And yet, if the Gulf is a hell of sorts, it’s a beautiful hell. I walk up the road and stare out at three cypress trees that must hold a couple hundred roosting ibises, all of them settling and fidgeting, settling and fidgeting, like fussy sleepers. Beyond the ibises, I catch sight of a roseate spoonbill, an anomalous patch of bruised pink in a green cypress.
I am here to see what is left, and part of what is left is beauty. I need to be honest about that too. I have grown weary of avoiding things; it takes a lot of energy. Bring on the beauty and the ugliness both. Show me the honest math. What are we losing? What is being gained?
The birds have already lit up the trees, and now the orange ball lights up all of it, the world greening as it brightens. There is a vibrancy here that reminds me of a word I learned from a former chiclero, a Belizean man who helped find and tap rubber trees. “Yax” is a Maya word meant to describe a particularly vibrant and wild green. Here there is yax aplenty, from the cypresses to the marsh grasses and ferns to what I take to be some sort of elder plant. In counterpoint stands the rising sun. Despite what must be considerable pressure to sell out, it still rises freely, brandishing its usual blazing reds and oranges, not yet willing to don the corporate colors of green and yellow. It is nice to know that there are still a few realms beyond the reach of British Petroleum.
I sip my cold coffee in salute to the sunrise.
FORCES OF NATURE
When I return to the lodge from my early morning bird-watching I get some disappointing news: the weather has put the whammy on our helicopter ride. We will not be getting up in the air today. I sulk around the lodge for a while like a child denied a ride on a roller coaster and think of what could have been. Then Lupe comes to the rescue with a pitcher of ice tea.
Somewhat buoyed by the drink, I step out for a walk in the drizzle. It’s no helicopter ride, but it brings unexpected sights. I head instinctively toward the river, first hiking up the levee and then walking along the top. From here, on the hump that sometimes struggles to contain it, the river looks muddy, caged-in, powerful. I’ve heard lots of songs about levees, of course, but didn’t grasp the concept until now. Walking on top gives me a view not just of the river and the opposite bank, but also, to the west, of the wetlands that lead to the Gulf beyond. It occurs to me that I have never walked along the banks of the Mississippi before. Which seems an amazing fact, since I happen to be an American.
After a while the rain stops and the sun breaks through. The heat is overpowering. It slams you, stuns you, slathers you in sweat. Everything wilts, and I am part of everything. It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to lie down and give up, to throw up your arms in surrender. It helps you understand the logic behind siestas; every instinct telling you to crawl into a cool, dark place and lie there and be still. The heat even seems to stun the birds that fly overhead; they flap lazily and deeply.
Crickets blare and willows sag and down by the water the reeds grow as tall as trees. By the time I get back to the lodge, I am sopping with sweat. I find Holly at one of the high tables along the rim of the lodge, sitting on a barstool and typing on her computer. When I walk up, she tells me she will soon be interviewing a member of an organization responsible for surveying birds and counting their fatalities from the oil. She invites me to sit in during the interview. It turns out to be an odd and frustrating exchange that takes about forty minutes to go nowhere. Holly is gently prying and persistent, but no matter what she says the man will not divulge the number of bird deaths. Finally, sheepishly, he admits why.
“BP is now on our board of trustees,” he says.
The interview ends soon after. Once the man has left, all we can do is shake our heads and laugh.
The rest of the day passes quietly. The Cousteau folk are working on their computers and lying low. I decide to take a nap. But the quiet ends with the arrival of Ryan Lambert in early evening. He walks into the lodge as if he owns the place—which, of course, he does.
Not only does he own it but he nailed together almost every board with his own hands, or more accurately, renailed them after his lodge was drowned by Katrina. We shake hands and he points up at the rafters above the mounted animal heads, to a line in the wood over twenty feet up.
“That’s how high the waters from Katrina reached,” he says.
Soon we are all sitting around one of the long camp-style dining room tables while Ryan holds court. He takes the head of the table, while Holly and I sit on either side of him. The Cousteauians and I don’t say a word, which is fine with me. Ryan is a big man, not especially tall but burly, and you just know he has told a thousand fish stories to paying guests from his seat at the head of the table. He has huge hands and a big expressive face, red from decades in the sun, and he looks like he could pick you up and crack you in half over his knee. But more impressive than this implication of physical strength is the immediate impression of energy, his pilot light always on high.
“I’m the only lodge around that isn’t booked up,” he says. “The rest of them are filled with BP workers. But I’d rather meet interesting people than whore myself out to BP.”
Over the next hour I learn that Ryan was born and raised in Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans. His grandparents owned a place down here in Buras, where they rode out Hurricane Betsy. When Ryan visited as a kid he would roam the wetlands, hunting and fishing with his uncles and falling madly in love with the place. After high school he went right to work at a chemical plant, but he couldn’t get this wild place out of his head. After a few years at the plant, he decided to start doing the impossible. That is, he kept working at the plant full time each night and then drove down here to work as a fishing and hunting guide about twenty days a month. Which left about ten nights a month when he actually got some sleep. He kept this going for twenty-one years. Finally, at thirty-nine, he quit the plant and moved down to establish Cajun Fishing Adventures, which grew into a million-dollar business with over twenty employees including fishing guides, duck guides, house cleaners, and cooks. He had realized his dream, at least until Katrina struck.
“I’ve had a bull’s-eye on my back for a while now,” he said. “First Katrina and now this.”
He insists that I join him and the Cousteau crew for dinner, and when I tell him that dinner is not included in my deal, he laughs and waves it off. Lupe serves up spareribs and coleslaw while Ryan tells the story of how he rebuilt the lodge after Katrina. The others lean in to hear.
“I got a plaque for being the first person to come back to this parish. I came by boat at first. It was a watery wasteland where you could only see the peak of this lodge. Everything was dead.”
He wanted to rebuild as soon as the water receded, but the insurance company refused to pay him, claiming the damage had come from water, not wind. He needed money so he came up with an idea. There was talk everywhere of trying to revive local businesses and of cleaning up after Katrina. He added these things up and put together a crew to clean debris and rebuild the parish. He worked hard and was paid well, well enough to in turn pay for the materials to rebuild his lodge, which he did whenever he wasn’t working on the cleanup. “I was possessed,” he says. Though I have only known him about an hour, this is not hard to believe. About a half year later, Cajun Fishing Adventures was up and running again.
“And now this,” he says, shaking his head. “This is worse than Katrina.”
Considering that Katrina basically flattened his town before drowning it when the Mississippi broke through