A Barge on the Bayou

Enlarge Image Image Gallery [1] Our bayou house sinks beneath the brown waters of the 1973 flood. [2] When the river receded, the raccoons moved in. [3] Calvin at work on the barge?becoming?a houseboat. [4] There's nofear of floods now that our spacious home can rise and fall with the water levels. [5] Crawfish catches provides us with food and cash.

Report From Them That's Doin'

by Gwen Carpenter

Raccoon feet tickety-tacked out of the back room as Calvin and I entered through the hole where the front door used to be. The guilty flick of a retreating snake's tail seemed to say, "Pardon me . . . I didn't think you'd be coming back," as it slipped down a crack in the six-inch layer of dried gunk covering the kitchen floor. By July the weight of that mud had broken the boards and pulled them away from the walls, finishing the demolition job started by the flood waters of February. As depressing as my last view of our home had been—with its roof poking bravely above the brown swirl of overflow from the Atchafalaya Riverit couldn't compare with the desolation I saw upon coming back to view the aftermath.

The high water shouldn't have been unexpected. Our now ruined house had been nestled deep in the Atchafalaya River Basin: 1.5 million acres of wilderness which, shortly after the devastating flood of 1927 terrorized settlements along the Mississippi River, had been designated an Army Corps of Engineers floodway. By the early 1930's floodgates were in place at the junction of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers above Simmsport, Louisiana, and retaining levees stretched along each side of the Atchafalaya to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. From that time on, the dangerous bulk of the Mississippi's spring rise could be diverted away from the cities by pouring it into this spillway.

BORN ON THE BAYOU

A land of fertile abundance, but cut off from the rest of the world by the river and its bayous, the Atchafalaya Swamp was too wild and forbidding for human habitation by any but the few people who loved it for its very isolation. For such individuals, the rich soil, plentiful fish and game, abundance of fur bearers, readily available cypress timber, and ever-present black moss were actually secondary in importance to the precious solitude.

My ancestors were among that group of ornery and independent swampers who left the confines of civilization to build their own schools, churches, stores, houses, and even a post office in the dense, green swamp. By the time the Army Corps of Engineers began its epic earth-moving, channel-changing project, that community—named Bayou Chene—was 150 years old . . . and right smack in the middle of the proposed spillway.

Even so, the idea of living "outside" was so distasteful to the swampers that most of them tried to stay on. When the floodgates were completed and put in use, the people of Bayou Chene modified their lifestyles to battle the water. They raised the floors in their houses, for example, and used large wooden rafts to stable their cattle until the high spring waters receded.