[StBernard] Gulf of Mexico oil spill is just the latest blow for Delacroix: Part one of four

[Westley Annis]

Gulf of Mexico oil spill is just the latest blow for Delacroix: Part one of
four
Published: Sunday, August 01, 2010, 6:30 AM 
 Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune 
 
On a blustery spring day, Delacroix native Lloyd Serigne stands on the banks
of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, 30 miles south of New Orleans, talking about the
village that raised him in the 1950s. Reaching into a deep well of memories,
he paints an idyllic picture: A community of several hundred fishers,
farmers and trappers whose homes were surrounded by a wetlands paradise of
high ridges, marshes and swamps. The outside world -- unwanted, unneeded --
seemed a thousand miles away.

There was a time when Delacroix was a thriving community of 700 fishers and
trappers, surrounded by forests of oak, maple and sycamore trees. Now barely
a sliver remains as the marsh continues to succumb to subsidence and
hurricanes. This photo was taken June 20. 
But the scene surrounding him only mocks that vision.

Naked slabs and raw pilings that once supported homes stand like tombstones
in open, soggy ground. Bare tree trunks rise from a salt marsh that used to
be a vegetable field. Battered home appliances, ice chests and derelict
boats litter the bank while a high tide moves through the remains of a
hardwood forest. And a steady stream of heavy equipment heads down the road
to fight the invasion of BP's oil.

None of it matches memories that seem as sharp as yesterday's news.

"Really, what we had here was a paradise -- a natural paradise," Serigne,
70, says with a smile of fond remembrance. He pauses to shake his head, a
gesture half of wonder, half of despair.

"But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me
like I'm crazy. They just can't imagine what was here such a short time ago.

"And now it's gone. Just gone."

Just outside the city, within earshot of the vocal crusade to save New
Orleans' culture after Hurricane Katrina, communities that were the hub of a
unique wetlands culture for 200 years have quietly been slipping into
history. There have been no jazz funerals or memorials for places like
Delacroix, Hopedale, Pointe a la Hache, Grand Bayou and Shell Beach. But in
the course of a few short years, place names that dotted the coastal maps
for centuries have become mere ghost towns, victims of a wetlands system
undercut by man, then pummeled by nature and more recently stained by oil.

For the vast majority of city residents, these places were destinations
known mostly for the seafood they shipped to local markets and the
entertainment they provided sportsmen on weekends. But for those who
understand their history and the reasons for their demise, these communities
carry an important warning for the big city. 

When Serigne thinks of his childhood here. he remembers a thriving community
of more than 700 Spanish-speaking fishers and trappers who seldom felt the
need to travel to New Orleans because the ridges and wetlands of their world
provided all they needed. He remembers high, dry ground covered with forests
of oak, maple and sycamore stretching from the banks of Bayou Terre aux
Boeufs. He remembers wild fruit trees, citrus groves, rabbits and deer,
ducks and geese, specks and reds and bass. He remembers how children spent
half of each year at distant trapping cabins with the whole family, wedging
in school between seasons for shrimp, muskrat, mink, crabs and ducks. He
remembers thinking the world would always be like this.

But the most amazing memory of all: It was still mostly here just 40 short
years ago.

Serigne surveys the ruins surrounding him, and shrugs.

"Everything we had was based on the wetlands," he said. "When the wetlands
started going, we were done for. But we just didn't realize it was happening
until it was too late."

Those wetlands -- the swamps and marshes of the great Mississippi River
delta -- were the reason Delacroix and its sister communities existed. Not
only did they supply the basic sustenance for life, but for 200 years they
were as imposing an obstacle to the outward expansion of New Orleans as the
Rocky Mountains were to Denver. That physical barrier allowed communities
such as Delacroix to remain insulated from change despite being in the
shadow of one of the nation's largest cities. Without hard-surfaced roads,
without electronic communications, and without a real need to use the
services and goods a city could offer, generations were raised speaking
their own language and answering to a different set of social priorities.

Looking back, former residents now in their 70s realize the differences were
stunning. Just 40 years ago, while their contemporaries in the Crescent City
were being carried along on the great cultural and economic changes of the
post-World War II years -- two-car garages, all-electric homes, subdivisions
sprawling along interstate highways and mandatory college educations -- life
in the fishing communities had changed little since the late 1800s. It was a
subsistence culture revolving around fishing, trapping, hunting and local
gardens, a life divided between high land along bayou ridges and the deep
marsh, between village homes and trapping cabins, where merchants from the
city hawked goods from floating stores on boats, and where no one ever
dreamed of leaving.

"Why would we?" asked Henry Martinez, 67, Serigne's life-long friend. "We
had meat, fish, vegetables. We had school, church, three dance halls. We had
a community where every kid had three hundred parents. You could play in the
woods, swim in the bayou, hunt and fish.

"We had the best life anyone could think of."

And it never seemed to change. Serigne's ancestors arrived from the Canary
Islands in the late 1700s, yet until the early 1960s, he and thousands of
others spread across these bayou towns lived routines those ancestors would
have recognized. But change was already rushing toward them. Centuries of
tradition would wash away in 40 years, the result of activities they
witnessed -- even cheered -- but never fully understood.

Levees built along the river in the early 1900s shut off the spring floods
that carried sediment to deltas. setting in motion a sinking of their
wetlands that should have taken hundreds of years. The dredges for industry
that arrived in the 1930s hastened that demise by centuries. Thousands of
acres of marsh were removed in the search for oil and gas riches, and many
more for shipping and development. As the delta sank and the dredges worked,
small ponds grew into lakes and lakes into bays, drawing the Gulf of Mexico
ever closer.

In 1965 Hurricane Betsy brought that reality home in crushing terms,
basically wiping out the entire community. Within a few years more than 80
percent of the residents had returned, but Betsy told them the end was
coming. Between his teenage years in the 1950s and his 30th birthday in
1970, Serigne said, it became obvious that Delacroix and its unique way of
life was dying. By his 65th birthday, it was gone: Hurricane Katrina was its
final act.

Another of Serigne's peers, Thomas Gonzales, 72, is one of the few natives
still crabbing and living on the island. But to accomplish that he resides
in a house trailer resting on pilings 17 feet above the narrow stretch of
land remaining on the east bank of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs.

"When I grew up, all you saw from the front steps was woods and the bayou
and other homes," he said. "Now all I can see is water where the trees and
marsh used to be.

"This ain't the Delacroix we boys was raised in. Not even close."

Today Delacroix and other fishing villages are either ghost towns,
reclamation projects for sportsmen, or temporary boom towns for the BP
disaster response. Some commercial fishermen still dock along the bayou, but
they are commuters, driving in from communities on the protected side of the
levees. Families that lived along the bayous for hundreds years have given
up, chased away not just by the violence of recent storms, but the certainty
of more to come. If there's new construction, it's largely by city anglers
building recreational retreats.

The newcomers seek their sport in a dying wetlands complex that is a
skeleton of the vibrant ecosystem Serigne remembers from his childhood.

The landscape surrounding Serigne on his walks today is as close to his
childhood memories as the Sahara is to the Amazon. The forest has been
replaced by a salt marsh, the only reminder of the former woodlands a
ghostly line of dead trees rising from an encroaching salt marsh that became
the graveyard for homes, businesses, farm fields and playgrounds. The
community that once was home to a population estimated at 700 now hosts
about 15 fulltime residents. The BP clean-up boom has boosted that number,
but only temporarily.

"Everything changed so fast," Serigne said, surveying the empty lots and
ruined boats along the bayou. "Of course, looking back with the information
we have now, we can see how it all happened.

"It was the canals -- the oil company canals, and the MR-GO. Back in the
'50s, we could see difference in the way the tide was coming in and out.
Faster. Stronger. By the '60s, we could see the marsh starting to eat out.

"Then came Betsy in 65. Then Katrina. Now it's gone. Hard to believe.
"Now when I talk to the younger people about it, they think it's a story."
It's a story worth retelling.