Letter from the gulf: shacks and swamps

Grand Bayou doesn’t look like much at first glance. But for the shrimpers and fishermen who live here, this swamp is a source of endless fascination; they can’t imagine existing anywhere else. Joe, my guide, has been fishing these waters all his life. Today, he’s taking me on a tour of the area, on the edge of the massive BP oil spill.

Standing at the prow of Joe’s blue shrimp boat, I get a good view of Grand Bayou, a 350-year-old village nestling in the Louisiana wetlands. Rotting boats litter the marshes. Shacks on stilts look a gust away from toppling into the water. The reeds are stained with oil.

Still, there are signs of life. Recreational fishing has just reopened in the area. As we cruise past a house christened “Down ‘n Out”, four children climb into a skiff with their retriever and a fishing rod. They wave.

Joe, who could be mistaken for a middle class golfer in his striped button-down and shades, pulls alongside a buoy to show me some crabs. "You know how you can tell they're female? Finger nail polish,” he says, hoisting up a trap to reveal a tangle of orange-tipped claws.

Leaving the village behind, we speed towards the area where BP is trying to keep the oil at bay. In the distance, dead trees jut from the marsh: an Indian burial ground. “I don't like goin' back there. No birds. At night it's dead silent. You got people buried back there, Norwood?” Joe looks over at his deckhand.

Norwood, who has a Native American father and a Filipino mother, nods. Joe consults him again. “How come we don’t see no pelicans out here, Norwood?”

Norwood is the resident spill expert—he moonlights for BP operating Kevin Costner's oil separating centrifuges near Barataria Bay. I ask if the machines work. “If the water's rough, it don't work so good, but if it's calm like this, it works fine."

The channel widens, and we enter a bay where air boats—floating saucers powered by giant fans—whisk about the surface.

“They ain't skimmin', they just ridin' around,” says Joe as we approach a boat full of reclining workers in hazmat suits. The men sit up and start passing around rubbish bags. Their boss picks up a walkie talkie. "They don't know who you are. You can bet they're nervous,” Joseph chuckles.

As the cleanup operation stirs to life, we pass bright orange booms deployed haphazardly along the margins of the marsh. “This here was my favourite area for speckled trout,” Joseph says, pointing to an inlet where oiled boom is heaped like spaghetti.

Joseph wants to show me the bayou, but more boom is blocking our path. There is a $40,000 penalty for touching it. We drive right up. “If you see an orange boat comin’, I gotta take off fast—that's the Coast Guard,” Joe says. Norwood unhooks the little clips holding the boom segments together, and then refastens them once we’re through.

“Don’t worry, if they show up I'll lose 'em in the marshes. Hold on!” Joe revs the engine and skirts some pilings. Suddenly the oil workers have disappeared. We're in the bayou.

It doesn’t take long to become disoriented in this labyrinth of grass, but Joe knows where he’s going.

“See them alligator nests?” he says, pointing to the shoreline. “Them gator mamas are fierce, they’ll run you down.”

The creatures, it turns out, once played a role in the local criminal justice system. "You did somethin' wrong, you went back by that gator farm,” Joe tells me. Better that than fall prey to “bayou rage”, he says, the region’s brand of vigilante justice.

As we approach a bend in the channel, fish fling themselves into the air, mistaking our engine for a ravenous predator. “Porpoise bait,” says Joseph as the speckled trout dance in the boat’s wake. “They goin’ crazy!” We suddenly see why. A surge of water slips over a smooth grey shadow, and a thrashing erupts at the water’s edge. A dolphin has trapped the fish against the bank and is feasting away.

“That’s the first one I seen since the spill started,” says Joe. “He feedin’ real good!”

Joe tells me that normally dolphins and their young congregate in the bayou, swimming alongside the boat. Still, he seems heartened by the brief reappearance of this single fellow fisherman.

“It’s so nice out here,” he says as the fin lingers, bobbing, and then disappears. “You just never wanna leave.”