevated floodwaters in Memphis by an average of about eight feet. The Corps remained loyal to the teachings of Guglielmini, and pronouncements were still forthcoming that the river was at last under control and destructive floods would not occur again. Declarations of that sort had been made in the quiet times before the great floods of 1884, 1890, 1891, 1897, 1898, and 1903, and they would be made again before 1912, 1913, 1922, and 1927. The 27 high water tore the valley apart. On both sides of the river, levees crevassed from Cairo to the Gulf, and in the same thousand miles the flood destroyed every bridge. It killed hundreds of people, thousands of animals. Overbank, it covered twenty-six thousand square miles. It stayed on the land as much as three months. New Orleans was saved by blowing up a levee downstream. Yet the total volume of the 1927 high water was nowhere near a record. It was not a hundred-year flood. It was a form of explosion, achieved by the confining levees. The levees of the nineteen-twenties were about six times as high as their earliest predecessors, but really no more effective. In a sense, they had been an empirical experimentin aggregate, fifteen hundred miles of trial and error. They could beand they would beraised even higher. But in 1927 the results of the experiment at last came clear. The levees were helping to aggravate the problem they were meant to solve. With walls alone, one could only build an absurdly elevated aqueduct. Resistance times the resistance distance amplified the force of nature. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river might be subject to laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres, but, if so, the laws were inexactly understood. The Corps had attacked Antaeus without quite knowing who he was. Congress appropriated three hundred million dollars to find out. This was more money in one billthe hopefully titled Flood Control Act (1928)than had been spent on Mississippi levees in all of Colonial and American history. These were the start-up funds for the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the coordinated defenses that would still be incomplete in the nineteen-eighties and would ultimately cost about seven billion dollars. The project would raise levees and build new ones, pave cutbanks, sever loops to align the current, and hold back large volumes of water with substantial dams in tributary streams. Dredges known as dustpans would take up sediment by the millions of tons. Stone dikes would appear in strategic places, forcing the water to go around them, preventing the channel from spreading out. Most significantly, though, the project would acknowledge the superiority of the force with which it was meant to deal. It would give back to the river some measure of the freedom lost as the deltas distributaries one by one were sealed. It would go into the levees in certain places and build gates that could be opened in times of extraordinary flood. The water coming out of such spillways would enter new systems of levees guiding it down floodways to the Gulf. But how many spillways How many floodways How many tributary dams Calculating maximum storms, frequency of storms, maximum snowmelts, sustained saturation of the upper valley, coincident storms in scattered parts of the watershed, the Corps reached for the figure that would float Noah. The round number was three millionthat is, three million cubic feet per second coming past Old River. This was twenty-five per cent above the 1927 high. The expanded control system, with its variety of devices, would have to be designed to process that. Various names were given to this blue-moon superflow, this concatenation of recorded moments written in the future unknown. It was called the Design Flood. Alternatively, it was called the Project Flood. Bonnet Carre was the first spillwaycompleted in 1931, roughly thirty miles upriver from New Orleans. The water was meant to spill into Lake Pontchartrain and go on into the Gulf, dispersing eight and a half per cent of the Project Flood. Bonnet Carre (locally pronounced Bonny Carey) would replace dynamite in the defense of New Orleans. When the great crest of 1937 came down the riversetting an all-time record at Natchezenough of the new improvements were in place to see it through in relative safety, with the final and supreme test presented at Bonnet Carre, where the gates were opened for the first time. At the high point, more than two hundred thousand feet per second were diverted into Lake Pontchartrain, and the flow that went on by New Orleans left the city low and dry. For the Corps of Engineers, not to mention the people of the southern parishes, the triumph of 1937 brought fresh courage, renewed confidencea sense once again that the river could be controlled. Major General Harley B. Ferguson, the division commander, became a regional military hero. It was he who had advocated the projects many cutoffs, all made in the decade since 1927, which shortened the river by more than a hundred miles, reducing the amount of friction working against the water. The more distance, the more friction. Friction slows the river and raises its level. The mainline levees were rebuilt, extended, reinforcedand their height was almost doubled, reaching thirty feet. There was now a Great Wall of China running up each side of the river, with the difference that while the levees were each about as long as the Great Wall they were in many places higher and in cross-section ten times as large. Work continued on the floodways. There was one in Missouri that let water out of the river and put it back into the river a few miles downstream. But the principal conduit of releasewithout which Bonnet Carre would be about as useful as a bailing canwas the route of the Atchafalaya. Since the lower part of it was the largest river swamp in North America, it was, by nature, ready for the storage of water. The Corps built guide levees about seventeen miles apart to shape the discharge toward Atchafalaya Bay, incidentally establishing a framework for the swamp. In the northern Atchafalaya, near Old River, they built a three-chambered system of floodways involving so many intersecting levees that the country soon resembled a cranberry farm developed on an epic scale. The West Atchafalaya Floodway had so many people in it, and so many soybeans, that its levees were to be breached only by explosives in extreme emergencymaybe once in a hundred years. The Morganza Floodway, completed in the nineteen-fifties, contained farmlands but no permanent buildings. A couple of towns and the odd refinery were surrounded by levees in the form of rings. But the plane geometry of the floodways was primarily intended to take the water from the Mississippi and get it to the swamp. The flood-control design of 1928 had left Old River openthe only distributary of the Mississippi to continue in its natural state. The Army was aware of the threat from the Atchafalaya. Colonel Charles Potter, president of the Mississippi River Commission, told Congress in 1928 that the Mississippi was just itching to go that way. In the new master plan, however, nothing resulted from his testimony. The Corps, in making its flow diagrams, planned that the Atchafalaya would take nearly half the Mississippi during the Design Flood. It was not in the design that the Atchafalaya take it all. The Atchafalaya, continuing to grow, had become, by volume of discharge, the second-largest river in the United States. Compared with the Mississippi, it had a three-to-one advantage in slope. Around 1950, geologists predicted that by 1975 the shift would be unstoppable. The Mississippi River and Tributaries Project would be in large part invalidated, the entire levee system of southern Louisiana would have to be rebuilt, communities like Morgan City in the Atchafalaya Basin would be a good deal less preserved than Pompeii, and the new mouth of the Mississippi would be a hundred and twenty miles from the old. Old River Control was authorized in 1954. The levees were raised again. What had been adequate in 1937 was problematical in the nineteen-fifties. New grades were set. New dollars were spent to meet the grades. So often compared with the Great Wall of China, the levees had more in common with the Maginot Line. Taken together, they were a retroactive redoubt, more than adequate to wage a bygone war but below the requirements of the war to come. The levee grades of the nineteen-fifties would prove inadequate in the nineteen-seventies. Every shopping center, every drainage improvement, every square foot of new pavement in nearly half the United States was accelerating runoff toward Louisiana. Streams were being channelized to drain swamps. Meanders were cut off to speed up flow. The valleys natural storage capacities were everywhere reduced. As contributing factors grew, the river delivered more flood for less rain. The precipitation that produced the great flood of 1973 was only about twenty per cent above normal. Yet the crest at St. Louis was the highest ever recorded there. The flood proved that control of the Mississippi was as much a hope for the future as control of the Mississippi had ever been. The 1973 high water did not come close to being a Project Flood. It merely came close to wiping out the project. While the control structure at Old River was shaking, more than a third of the Mississippi was going down the Atchafalaya. If the structure had toppled, the flow would have risen to seventy per cent. It was enough to scare not only a Louisiana State University professor but the division commander himself. At the time, this was Major General Charles Noble. He walked the bridge, looked down into the exploding water, and later wrote these words: The south training wall on the Mississippi River side of the structure failed very early in the flood, causing violent eddy patterns and extreme turbulence. The toppled training wall monoliths worsened the situation. The integrity of the structure at this point was greatly in doubt. It was frightening to stand above the gate bays and experience the punishing vibrations caused by the violently turbulent, massive flood waters. If the General had known what was below him, he might have sounded retreat. The Old River Control Structurethis two-hundred-thousand-ton keystone of the comprehensive flood-protection project for the lower Mississippi Valleywas teetering on steel pilings above extensive cavities full of water. The gates of the Morganza Floodway, thirty miles downstream, had never been opened. The soybean farmers of Morganza were begging the Corps not to open them now. The Corps thought it over for a few days while the Old River Control Structure, absorbing shock of the sort that could bring down a skyscraper, continued to shake. Relieving some of the pressure, the Corps opened Morganza. The damage at Old River was increased but not initiated by the 1973 flood. The invasive scouring of the channel bed and the undermining of the control structure may actually have begun in 1963, as soon as the structure opened. In years that followed, loose barges now and again slammed against the gates, stuck there for months, blocked the flow, enhanced the hydraulic jump, and no doubt contributed to the scouring. Scour holes formed on both sides of the control structure, and expanded steadily. If they had met in 1973, they might have brought the structure down. After the waters quieted and the concrete had been penetrated by exploratory diamond drills, Old River Control at once became, and has since remained, the civil-works project of highest national priority for the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. Through the surface of Louisiana 15, the road that traverses the structure, more holes were drilled, with diameters the size of dinner plates, and grout was inserted in the cavities below, like fillings in a row of molars. The grout was cement and bentonite. The drilling and filling went on for months. There was no alternative to leaving gates open and giving up control. Stress on the structure was lowest with the gates open. Turbulence in the channel was commensurately higher. The greater turbulence allowed the water on the Atchafalaya side to dig deeper and increase its advantage over the Mississippi side. As the Corps has reported, The percentage of Mississippi River flow being diverted through the structure in the absence of control was steadily increasing. That could not be helped. After three and a half years, control was to some extent restored, but the extent was limited. In the words of the Corps, The partial foundation undermining which occurred in 1973 inflicted permanent damage to the foundation of the low sill control structure. Emergency foundation repair, in the form of rock riprap and cement grout, was performed to safeguard the structure from a potential total failure. The foundation under approximately fifty per cent of the structure was drastically and irrevocably changed. The structure had been built to function with a maximum difference of thirty-seven feet between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya sides. That maximum now had to be lowered to twenty-two feeta diminution that brought forth the humor in the phrase Old River Control. Robert Fairless, a New Orleans District engineer who has long been a part of the Old River story, once told me that things were touch and go for some months in 1973 and the situation was precarious still. At a head greater than twenty-two feet, theres danger of losing the whole thing, he said. If loose barges were to be pulled into the front of the structure where they would block the flow, the head would build up, and thered be nothing we could do about it. A sign appeared on one of the three remaining wing walls: Fishing and Shad Dipping off This Wing Wall Is Prohibited . A survey boat, Navy-gray and very powerful and much resembling PT-109, began to make runs toward the sill upstream through the roiling brown rapids. Year after yearat least five times a weekthis has continued. The survey boat drives itself to a standstill in the whaleback waves a few yards shy of the structure. Two men in life vests, who stand on the swaying deck in spray that curls like smoke, let go a fifty-pound ball that drops on a cable from a big stainless reel. The ball sinks to the bottom. The crewmen note the depth. They are not looking for mark twain. For example, in 1974 they found three holes so deep that it took a hundred and eighty-five thousand tons of rock to fill them in. The 1973 flood shook the control structure a whole lot more than it shook the confidence of the Corps. When a legislative committee seemed worried, a Corps general reassured them, saying, The Corps of Engineers can make the Mississippi River go anywhere the Corps directs it to go. On display in division headquarters in Vicksburg is a large aerial photograph of a school bus moving along a dry road beside a levee while a Galilee on the other side laps at the levee crown. This picture alone is a triumph for the Corps. Herbert Kassner, the public-relations director and a master of his craft, says of the picture, Of course, I tell people the school bus may have been loaded with workers going to fix a break in the levee, but it looks good. And of course, after 1973, the flow lines were recomputed and the levees had to be raised. When the river would pool against the stratosphere was only a question of time. The Washington Post . in an editorial in November of 1980, called attention to the Corps efforts to prevent the great shift at Old River, and concluded with this paragraph: Who will win as this slow-motion confrontation between humankind and nature goes on No one really knows. But after watching Mt. St. Helens and listening to the guesses about its performance, if we had to bet, we would bet on the river. The Corps had already seen that bet, and was about to bump it, too. Even before the muds were dry from the 1973 flood, Corps engineers had begun building a model of Old River at their Waterways Experiment Station, in Vicksburg. The model was to cover an acre and a half. A model of that size was modest for the Corps. Not far away, it had a fifteen-acre model of the Mississippi drainage, where water flowing in from the dendritic tips could get itself together and attack Louisiana. The scale was one human stride to the mile. In the time it took to say one Mississippi, if fourteen gallons went past Arkansas City that was a Project Flood. Something like eight and a half gallon was a high-water event. Its the ultimate sandboxthese guys have made a profession of the sandbox, Tulanes Oliver Houck has said, with concealed admiration. Theyve put the whole river in a sandbox. The Old River model not only helped with repairs, it also showed a need for supplementary fortification. Since the first control structure was irreparably damaged, a second one, nearby, with its own inflow channel from the Mississippi, should establish full control at Old River and take pressure off the original structure in times of high stress. To refine the engineering of the auxiliary structure, several additional models, with movable beds, were built on a distorted scale. Making the vertical scale larger than the horizontal was believed to eliminate surface-tension problems in simulating the turbulence of a real river. The channel beds were covered with crushed coalwhich has half the specific gravity of sandor with walnut shells, which were thought to be better replicas of channel-protecting rock but had an unfortunate tendency to decay, releasing gas bubbles. In one model, the stilling basin below the new structure was filled with driveway-size limestone gravel, each piece meant to represent a derrick stone six feet thick. After enough water had churned through these models to satisfy the designers, ground was broken at Old River, about a third of a mile from the crippled sill, for the Old River Control Auxiliary Structure, the most advanced weapon ever developed to prevent the capture of a rivera handsome gift to the American Ruhr, worth three hundred million dollars. In Vicksburg, Robert Fletchera sturdily built, footballish sort of engineer, who had explained to me about the nutshells, the coal, and the gravelsaid of the new structure, I hope it works. The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure is a rank of seven towers, each buff with a white crown. They are vertical on the upstream side, and they slope toward the Atchafalaya. Therefore, they resemble flying buttresses facing the Mississippi. The towers are separated by six arciform gates, convex to the Mississippi, and hinged in trunnion blocks secured with steel to carom the force of the river into the core of the structure. Lifted by cables, these tainter gates, as they are called, are about as light and graceful as anything could be that has a composite weight of twenty-six hundred tons. Each of them is sixty-two feet wide. They are the strongest the Corps has ever designed and built. A work of engineering such as a Maillart bridge or a bridge by Christian Menn can outdo some other works of art, because it is not only a gift to the imagination but also structural in the matrix of the world. The auxiliary structure at Old River contains too many working components to be classed with such a bridge, but in grandeur and in profile it would not shame a pharaoh. The origin Old River Control project, going on line in 1963, cost eighty-six million dollars. The works of repair and supplement have extended the full cost of the battle to five hundred million. The disproportion in these figures does, of course, reflect inflation, but to a much greater extent it reflects the price of lessons learned. It reflects the fact that no one is stretching words who says that in 1973 the control structure failed. The new one is not only bigger and better and more costly also, no doubt, there are redundancies in its engineering in memory of 73. In 1983 came the third-greatest flood of the twentieth centurya narrow but decisive victory for the Corps. The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure was nothing much by then but a foundation that had recently been poured in dry ground. The grout in the old structure kept Old River stuck together. Across the Mississippi, a few miles downstream, the water rose to a threatening level at Louisianas maximum-security prison. The prison was protected not only by the mainline levee but also by a ring levee of its own. Nonetheless, as things appeared for a while the water was going to pour into the prison. The state would have to move the prisoners, taking them in buses out into the road system, risking Lord knows what. The state went on its knees before the Corps: Do something. The Corps evaluated the situation and decided to bet the rehabilitation of the control structure against the rehabilitation of the prisoners. By letting more water through the control structure, the Corps caused the water at the prison to go down. Viewed from five or six thousand feet in the air, the structures at Old River inspire less confidence than they do up close. They seem temporary, fragile, vastly outmatched by the natural worlda lesion in the side of the Mississippi butterflied with surgical tape. Under construction nearby is a large hydropower plant that will take advantage of the head between the two rivers and light the city of Vidalia. The channel cut to serve it raises to three the number of artificial outlets opened locally in the side of the Mississippi River, making Old River a complex of canals and artificial islands, and giving it the appearance of a marina. The Corps is officially confident that all this will stay in place, and supports its claim with a good deal more than walnuts. The amount of limestone that has been imported from Kentucky is enough to confuse a geologist. As Fred Chatry once said, The Corps of Engineers is convinced that the Mississippi River can be convinced to remain where it is. I once asked Fred Smith, a geologist who works for the Corps at New Orleans District Headquarters, if he thought Old River Control would eventually be overwhelmed. He said, Capture doesnt have to happen at the control structures. It could happen somewhere else. The river is close to it a little to the north. That whole area is suspect. The Mississippi wants to go west. Nineteen-seventy-three was a forty-year flood. The big one lies out there somewherewhen the structures cant release all the floodwaters and the levee is going to have to give way. That is when the rivers going to jump its banks and try to break through. Geologists in general have declared the capture inevitable, but, of course, they would. They know that in 1852 the Yellow River shifted its course away from the Yellow Sea, establishing a new mouth four hundred miles from the old. They know the story of catastrophic shifts by the Mekong, the Indus, the Po, the Volga, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Rosetta branch of the Nile was the main stem of the river three thousand years ago. Raphael Kazmann, the hydrologic engineer, who is now emeritus at Louisiana State, sat me down in his study in Baton Rouge, instructed me to turn on a tape recorder, and, with reference to Old River Control, said, I have no fight with the Corps of Engineers. I may be a critic, but Im not mad at anybody. Its a good design. Versteh mich nicht falsch. These guys are the best. If it doesnt work for them, nobody can do it. A tape recorder was not a necessity for gathering the impression that nobody could do it. More and more energy is being dissipated there, Kazmann said. Floods are more frequent. There will be a bigger and bigger differential head as time goes on. It almost went out in 73. Sooner or later, it will be undermined or bypassedgive way. I have a lot of respect for Mother. for this alluvial river of ours. I dont want to be around here when it happens. The Corps would say he wont be. Nobody knows where the hundred-year flood is, Kazmann continued. Perspective should be a minimum of a hundred years. This is an extremely complicated river system altered by works of man. A fifty-year prediction is not reliable. The data have lost their pristine character. Its a mixture of hydrologic events and human events. Floods across the century are getting higher, low stages lower. The Corps of Engineerstheyre scared as hell. They dont know whats going to happen. This is planned chaos. The more planning they do, the more chaotic it is. Nobody knows exactly where its going to end. The towboat Mississippi has hit the point of a sandbar. The depth finder shows thirty-eight feetindicating that there are five fathoms of water between the bottom of the hull and the bed of the river. The depth finder is on the port side of the ship, however, and the sandbar to starboard, only a few feet down. Thus the towboat has come to its convulsive stop, breaking the stride of two major generals and bringing state officials and levee boards out to the rail. General Sands, the division commander, has a look on his face which suggests that Hopkins has just scored on Army but Army will win the game. There is some running around, some eye-bugging, some breaths drawn shallower even than the sandbarbut not here in the pilothouse. John Dugger, the pilot, and Jorge Cano, the local contact pilot, reveal on their faces not the least touch of dismay, or even surprise, whatever they may feel. They behave as if it were absolutely routine to be aiming downstream in midcurrent at zero knots. In a sense, that is true, for this is not some minor navigational challenge, like shooting rapids in an aircraft carrier. This is the Atchafalaya River. A poker player might get out of an analogous situation by reaching toward a sleeve. A basketball player would reverse pivotshielding the ball, whirling the body in a complete circle to leave the defender flat as a sandbar. John Dugger seems to be both. He has cut the engines, and nowlooking interested, and nothing elsehe lets the current take the stern and swing it wide. The big boat spins, reverse pivots, comes off the bar, and leaves it behind. Conversations resumein the lounge, on the outer decks, in the pilothouseand inevitably many of them touch on the subject of controls at Old River. General Sands is saying, Between 1950 and 1973, there was intensification of land use in the lower Mississippia whole generation grew up thinking you could grow soybeans here and never get wet. Since 73, Mother Nature has been trying to catch up. There have been seven high-water events since 1973. Now the auxiliary structure gives these folks all the assurance they need that Old River can continue to operate. I ask if anyone agrees that the Atchafalaya could capture the Mississippi near the control structures and not through them. General Sands replies, I dont know that Im personally smart enough to answer that, but Id say no. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Willis asks C. J. Nettles, chief of operations for the New Orleans District, if he thinks the auxiliary structure will do the job. Nettles says, The jury is out on that one, and adds that he is not as confident about it as others are. At Old River a couple of days ago, near the new structure, Nettles and LeRoy Dugas were looking over a scene full of cargo barges, labor barges, crawling bulldozers, hundreds of yards of articulated concrete mattress revetments recently sunk into place, and millions of tons of new limestone riprap. Nettles asked Dugie how long he thought the new armor would last. Dugie said, Two high waters. General Sands advanced a question: Had man not settled in southern Louisiana, what would it be like today Under natures scenario, what would it be like And, not waiting for an answer, he supplies one himself: If only nature were here, peopleexcept for some hunters and fishermencouldnt exist here. Under natures scenario, with many distributaries spreading the floodwaters left and right across the big deltaic plain, visually the whole region would be coveredwith fresh sediments as well as water. In an average year, some two hundred million tons of sediment are in transport in the river. This is where the foreland Rockies go, the western Appalachians. Southern Louisiana is a very large lump of mountain butter, eight miles thick where it rests upon the continental shelf, half that under New Orleans, a mile and a third at Old River. It is the nature of unconsolidated sediments to compact, condense, and crustally sink. So the whole deltaic plain, a superhimalaya upside down, is to varying extents subsiding, as it has been for thousands of years. Until about 1900, the river and its distributaries were able to compensate for the subsidence with the amounts of fresh sediment they spread in flood. Across the centuries, distribution was uneven, as channels shifted and land would sink in one place and fill in somewhere else, but over all the land building process was net positive. It was abetted by decaying vegetation, which went into the flooded silts and made soil. Vegetation cannot decay unless it grows first, and it grew in large part on nutrients supplied by floodwaters. In the seventeenth century, the Mississippi was very porous along its banks, and water left it in many places, Fred Chatry reminds us. Only at low water was it completely confined. Now, in two thousand miles, the first place where water naturally escapes the Mississippi is at Bayou Baptiste Collettesixty miles below New Orleans. What was a net gain before 1900 has by now been a net loss for nearly a hundred years, and the Louisiana we have knownfrom Old River and the Acadian world to Bayou Baptiste Colletteis sinking. Sediments are being kept within the mainline levees and shot into the Gulf at the rate of three hundred and fifty-six thousand tons a dayshot over the shelf like peas through a peashooter, and lost to the abyssal plain. As waters rise ever higher between levees, the ground behind the levees subsides, with the result that the Mississippi delta plain has become an exaggerated Venice, two hundred miles wideits rivers, its bayous, its artificial canals a trelliswork of water among subsiding lands. The medians of interstates are water. St. Bernard Parish, which includes suburbs of New Orleans and is larger than the state of Delaware, is two per cent terra firma, eighteen per cent wetland, and eighty per cent water. A ring levee may surround a whole parish. A ring levee may surround fifty-five square miles of soybeans. Every square foot within a ring levee forces water upward somewhere else. An Alexander Calder might revel in these motionsinterdependent, interconnected, related to the flow at Old River. Calder would have understood Old River Control: the place where the work is attached to the ceiling, and below which everythingNew Orleans, Morgan City, the river swamp of the Atchafalayadangles and swings. Something like half of New Orleans is now below sea levelas much as fifteen feet. New Orleans, surrounded by levees, is emplaced between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi like a broad shallow bowl. Nowhere is New Orleans higher than the rivers natural bank. Underprivileged people live in the lower elevations, and always have. The richby the riveroccupy the highest ground. In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp. The Garden District and its environs are locally known as uptown. Torrential rains fall on New Orleansenough to cause flash floods inside the municipal walls. The water has nowhere to go. Left on its own, it would form a lake, rising inexorably from one level of the economy to the next. So it has to be pumped out. Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the citys subsidence. Where marshes have been drained to create tracts for new housing, ground will shrink, too. People buy landfill to keep up with the Joneses. In the words of Bob Fairless, of the New Orleans District engineers, Its almost an annual spring ritual to get a load of dirt and fill in the low spots on your lawn. A child jumping up and down on such a lawn can cause the earth to move under another child, on the far side of the lawn. Many houses are built on slabs that firmly rest on pilings. As the turf around a house gradually subsides, the slab seems to rise. Where the driveway was once flush with the floor of the carport, a bump appears. The front walk sags like a hammock. The sidewalk sags. The bump up to the carport, growing, becomes high enough to knock the front wheels out of alignment. Sakrete appears, like putty beside a windowpane, to ease the bump. The property sinks another foot. The house stays where it is, on its slab and pilings. A ramp is built to get the car into the carport. The ramp rises three feet. But the yard, before long, has subsided four. The carport becomes a porch, with hanging plants and steep wooden steps. A carport that is not firmly anchored may dangle from the side of a house like a third of a drop-leaf table. Under the house, daylight appears. You can see under the slab and out the other side. More landfill or more concrete is packed around the edges to hide the ugly scene. A gas main, broken by the settling earth, leaks below the slab. The sealed cavity fills with gas. The house blows sky high. The people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water, Mark Twain observed in the eighteen-eighties. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon made ground so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. The others may not complain, but they sometimes leave. New Orleans is not a place for interment. In all its major cemeteries, the clients lie aboveground. In the intramural flash floods, coffins go out of their crypts and take off down the street. The water in New Orleans natural aquifer is modest in amount and even less appealing than the water in the river. The city consumes the effluent of nearly half of America, and, more immediately, of the American Ruhr. None of these matters withstanding, in 1984 New Orleans took first place in the annual Drinking Water Taste Test Challenge of the American Water Works Association. The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, is on high ground with respect to the rest of New Orleans, but even from the benches of Jackson Square one looks up across the levee at the hulls of passing ships. Their keels are higher than the AstroTurf in the Superdome, and if somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium they would hover above the playing field like blimps. In the early nineteen-eighties, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers built a new large district headquarters in New Orleans. It is a tetragon, several stories high, with expanses of sheet glass, and it is right beside the river. Its foundation was dug in the mainline levee. That, to a fare-thee-well, is putting your money where your mouth is. Among the five hundred miles of levee deficiencies now calling for attention along the Mississippi River, the most serious happen to be in New Orleans. Among other factors, the freeboardthe amount of levee that reaches above flood levelshas to be higher in New Orleans to combat the waves of ships. Elsewhere, the deficiencies are averaging between one and two feet with respect to the computed high-water flow line, which goes on rising as runoffs continue to speed up and waters are increasingly confined. Not only is the water higher. The levees tend to sink as well. They press down on the mucks beneath them and squirt materials out to the sides. Their crowns have to be built up. You put five feet on and three feet sink, a Corps engineer remarked to me one day. This is especially true of the levees that frame the Atchafalaya swamp, so the Corps has given up trying to fight the subsidence there with earth movers alone, and has built concrete floodwalls along the tops of the levees, causing the largest river swamp in North America to appear to be the worlds largest prison. It keeps in not only water, of course, but silt. Gradually, the swamp elevations are building up. The people of Acadiana say that the swamp would be the safest place in which to seek refuge in a major flood, because the swamp is higher than the land outside the levees. As sediments slide down the continental slope and the river is prevented from building a proper lobeas the delta plain subsides and is not replenishederosion eats into the coastal marshes, and quantities of Louisiana steadily disappear. The net loss is over fifty square miles a year. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a fort was built about a thousand feet from a saltwater bay east of New Orleans. The fort is now collapsing into the bay. In a hundred years, Louisiana as a whole has decreased by a million acres. Plaquemines Parish is coming to pieces like old rotted cloth. A hundred years hence, there will in all likelihood be no Plaquemines Parish, no Terrebonne Parish. Such losses are being accelerated by access canals to the sites of oil and gas wells. After the canals are dredged, their width increases on its own, and they erode the region from the inside. A typical three-hundred-foot oil-and-gas canal will be six hundred feet wide in five years. There are in Louisiana ten thousand miles of canals. In the nineteen-fifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country straight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The canal is known as Mr. Go, and shipping has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years, is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inches of additional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an interstate that jumps over the walls. The coast is sinking out of sight, Oliver Houck has said. Weve reversed Mother Nature. Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north. I went to see Sherwood Gagliano one dayan independent coastal geologist and regional planner who lives in Baton Rouge. We must recognize that natural processes cannot be restored, he told me. We cant put it back the way it was. The best we can do is try to get it back in balance, try to treat early symptoms. Its like treating cancer. You get in early, you may do something. Gagliano has urged that water be diverted to compensate for the nutrient starvation and sediment deprivation caused by the levees. In other words, open holes in the riverbank and allow water and sediment to build small deltas into disappearing parishes. If we dont do these things, were going to end up with a skeletal framework with levees around ita set of peninsulas to the Gulf, he said. We will lose virtually all of our wetlands. The cost of maintaining protected areas will be very high. There will be no buffer between them and the coast. Professor Kazmann, of L. S.U. seemed less hopeful. He said, Attempts to save the coast are pretty much spitting in the ocean. The Corps is not about to give up the battle, or so much as imagine impending defeat. Deltas wax and wane, remarks Fred Chatry, in the pilothouse of the Mississippi. You have to be continuously adjusting the system in consonance with changes that occur. Southern Louisiana may be a house of cards, but, as General Sands suggested, virtually no one would be living in it were it not for the Corps. There is no going back, as Gagliano saysnot without going away. And there will be no retreat without a struggle. The Army engineers did not pick this fight. When it started, they were still in France. The guide levees, ring levees, spillways, and floodways that dangle and swing from Old River are here because people, against odds, willed them to be here. Or, as the historian Albert Cowdrey expresses it in the introduction to Lands End, the Corps official narrative of its efforts in southern Louisiana, Society required artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete. The towboat Mississippi is more than halfway down the Atchafalaya nowbeyond the leveed farmland of the upper basin and into the storied swamp. The willows on the two sides of the river, however, continue to be so dense that they block from sight what lies behind them, and all we can see is the unobstructed waterway running on and on, half a mile wide, in filtered sunlight and the shadows of clouds. A breeze has put waves on the water. Coming over the starboard quarter, it more than quells the humidity and the heat. Nevertheless, as one might expect, most of the people remain indoors, in the chilled atmosphere of the pilothouse, the coat-and-tie comfort of the lounge. A deck of cards appears, and a game of bour develops, in showboat motif, among various civilian millionairesEd Kyle, of the Morgan City Harbor amp Terminal District, dealing off the top to the Pontchartrain Levee Board, the Lafourche Basin Levee Board, the Teche-Vermilion Fresh Water District. Oliver Houckthe law professor, former general counsel of the National Wildlife Federation, whose lone presence signals the continuing existence of the environmental movementnaturally stays outdoors. He has established an eyrie on an upper deck, to windward. Tall and loosely structured, Houck could be a middle-aged high jumper, still in shape to clear six feet. His face in repose is melancholymade so, perhaps, by the world as his mind would have it in comparison with the world as he sees it. What he is seeing at the momentin the center of the greatest river swamp in North America, which he and his battalions worked fifteen years to saveis a walled-off monotony of sky and water. General Sands joins him, and they talk easily and informally, as two people will who have faced each other across great quantities of time and paper. Sands remarks again that on inspection trips such as this one he has become wed to being beaten on the head and shoulders by almost everyone he encounters, not just the odd ecologue attired in alienation. Houck addresses himself to the head, the shoulders, and the chest, saying that he has deep reservations about Sands uniform: all those brass trinkets and serried stars, the castle keeps, the stratified ribbons. He says that Sands habiliments constitute a form of intimidation, especially in a region of the country that has not lost its respect for the military presence. Sands habiliments are not appropriate in a civilian milieu. You are Armyan untypical American entity to be performing a political role like this, Houck says to him, beating on. He tells Sands that he reminds him of a politician on the stump, going around stroking his constituency. He calls him a political water czar. Sands implicitly reminds Houck that if it were not for the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers there wouldnt be any stump, the constituency would be somewhere else, and Houcks neighborhood would be nine feet under water. He says, Under natures scenario, think what it would be like. The water czar, I feel a duty to insert, is not the very model of a major general. If he were to chew nails, he would break his teeth. I am not attempting to suggest that he lacks the presence of a general, or the mien, or the bearing. Yet he is, withal, somewhat less martial than most English teachers. Effusive and friendly in a folk-and-country way, courteous, accommodating, he is of the sort whose upward mobility would be swift in a service industry. Make no mistake, he is a general. Shall we just go to the Four Seasons A nice little place to have lunch, he said one day in Vicksburg, and we drove to a large building in the center of town, where his car was left directly in front of the main entrance, beside a bright-yellow curb under various belligerent signs forbidding parking. It stayed there for an hour while he had his crab gumbo. We approach, on the right, a gap in the Atchafalayas bank, where the willows open to reveal a plexus of bayous. Houck has been complaining that the old Cajun swamp life of the Atchafalaya Basin is gone now, and has been for many years, as a result of the volumes of water concentrated in the floodway and of rules forbidding people to live inside the levees. This single piece of plumbing, he says of the Atchafalaya, is the last great river-overflow swamp in the world and also the biggest floodway in the worldall to protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans. We now come abreast of the gap on the right, and it ends the tedium of the reach upriver. It is a broad window into stands of cypress, their wide fluted bases attached to their redirections in still, dark water. How I love them, says Houck, who is a conservationist of the sunset school, with legal skills adjunct to the force of his emotion. Pointing into the beauty of the bayou, he informs General Sands, Thats what its all about. The General takes in the scene without comment. In silence, we look at the water-standing trees and into narrow passages that disappear among them. They draw me into thoughts of my own. I first went in there in 1980that is, into the Atchafalaya swamp, away from its floodway levees, and miles from the river. There were four of us, in canoes. The guide was Charles Fryling, a professor of landscape architecture at Louisiana State University, who, among the environmentalists of the eighteenth state, plays Romulus to Oliver Houcks Remus. Fryling is a tall man with a broad forehead, whose hair falls straight to his eyes without the slight suggestion that comb or brush has ever been invited to intrude upon nature. In 1973, when he moved into his house, on the periphery of Baton Rouge, it sat on a smooth green lawn, in a neighborhood of ranch contemporaries, each on a smooth green lawn. Frylings yard is now a rough green forest, its sweet gums, grapevine, pepper vine, rattan vine, hackberry, passionflowers, and climbing ferns a showcase of natural succession. In Frylings words, It beats the hell out of mowing the lawn. The trees are thirty feet high. Fryling speaks in a slow country roll that could win him a job in movies. He would be Lil Abner, or Candide at Fort Dixthe soldier who appears slow in basic training and dies on an intelligence mission twenty-five miles behind enemy lines. He is a graduate of the illustrious forestry school of the State University of New York (Syracuse), his advanced degree is from Harvard, andto continue the escalationhe knows how to get from here to there in the swamp. This is a remarkable feat in seven hundred thousand acres that change so much and so often that they are largely unmappable. Fryling understands the minor bayous. Sometimes they run one way, sometimes the other. The water contains sediment or is clear. See. The water is clearer. Its coming toward us. Its coming down from Bayou Pigeon. Well get through. If you ask him what something is, he knows. Its green hawthorn. Its deciduous holly. Its water privet. Its water elm. Its a water moccasinthere on the branch of that water oak. The moccasin doesnt move. A moccasin never backs off. Dragonflies land on the gunwales. In the Atchafalaya, dragonflies are known as snake doctors. Leaving the open bayou, the canoes turn into the forest and slide among the trunks of cypress under feathery arrowhead crowns. Young cypress need a couple of years on dry land to get started, but we rend so much water through the Atchafalaya that young trees cant get going. So existing cypress are notas trees are generally thought to bea renewable resource. We have to protect them in order to have them. To be in the Atchafalaya is to float among trees under silently flying blue herons, to see the pileated woodpecker, to hope to see an ivorybill, to hear the prothonotary warbler. The barred owl has a speaking voice as guttural as a dogs. It seems to be growling, Who cooks for you Who cooks for yall The barred owlstaring from a branch straight down into the canoesappears to be a parrot in camouflage. In the language of the Longtown Choctaw, Hacha Falaia meant Long River. (The words are reversed in translation.) Since my first travels with Fryling, those rippling syllables have symbolized for me the bilateral extensions of the phrase control of nature. Atchafalaya. The word will now come to mind more or less in echo of any struggle against natural forcesheroic or venal, rash or well advisedwhen human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods. The Atchafalayathis most apparently natural of natural worlds, this swamp of the anhinga, swamp of the nocturnal bearlies between walls, like a zoo. It is utterly dependent on the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose decisions at Old River can cut it dry or fill it with water and silt. Fryling gave me a green-and-white sticker that said atchafalaya . I put it in a window of my car. It has been there for many years, causing drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike to veer in close and crowd my lane while staring at a word that signifies collision. In the Atchafalaya more recently, we came upon a sport fisherman in a skiff called Mon Ark. Theres all kind of land out there now, he said. He meant not only that the wet parts were low but also that the dry parts were growing. In the Atchafalaya, the land comes and goes, but it comes more than it goes. As the overflow swamp of the only remaining distributary in the deltathe only place other than the mouth of the Mississippi where silt can gothe Atchafalaya is silting in. From a light plane at five hundred feet, this is particularly evident as the reflection of the sun races through trees and shoots forth light from the water. The reflection disappears when it crosses the accumulating land. If land accretes from the shore of a lake or a bayou, the new ground belongs to the shores owner. If it accretes as an island, it belongs to the statea situation of which Gilbert would be sure to inform Sullivan. Some fifty thousand acres are caught in this tug-of-war. Wet and dry, three-quarters of the Atchafalaya swampland is privately owned. Nearly all the owners are interested less in the swamp than in what may lie beneath it. The conservationists, the Corps, landowners, and recreational interests have worked out a compromise by which all parties putatively get what they want: floodway, fishway, oil field, Eden. From five hundred feet up, the world below is green swamp everywhere, far as the eye can see. The fact is, though, that the eye cant see very far. The biggest river swamp in North America, between its demarcating levees, is seventeen miles wide and sixty miles long. It is about half of what it was when it began at the Mississippi River and went all the way to Bayou Teche. The old life of the basin is not entirely gone. It is true that people dont collect moss anymore to use in stuffing furniture, true that the great virgin cypresses are away. Their flared stumps remain, like cabins standing in the water. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Cajuns made their lives and livings in the swamp. Their grocery stores were afloat, and moved among them, camp to camp. It is true all that has vanished, and the Cajuns live outside the levees, but they and othersoperating for the most part alone or in pairsgo into the swamp and take twenty-five million dollars worth of protein out of the water in any given year. The fish alone can average a thousand pounds an acre, and that, according to Fryling, is more fish than in any other natural water system in the United Statestwo and a half times as productive as the Everglades. The fish are not in the conversation, however, when compared with the crawfish. I know a crawfisherman named Mike Bourque, who lives in Catahoula. I remember as if it were today running his lines with him. Watch your hands. Dont put em on the side of the boat. Cause smash em, he said as we went out of Bayou Gravenburg and headed into the trees. His boat was not a canoe, and the object on the stern was no paddle. It was a fifty-horse Mariner, enough for lift-off if the boat had wings. Bourques brother-in-law was with us. In French, Bourque told him that he was affecting the balance and to shift his position in the boat. Then, addressing me in English, he said, Watch yourself, I got to jump that log. Ahead of us, half hidden in water hyacinths, was an impressive floating log, with a solid diameter of about two feet. The boat smashed against it, thrust up and over it, with a piercing aluminum screech. The boat was about seventeen feet long. The brother-in-law, Dave Soileau, called it a bateau. Bourque called it a skiff. French and Englishwe mix it up, he said. Ordinarily, he works alone, and talks a good deal to himself. When I talk to myself, I talk in French. When I meet other fishermen, ninety per cent of the time we speak French. If he doesnt know them, he knows where they live, because each town has its accent. Like everyone else, he calls the hyacinths lilieswater lilies. This densely growing planta waterborne kudzu, an exotic from the Orienthas come to plague Southern waterways and spread over marshes like nuclear winter closing many forms of life. That is not the case, however, in the Atchafalaya, where the lilies are good for the crawfish. The young feed on stuff that clings to the roots. On heavy stems, the water hyacinths grow three to four feet high, so a lot of power is needed to get through them. Youll never see a fisherman with less than a fifty-horse motor. Bourque moved the skiff from tree to tree as if he were on snowshoes in a sugarbush emptying buckets of sap. The crawfish cages were chicken-wire pillows with openings at one end. Bourque pulled them out of the water on cords that were tied to the trees, and poured the crawfish into a device that looked something like a roasting pan and was hinged to the side of the boat. He called it the trough. Open at the inner end, it forms a kind of ramp down which the crawfish crawl until they drop into a bucket. Dead bait fish, dead crawfish, and other detritus remain in the trough, and thus the living creatures winnow themselves from what is thrown away. Snakes are thrown away. Some of the used bait fish have less remaining flesh than skeletons lifted by waiters who work in white gloves. The larger crawfish weigh a quarter of a pound and are nine inches long, with claw spans greater than that. When the bucket is full, the crawfish in their motions seem to simmer at the top. Cest bon. Cest bon. O est le sac said Bourque, and Soileau handed him a plastic-burlap sack. Containing forty pounds each, the sacks began to pile up. The crawfish lay quiet. When a sack was moved, or even touched, though, the commotion inside sounded like heavy rain. The boat climbed another log. The engine cavitated. We broke through brush like an elephant. Bourque had been following what he called the driftwood line, where a small change in depth had caused driftwood to linger. To him the swamp topography was as distinctive and varied as the neighborhoods of a city would be to someone elsethese subworlds of the Atchafalaya, out past Bayou Gravenburg, on toward the Red Eye Swamp. This line used to go in back there, but I moved them out in front, he said in a place that seemed much too redundant to have a back or a front. Colored ribbons, which he called flags, helped to distinguish the fishermens trees, but he could run his lines without them, covering his four hundred cages. He did about sixty an hour. Soileau, using a grain scoop, shoveled dead alewives and compressed pellets of Acadiana Choice Crawfish Bait into each emptied cage, and Bourque returned it to the water. Bourque told Soileau, who is a biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, to quit the government and come work for him. Soileau said, For ten dollars a day Bourque said, Good future. No benefits. We were in a coulee, which is like a slough but deeper and with slushier muds at the bottom. A cage came up with seventy crawfish, all dead. The cage had been too low in the muck, where the creatures died in an anoxic slurry. They stirred it up themselves. The cage should just lightly touch the bottom, with the closed end slightly raised. Bourque next pulled up an empty cage. Somebody helped me out, he remarked, and added that he had occasionally met a thief in the act of raiding one of his cages. Soileau said, Theres only one thing to do. Go straight to him, board his vessel, and start slugging. There have been no deaths. Theft was rising in direct proportion to unemployment. Oil companies owned that part of the swamp. Fishermen have, in fact, been arrested for trespass. Frylings wife, Doris Falkenheiner, defends them in court. Meanwhile, so many fishermen work the watery forest that there is a plastic ribbon on almost every tree. The fishermen say they have to bring their own trees. We hit another log. We ran between a cypress and its knees. Were getting up on the ridge, Bourque said, referring to a subtle, invisible feature of the bottom of the swamp. Out of a cage came a white crawfish, a male. (The male has longer arms.) Crawfish are red, white, or blue. The white ones like the sand of the ridge. Blue ones are rare. Bourque sees fewer than twenty a year. Now he was reaching down into the water for a cage that had been separated from its string by another fishermans motor. Touchez la asked Soileau. Bourque answered, Yes. Then he said, Ah, bon, as he retrieved the cage. Are yall hungry Bourque asked. I live hungry, said Soileau. Bourque turned off the motor and we stopped for lunch: ham sandwiches, Royal Crown, Mr. Porker fried cured pork skins. It was seven-thirty in the morning. We got up around three-thirty and were driving down the levee by four oclockin Bourques pickup, with the skiff behind. Soileau made the comment that the levees were like cancer, because they had to keep growing while they sank into the swamp. After twenty-five miles, we went down a ramp to a boat landing, where forty-one pickups had arrived before us. Roughly five thousand people take crawfish from the swamp, annually trapping twenty-three million pounds. Now, at lunchtime, as the early-morning sun began to penetrate the trees, we were looking out on one lovely scene, with tupelo and cypress rising from the water, and pollen on the water like pale-green silk. The best months are Epp Rill and May, Bourque said. The water might rise in October sometimes. Ill come and try. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a soft cap with a buttoned visor, white rubber boots, and yellow rubber overalls slashed at the crotch. Of middle height, blond and fine-featured, he had sandy hair around his ears and a large curl in back, like a breaking wave. His low-sill mustache looked French. He went to St. Martinville High School, as did Soileau, who married the youngest of Bourques six sisters. In large script below the windows of a drugstore in St. Martinville, a sign says, Sidney Dupois PharmacienAu Service de la Sant de Votre Famille. The Teche News . published down the street, has a regular column headlined pense donc . and contains marriage and death notices about people with names like Boudreau, Tesreau, Landreaux, Passeau, Bordagaray, Lajoie, Angelle, and Guidry. Bourque was the youngest in his family and the only sibling male. He explains that Cajuns keep going until they get a male, and this was where the Bourques stopped. Soileau passed the pork skins. Bourque chewed them crunchily. Crawfish are crevisses in French, he said. We call them crawfish. I mentioned that crevisses are cherished by chefs in France. Soileau said, I hear you get only three or four. Bourque had a recipe of which the nouveaux cuisiniers may not have heard. Saut onions in butter, then put in fat out of the head for ten or fifteen minutes, then put meat in for a few minutes more, he said. Salz. Cayenne pepper. Onion tops. What makes the touffe is the fat. Some people put a little roux in there. You can stretch it like that. Crawfish touffe: the Cajun quenelle de brochet. The meat is ground, but not to the end of texture. On Easter Sunday morning in Catahoula, the Bourques have a crawfish ball. At least, I thought thats what they were saying until I saw what they did. They boiled a hundred pounds of crawfish. They ate a crimson mountain of condensed lobsters. Now we were running in Bayou Eugene, which Soileau and Bourque lyrically pronounced in three syllablesby yooz yen. We came upon a beaver on a floating log. This was not the animal that founded a nation, the alert and agile slapper of the boreal lakes. This was a Louisiana beaverhuge, half asleep, prone like a walrus, a mound of cinnamon fur with nothing much to do but eat. There was no need to dam a thing here. The Corps of Engineers would see to that. The beaver topples trees just to eat the bark. There is no mandate to practice conservation when you are what is being conserved. A willow branch eaten by a beaver is just as smooth as if it had been sanded, Soileau remarked. Theres nothing prettier than a willow branch eaten by a beaver. Nutria live in the swamp as well. Bourque said that he sees only four or five alligators a year. A friend of his lost a finger to a cottonmouth. He was walking through thick lilies, very high lilies, to make a road for his pirogue. The snake bit his finger through a glove. Among the crowns of the cypress, a heron flapped by. Bourque called it a gros bec . Soileau called it a yellow-crowned night heron. Bourque said, The gros bec is here for the same purpose we are: to get crawfish. A mulberry-blue crawfish came into the boat from a cage that was deep in the Red Eye Swamp. Farther down the trap line, Bourque said, Crawfish is something hard to understand. When its muddier, theyre hungrier. The waters not muddy enough out here. There was a time when that sort of thing was a fact of nature. Now, of course, he blamed the Corps. Id like more water, he continued. A lot of times, theyve got much more in the Mississippi than they can use. They say they give us thirty per cent. We dont know if thats true. I told him I had seen a tally sheet at Old River Control, and it said that 31.1 per cent had gone down the Atchafalaya the day before. Id like to see that paper when the river starts dropping, Bourque responded. I dont see that we get thirty per cent except when there is plenty of water. If they close the locks, it start dropping fast. I mentioned the towboat Mississippi and its low-water Atchafalaya inspection trip, and asked if he had ever gone aboard to complain. I never heard of that until you mentioned it right now, he said. They know we want more water. They dont have to ask. I remembered Rabalais saying, After they built the structure and started stabilizing this water and so on, the main complaint was the people from the Atchafalaya Basinall your crawfish fishermen, and so on. They claimed they wasnt getting enough water, but over the years theyve learned to live with it, and they catch as many crawfish, I would say, now as they did then. And Peck Oubre, the lock mechanic, asking Rabalais, Before they put in Old River Lock and the control structure, what was the people talking about when the water used to rise and come through here Were they complaining about it No, said Rabalais. They wouldnt complain, because there wasnt nothing you could do. Bourque said that farmers who raise crawfish in artificial pondsa fairly new and rapidly expanding industrywere influencing the Corps to keep the water low in the Atchafalaya in order to squeeze out swamp fishermen like him, whose forebears were swamp fishermen. It is possible that the charge he was making was based on pure suspicion, but now that the structures were emplaced at Old Riverand the Corps had assumed charge of the latitude flowsuspicion was one more force they had to try to control. As we were heading back toward the landing, Bourque remarked, surprisingly, Its good we have the levees. Before the levees, the crawfish, they was spread all over. For bait, for gasoline, and so forth, the cost of the days run was seventy-five dollars. At the boat landing, Bourque sold the crawfish for three hundred and sixty. The buyer was Michael Williams, a youth from New Iberia with a mane of Etruscan hair. He identified himself as a poet, and said, For poems theres not a market anymore. The days of the Romantic poets is gone. Thats like in the past. So he also writes country-and-western lyrics. He recited one that began, Oh, its hard to write a love song If youve never been in love. He had a pit bull named Demon with him. Demon went into the water and snapped at wave. He tried to bite motorboat waves. I emerge from my remembrances standing at the rail, bewitched by the impenetrable vegetation. No part of those scenes that lie behind it can be felt or sensed from the decks of the Mississippi as the towboat moves on between the curtains of willow and straight down the middle of the bifurcated swamp. The others continue to talk, argue. The point is made that if the Mississippi River were to shift into the Atchafalaya the entire basin would fill with sediment and become a bottomland hardwood forest. When nature shifts, man shifts, Oliver Houck says. The petrochemical industries would move to the basin, too, rebuilding themselves on Bayou Eugene, extruding plastics in the Red Eye Swamp. There are people in Morgan City who envision another Ruhr Valley up the Atchafalaya. Morgan City would be the new New Orleans. The new New Orleansseventeen miles from the Gulfis not far ahead of us now. The landscape is changing to coastal marsh. Going below, I make a circumspect visit to the card game in the lounge. The Pontchartrain Levee Board draws three, Teche-Vermilion needs two. Ed Kyle, of Morgan City, whose pockets are familiar with United States currency bearing portraits that most people in their lifetime never see and do not even know exist, throws one dollar into the pot. In the center of the table, the greenbacks reach flood stage. Now, through the picture windows at the front of the lounge, our destination is in view: Morgan City, the Cajun Carcassonnea very small town behind a very high wall. A railroad bridge and two highway bridges leap the Atchafalaya and seem to touch gingerly on the two sides, as if they were landing on lily pads. Flood stage in Morgan City is four feet above sea level. A dirt levee protected the town until 1937. It was succeeded by concrete walls six and then eight feet high. As floods grewand the Atchafalaya became the only distributary of the Mississippisandbags and wooden baffles were piled up in haste on top of the eight-foot walls. Since it is the Corps intention that fifty per cent of a Design Flood go down the Atchafalaya, and since Morgan City is on a small island of no relief situated directly in the path of the planned deluge, the Corps has built the present wall twenty-two feet high. It is of such regal and formidable demeanor that it attracts tourists. It is a wall that imagines watera sheet of water at least twenty feet thick between Morgan City and the horizon. The sea wall, as it is known, rises to the skirts of palms that stand in rows behind it. From the approaching towboat we can see a steeple, a flagpole, a water tower, but not the towns low avenues or deeply shaded streets. Damocles would not have been so lonely had he lived in Morgan City. In a proportion inverse to the seawalls great size, the seawall betokens a vulnerability the like of which is hard to find so far from a volcano. Water approaches Morgan City from every side. The Atchafalaya River and its surrounding floodway come down from the north and pass the western edge of town. The seawall is a part of the floodways eastern guide levee. When there are heavy local rains, as there were at the time of the great flood of 1973, water that is kept out of the floodway by the seventy-five miles of the eastern guide leveewater that used to go into the swamp and the river when the basin was under the control of naturepools against the levee, caroms in the direction of the Gulf, and assaults Morgan City from the back side. The levee ends on Avoca Island, five or six miles south. The Atchafalaya floodwaters are sometimes so high that they go around the end of the levee and come back against Morgan City. Hurricanes also bring floods from that direction, surging from the Gulf like tidal waves. Professor Kazmann, of L. S.U. said, You cant sell Morgan City short, or I would. To end its days, Morgan City does not require a Design Flood. The Design Flood, at Morgan City, is a million and a half cubic feet per second. LeRoy Dugas, of Old River, once explained to me, The Old River Control Structures can pass seven hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet per second and the Morganza Spillway six hundred. In that situation, if both of them are wide open, weve got Morgan City gasping for air. The people of Morgan City are not easily frightened. They would tell Professor Kazmann to get back into his college and Dugie to shut a few gates. Mayor Cedric LaFleur says, I feel safe. I feel secure. Were not going to wash away. If there is a slightly hollow sound as he speaks, it is because Morgan City is sort of like a large tumbler glued to the bottom of an aquarium. The Corps, of course, built Morgan Citys great rampart, and graced it with bas-reliefs of shrimp boats and oil rigsconsecutive emblems of Morgan City booms. Everyone is grateful for the wall. Morgan Cityin its unusual settingis dependent on the Corps of Engineers in the way that a space platform would depend on Mission Control. The fate of Morgan City is written at Old River. Anything that happens there is relevant to the town. As the towboat passes under the second bridge and turns toward a berth below the seawall, I ask General Sands what sort of complaint he most frequently receives when he comes here. He says, The Corps of Engineers isnt doing enough to protect Morgan City from disaster. The hearing is at nine the next morning, aboard the Mississippi in the thoroughly transformed lounge. Where Teche-Vermilion was taking pots, the scene is now set for the court-martial of Billy Mitchell. In front of various standing flags, the three generals and two civilian members of the Mississippi River Commission sit at a large formal table, with General Sands in the central position. A colonel is master of ceremonies, and three other colonels are in the front row. This seems an unlikely place for Clifton Aucoin to present his petitions, but now he stands before thema man in bluejeans and an open shirt, whose remarks suggest that he has spent a good many days of his life up to his hips in water. My name is Clifton Aucoin, he testifies. Very few people pronounce it right, so dont feel bad about it. He tells the commission that he once kept a boat tied to the knob of his front door. As far as us people in the back floodwater area, we feel neglected, he continues. As far as we can tell, nothing has been fixed. Atchafalaya water just comes around Bayou Chene, it comes right on us backwater people. We feel that its just another major flood thats waiting to hit us if nothing is done about it. As a hunter, he further complains of dying trees, of disappearing browse and coverchanges no longer ascribable to nature but now quite obviously conceded to be under the control of the Corps. The commissioners hear Cedric LaFleur, a trimly built man with curly hair and dark, quick eyes. LaFleur says it is a dire relief to have the seawall completed, and suggests that the Corps stop studying the Avoca Island levee and extend it several miles southto prevent the floods of the Atchafalaya from going around the levees tip and coming back upon the town. Terrebonne Parish, east of the proposed extension, has complained to the Corps that an extended levee would deprive Terrebonne marshes of sediment, thereby destroying the marshes. The survival of one parish is in conflict with the survival of another, and each is appealing to the Corps. They hear Mark Denham, of St. Mary Parish: We appreciate yall coming down. We really consider having the Corps as a presence in our area a tremendous asset to our area as far as protection of floodwaters and as far as economic development also. They hear Jesse Fontenot, Curtis Patterson, Gerald Dysonchambers of commerce, levee boards, the government of the state. And, as they inevitably do in Morgan City, they hear Doc Brownell. He comes forward slowly, slightly stoop-shouldered, septuagenarian. This man once entered prizefights. There is a trace of smile on his face. He, too, thanks the commission. Its always a pleasure to see you people come down here. It gives as a little encouragement. And then, in effect, he tells the Corps to get its act mobilized and extend the levee. For thirty-two and a half years, Doc Brownell was the mayor of Morgan City. LaFleur has been described as his clone. In 1973, when the water went around the end of the levee and came back up Bayou Chene, Brownell, without authority, sank a fifteen-hundred-ton barge in the bayou. The barge acted as a dam and held off the water long enough for the people to build up their defenses and save the city. The nightmare of 73 is still with us, Brownell reminds the commission. We live in a state of apprehension we live on the whims of the weather of over forty-two per cent of the United States. We live with it twenty-four hours a day. He praises the beauty of the new seawall but points out that to the people of Morgan City its extraordinary height is an unambiguous message from the Corps. We can expect that much more water. It makes us very apprehensive. We have got to extend our defenses. Brownell, who went into medicine because the lumber business was dying, became a sort of bayou Schweitzer, delivering babies far out in the swamps, doing surgery in an un-air-conditioned operating room for twelve and fourteen hours a day. Among his closest companions was an alligator called Old Bull, who lived with the Brownell family for thirty-five years. Old Bull died in 1982 and is now in a glass-sided mahogany-framed casein effect, a see-in coffinlooking almost alive among simulated hyacinths, iris, and moss in Brownells parlor. Tip to tip, Old Bull is ten and a half feet long. There is a brass footrail next to Old Bull and a padded bar above him, with beer tap, soda siphon, and a generous stock of bottles. Brownell took Charlie Fryling and me there one spring day to admire Old Bull and to show us, with the help of pictures, the predicament of Morgan City. What struck me most of all as he talked was his evident and inherent conviction that a community can have a right to existto rise, expand, and prosperin the middle of one of the most theatrically inundated floodplains in the world. To be sure, the natural floodplain is also an artificial floodwayconcentrated and shapedand, accordingly, its high waters are all the more severe. In Morgan City, it has become impossible to separate the works of people from the periodic acts of God. We have a lot of restaurants now and various types of establishments in places vulnerable to the water, Brownell said. We got to develop on the floodplain. Its the only place we got to develop. We still have got to look for places for people to live. Now, you can see from this map that were right in the middle of this floodway. Its like a funnel with a spout, and were at the end of that spout. Were in the concentration part of it. We have our homes, our families, our whole future in the floodway. Weve got to live with these problemsand to me it ought to be some type of priority for the people who live under these conditions twelve months out of the year should be given some type of preference as to what our future is. Its the nations problem, and we are only the victims here of a lot of things that does happen here that are imposed upon us. We lost the big live oaks in the park because of the long-standing floodwater. A flood doesnt last for weeks here, as it does in some of those northern places. Our floods last for months. The more ring levees are built to the north, the more water Morgan City gets. In whatever way the people upriver protect themselves, they send more water to Morgan City. If people dig canals to get water off their land, it goes to Morgan City. When youre drowning, you dont need more water. Tarzan of the Apes once leaped about among the live oaks in the park. The first Tarzan movie was filmed in Morgan City. The Atchafalaya swamp was Tarzans jungle. Black extras in costumes pretended they were Africans. Not far from Old Bull, the head of another alligator was in use as a lampits mouth open, a light bulb in the back of its throat. Stuffed owls and hawks were hanging on the walls, and Canada geese were flying through the air. There were the heads of deer, of black bears from the Atchafalaya swamp. Brownell said his father had killed six bears shortly before he died. There was a stuffed tarpon head as large as the head of a horse. The tarpon was caught in the Atchafalaya River near Morgan City before the river, increasing in volume and power, pushed back the salt water. Islands now stand where the river was a hundred feet deep. As the Atchafalaya has grown, more and more sediments have, of course, come with it, stopping where they reach still water. This is the one place in Louisiana, other than the mouth of the Mississippi, where new coastal land is forming. Large areas of what was once Atchafalaya Bay have become dry flats. The soil broke the surface as the flood receded in 1973. Whole islands appeared at once. The bay was choked. Brownell says the river built a dam there. A geologist would call it a delta. Charles Morgan, a shipper in New Orleans in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, was so irritated by New Orleans taxes, New Orleans dockage fees, and New Orleans waterfront clutter that he moved his operation to the Atchafalaya and developed a competing city. It seems unlikely that he was aware that the Mississippi River meant to follow him. Morgan City thrived on shipping, on oysters. When the big cypresses were felled in the Atchafalaya swamp, Morgan City became the center of the cypress industry in the United States: numerous sawmills, hundreds of schooners in the port. Brownells great-grandfather owned a sawmill. In the nineteen-thirties, Captain Ted Anderson, a Florida-based fisherman, was blown off course by a storm, and put in at Morgan City. In the hold of his boat were shrimp of a size unfamiliar in Morgan Citybig ones, like croissants, from far offshore. They were considered repulsive, and at first no one wanted them, but these jumbos of the deep Gulf soon gave Morgan City the foremost shrimp fleet in the world. As the Atchafalaya River pushed back the salt water, it pushed out of the marshes the nurseries of shrimp. Caught in the westbound littoral drift, the shrimp went to Texas, where much of the business is now. The growth of cypresses was too slow to keep up with the lumber industry, so the lumber industry collapsed. The next boom was in oil. The big offshore towers come out of the marshlands surrounding Morgan City. They are built on their sides and dominate the horizon like skeletons of trapezoidal blimps. Of the twelve hundred and sixty-three permanent platforms now standing in the Gulf on the continental shelf, eighty-eight per cent are off Louisiana. In other words, the people of Morgan City are accustomed to taking nature as it comes. Cindy Thibodaux, the town archivista robust young poet with cerulean eyes and a fervent manner of speakingsaid to me one day, When youre fishing in the bayou, youre out in nature with the oil industry all around you. She has written a poem about the oil industry and nature from an alligators perspective. In the presence of the tribunes on the towboat, as the Pontchartrain Levee District recites its needs and the State of Louisiana its concernsas the discussion touches upon the varied supplication of the whole deltaic plain, and on the growth of the extremities of the great levee system not only below Morgan City but down the Mississippi from Bohemia to Baptiste Collettemy mind cannot help drifting back to Old River, where every part of this story in a sense had its beginnings and could also have its end. Near the mouths of the intake channels of Old River Control, the Corps maintains another towboat, smaller than the Mississippi but no less powerfula vessel on duty twenty-four hours a day and not equipped with white couches, wall-to-wall windows, or venetian blindsthe name of which is Kent. Kent is a picket boat. It defends Old River Control. With its squared bow and severed aspect, it appears to be a piece of wharf that loosened like a tooth and came out on the river. Kents job is to catch, hold, and assist any vessel in trouble. If barges break loose upstream and there is insufficient time to tie them up, Kent is supposed to divert them. Technically, it is a twin-screw steel motor rug, eighty-five feet long, with two nine-hundred-horse diesels that can start at the touch of buttons. (Compressed air makes that possible.) It cost two million dollars and differs from most river towboats only in its uncommon electronicsthe state and variety of its radar, the applications of its multiple computers. In addition to the on-board radar, two radar beams sweep the river from the bank at stations four miles apart, and anything that reflects from these beams appears on a screen in Kent. If a tow rig is moving at the speed of the current, an alarm goes off, for the coincidental speed suggests that the rig is without power. Kent can tell this eight miles away. Fifteen miles up the river, in April of 1964, twenty barges full of ore were tied to the bank and left there unattended. Eight of them broke free. There was no picket boat then. As a functioning valve, the control structure at Old River was nine months old. As the ore-laden barges drifted near, they were drawn away from the Mississippi, sucked into the structure by the power of the Atchafalaya. One of them plunged through the gates and sank on the lower side. Three sank in front of the gates and effectively closed the structure. A standard barge is a hundred and ninety-five feet long. Water piled up. Weeks went by. Much of the time, the difference in water level between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya sides was thirty-five feet, a critical number that resulted in damage and threatened the integrity of the structurethe Corps way of saying that it might have been wiped out. Today, it is illegal to tie anything to either bank of the Mississippi within twenty upstream miles of the structures at Old River. Every approaching vessel has to radio Kent and, as Dugas puts it, say what he is, who he is, and if he has a red-flag product. And for ignorant river pilots and all uninitiated craft theres a very large sign high up the bank of the riverits first three words in red: Old River Control Structure Corps of Engineers New Orleans District Spring high water often knocks the sign away. It would be difficult to overestimate the power of the draw, deriving, as it does, from the Atchafalaya, by now, in point of discharge, the seventh-strongest river in the world. The Coast Guard once tried to set five warning buoys in the west side of the Mississippi, but could not keep them in place, because the suction was so fierce. This threat to navigation could be called an American Maelstroma modern Charybdis, a Corryvreckanwere it not so very much greater in destructive force. In Dugies words, Any rig on the right side of the river is in trouble. An empty barge and three barges loaded with quarry stones were sucked into the low sucked into the low sill in 1965. Two loaded barges went through the structure and sank on the Atchafalaya side. The other sank against the gates without causing apparent damage, but it must have contributed to the turbulences that even then were undermining the structure. After the great flood of 1973 and the considerable debilitation it disclosed, there was the constant danger that if several loose barges were to block the flow and the difference in water levels were to build to catastrophic proportions nothing could be done about it. One barge spent a flood against the gates in 1974, but the structure survived. People in Simmesport often refer to Old River Control as the second locks. John Hughes, the supervisor of Kent and one of its operators, does his best to correct them. Thats not a lock, thats a control structure, he says. And a Simmesport person says, Well, we was born and raised here, and we call it the second locks. To judge by the amount of traffic erroneously attracted to the control structure, they have a point. A boat comes down the river, takes a right, and heads for Old River Control, thinking that it is Old River Navigation Lock. Usually, the boat is smallera cabin cruiser, or something of the sortbut the mistake has been made by a fifteen-barge tow. Its skipper called in on the radio to the navigation lock, announcing his arrival. The people at the lock replied that they didnt see him. He said, Im right here looking at you, Im coming in. The mistake was corrected just in time. In 1982, thirty-nine barges broke loose thirteen miles upstream at four in the morning. The whole rig just came apart. Dugie recalls, He was in a bend of the river. He couldnt maneuver the river. He hit the bank. The picket boat went after the barges. Five other skippers, joining their units together, detached four towboats that came to help. They could see the picket boat had a lot of problems, trying to catch thirty-nine barges by himself, Dugie says. At 6 a. m. . right at the entrance to the intake channel of Old River Control, the last barge was caught. Not even one hit the gates. Two of the thirty-nine were red-flag barges, loaded with petroleum. Later that year, a fifteen-barge rig heading north in the dark swung too close to Old River Control, was drawn off course, andits engines overmatched by the force of the watercrashed in the sand on the north side of the intake-channel mouth. In 1983, at midnight, a towboat with three jumbo barges lost power at Black Hawk Point, two miles above the structure. The picket boat caught it before it reached the channel. The operator on that occasion was Gerald Gillis, whose broad full face and long jet-black hair lend him the look of an Elizabethan page after twenty-five years in Morgan City. He is one of eight men who work Kenttwo on a shift. One day, he took me out on the beat with him, running up the river. He said the speed of the Mississippi current ranges from about three knots in low water to six in spring and eight in flood. A rig coming downstream on this September day would be averaging about eight knots. To conserve fuel, the big thirty-five-barge tows like to crawl along just barely ahead of the speed of the river, and that confuses Kent, because the tows could be dead in the water. An example was descending toward us now, called Gale C, shoving thirty-five barges of grain and cord, and much alive in the river, as Gillis learned from his transceiver. While the huge rig was passing by usreally an itinerant island, eight thousand horsepower and a third of a mile long, with its barges in seven ranks of fivehe said the rough rule of thumb for fuelling such an enterprise is one gallon per horsepower per day. Gillis turned on the depth finder. We had come up the Mississippis east side, and now he swung crosscurrent, heading for the cutbank of the west-convexing bend just above the structures of Old River. As we traversed the Mississippi, the depth, which was being sketched by a stylus on graph paper, dropped steadily and kept on dropping the closer we came to the bank. We were only a few swimming strokes from shore when the depth reached a hundred feet. It was notable that the riverbed was fifty feet below sea level more than three hundred miles from the mouth of the river, but what particularly astounded me was the very great depth so close to the west bank. It showed the excavating force of a tremendous river. The foundations of skyscrapers are rarely that deep. And this was the bend where the water swung off and into Old River Controla bend armored with concrete where the Mississippi might break free and go to the Atchafalaya. Kent was so close to the bank that it had no room to turn. Gillis backed away. Twenty years before, a barge that broke loose and was crumpled after sinking at the structure was hauled up the intake channel and left by the edge of the river. The barge had not moved since then, but the Mississippis bankconsumed by the scouring currentshad eroded to the west. The barge now lay five hundred feet out in the Mississippi. General Sands, reflecting on these matters, once said, The Old River Control Structure was put in the wrong place. It was designed to a dollar figure. And Fred Bayley, his chief engineer, added, That is correct. It was done during the Eisenhower Administration. The Corps once attempted to barricade the intake channel with a string of barges anchored in the river. Driftas the big logs are called that unremittingly come down the riveramassed against the anchoring cables until enough had gathered to heave high and start breaking the cables. As if drift were not enough of a problem, ice has been known to appear as well. It may come only once in twenty years, but ice it is, in Louisiana. The water attacking Old River Control is of course continuous, working, in different ways, from both sides. In 1986, one of the low-sill structures eleven gates was seriously damaged by the ever-pounding river. Another gate lost its guiding rail. When I asked Fred Smith, the district geologist, if he thought it inevitable that the Mississippi would succeed in swinging its channel west, he said, Personally, I think it might. Ja. Thats not the Corps position, though. Well try to keep it where it is, for economic reasons. If the right circumstances are all put together (huge rainfall, a large snowmelt), theres a very definite possibility that the river would divertgo down through the Atchafalaya Basin. So far, we have been able to alleviate those problems. Significant thanks to Kent. A skiff rides on Kents stern. A part of the skiffs permanent equipment is a fifteen-foot bamboo pole. Kent is alert to everything that moves in the river, including catfish. Where to Go, what to do
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