Twain's Feast (28 page)

Sheepshead did sometimes appear on the city’s best, and most expensive, Creole tables, as when Twain splurged on a ten-dollar “French” dinner (the word “Creole” wasn’t commonly used to describe city cooking until several decades later). His sheepsheads were cooked with mushrooms, which may mean something like the
Picayune
’s formula for garnishing a sheepshead “baked” on the stovetop with oysters, shrimp, and a tomato-and-mushroom gravy. Or it could have been like the sheepshead à la normande of a man said to know which fish were best in the markets and “the mode in which New Orleans chefs can best cook them”: he poached the fish, then blended the liquid with butter, Calvados, and heavy cream. Sheepsheads were everyday fish, but they could be elevated by the right hand.

Today they’re making a comeback on New Orleans tables, sometimes under the more appetizing name “sea bream” (there’s a lot of wiggle room in the names of fish—twenty years ago you would have ordered Patagonian toothfish instead of Chilean sea bass, slimehead instead of orange roughy). When Pete catches a few sheepsheads in the summer months, Clara is happy enough to sell them at the stall. But unlike croakers, sheepsheads are worth pursuing for their own sake, especially in the autumn, just before the season for small white shrimp closes near Christmas.

“I’ll be coming back in, see the school on the surface, and just change out nets,” Pete says. “The shrimp trawl nets have a real fine mesh, so they push water in front of them. But the fish trawl is way more open, which lets the water pass through and the fish come in. You can get a good haul that way.” It’s nothing like a windfall; sheepsheads are bony fish, yielding as little as a five-to-one cut, meaning that about 20 percent of the fish’s total weight is usable meat. Still, as the year ends, the white shrimp getting smaller and smaller until it takes a hundred to make up a pound, sheepsheads can be a real boon—they’re one more thing that lets the Gericas keep on doing what they’re doing.

Twain loved fish from the lake, bayou, and open Gulf, whether roasted with essence of mushroom or fried crisply and drizzled with browned butter. But the heart of New Orleans, for him, was the river. The river was why the city existed; the river was what carried him there. The fish he loved grew in its wetland nurseries, thriving on the nutrients it brought downstream.

Twain couldn’t know that all that was slowly ending—that the great, muddy conveyor of life could stop.

Rain falling on nearly half of California eventually drains into the San Francisco Bay. But the Mississippi River drains almost half the land of the
entire continental United States:
41 percent of it, from New York to Montana and from West Virginia to Colorado. After the Amazon and the Nile, it’s the third-largest drainage basin in the world. Twain believed that rain falling in part of twenty-eight states ended in the river.

You’d think that such an imposing flow would have carved itself a permanent bed, fixed and immutable as the walls of the Grand Canyon. But the Mississippi flows through some of the flattest land on earth, dropping a miserly three inches for every mile it runs. And though near Twain’s Missouri hometown it usually remained between rocky walls, in the flat, silty country below Cairo, Illinois, it was free: the lower river ran wild. There, when the river wanted to slip its banks—carving out a new course through old woodlands, over a farm, or through a well-established town—there was nothing in the world to stop it. When René-Robert de La Salle explored the river, Twain believed, he had traveled an entirely different flow; the old bed was dry, forgotten. A shift in the river could bless tiny settlements with commerce or abandon thriving market towns to die. The Mississippi drowned what it wanted to drown.

In flood times the river turned surreal. The wedding-cake paddle wheelers would grope along backcountry chutes, through ancient forests and swamps, past forlorn families gathered on the roofs of sunken farmhouses. At such times land and water bled together. “We’ll creep through cracks where you’ve always thought was solid land,” Bixby told Twain. “We’ll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river to one side; we’ll see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.” In the cracks they’d hang out torches to aid in steering past the “swinging grape-vines[,] flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift riches of the forest foliage” that overhung the narrow banks. During high floods they might lose track of the river’s channel entirely—especially when piles of sugarcane refuse, or bagasse, were burning inland, leaving the world gray, indistinct, and filled with a smoke “like Satan’s own kitchen.” Piloting could seem a dreamtime; even the river’s fish were bizarre, prehistoric species like the giant paddlefish, blue catfish, and alligator gar. In Twain’s youth the Mississippi was a beautiful, dangerous, defiant world.

So upon his return in 1882, it was exceptionally painful for Twain to find the once thriving, once wild river tamed. At the St. Louis wharf, once jammed by a “solid mile” of steamboats, a scant half dozen now waited quietly for cargo; seeing what rails had done to the vibrant port made Twain feel very old. “Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812,” he reflected. “At the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.”

What was more, the United States River Commission (predecessor of the Army Corps of Engineers) had been hard at work. And though Twain didn’t know what the results of their labor would be, he was clearly disturbed. Wing dams guided the current; dikes constrained it; the shoreline was shaved of timber, loaded down with stone ballast and wooden pilings. “One who knows the Mississippi,” Twain said, “will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that 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.” Were it not for the recently completed jetties at the river’s mouth, he’d think that “the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to try to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.”

He didn’t know what the tamed river would do; still, he felt the change in his blood. He saw snag boats “pulling the river’s teeth” and government beacons that made the dark flow into a “two-thousand-mile torch-light procession.” To Twain’s eyes so many navigational aids sterilized the river. “This thing,” he reflected about the network of lights, “has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.”

One thing, at least, seemed the same—the mud. The Mississippi had always been famously muddy; in
Huckleberry Finn,
Twain’s river men joked about being able to grow corn in the stomach of a man who drank enough of the water. “Here was a thing which had not changed,” he wrote now. “A score of years had not affected this water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. . . . If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.” But although Twain didn’t know it, changes to the Mississippi’s mud were the most momentous of all.

Certainly change seemed unlikely; there was probably more sediment in the river during Twain’s piloting years than ever before, as plows loosed soil from tightly woven prairie-grass roots. Every year the Mississippi had carried some 400 million
tons
of dissolved earth to Louisiana. Much of it never went as far as New Orleans; before the river reached the city, it branched off into the Atchafalaya and other distributaries, spreading mud and sediment throughout the state’s bayous. Both there and at the river’s shifting, unsteady mouth, this sediment eventually settled, slowly extending the land; Twain wrote that Louisiana’s coast was “much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.” For seven thousand years, residue from Montanan turf, New York mud, Wisconsin sod, and Arkansan clay had built the swamps and wetlands; Illinois’s and Iowa’s losses were Louisiana’s gain. The state was literally built from half of America.

But as Twain steamed toward New Orleans, all that was coming to an end. If you’re like me, you may have heard about the state’s disappearing wetlands and assumed that development was most to blame: tidal ponds filled in to make lawns, swamps drained for golf courses, that kind of thing. But the truth is that, in Louisiana,
the land is melting away.
And it’s happening almost fast enough to be visible to the naked eye—a football field’s worth of land vanishes every forty-five minutes. The equivalent of Manhattan disappears every ten months. This land is underwater; it’s gone.

The reason, as Mike Tidwell says in his fascinating, deeply disturbing
Bayou Farewell,
is that during the 1880s—the very moment that Twain returned to the river—the ancient accrual of land stopped. Dams upstream trapped so much mud and sand that even as agricultural erosion increased, the lower Mississippi’s sediment load fell. Instead of building Louisianan wetlands, the earth from midwestern prairies became sunken river sludge. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers’ dikes and levees held back the floods that had once spread earth for miles alongside the Mississippi’s banks, earth that had once countered erosion and subsidence (the natural tendency of wetlands to sink as sediments compact and organic elements rot away). Then, after the Great Flood of 1927 killed over a thousand people in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, the corps determined to stop the river from ever jumping its levees again. It was an understandable decision, but now there were no more annual floods at all, no more yearly renewals of the land. This in itself was a danger, though one that was harder to see.

Then there were the jetties at the river mouth. They greatly impressed Twain, keeping the river mouth open, making navigation much safer and easier. But they also channeled the Mississippi’s mud into a massive flume, shooting it over the edge of the continental shelf into one of the deepest parts of the Gulf. Now, instead of spreading gently down the coast, all that land-building, life-giving mud was gone forever. And the Gulf Coast, it soon developed, hates a steady state: if the land isn’t building up, then it’s eroding away.

In one sense Twain was wrong: the corps has, in fact, channeled the river, tamed its lawless stream, saved shores it had sentenced. But he was deadly right that you can’t bully the Mississippi without consequence. When the engineers cut off its natural course, the river took the land it carried with it; it let the sea begin stealing the shore. Meanwhile, the century-old grid of oil-company canals—thousands of miles of them—accelerate erosion and the coast’s disappearance. Remember that the MRGO channel grew from fifty feet to two hundred in a few decades; wave action can double a canal’s width in fourteen years, making what were once nearly portages into rivers in their own right.

Now, Tidwell says, the cemeteries of some Cajun communities are under feet of water; old baseball fields are fishing grounds. He watched the GPS of one shrimping boat as it cruised easily over what should have been solid ground—the electronic map, the captain explained, was seven years out of date.

In the long term, all this means catastrophe for Louisiana’s critically important fisheries, which rely almost entirely on wetland breeding grounds and provide about a third of the nation’s catch. But for now the effects aren’t easy to see; ironically, grass that decays on sinking land causes great explosions of plankton, and fish, crab, and shrimp thrive in the kinds of edge habitats created when a solid bank of wetland breaks up. It’s much like what happened to prairie chickens, which thrived on a temporary blend of corn and grass: there were more of the birds than ever before in history, and then they were gone. If the wetlands disappear, something like that is absolutely guaranteed to happen to Louisiana’s fisheries. Sheepshead, crab, shrimp—they’ll all appear in fine condition until, seemingly at once, they vanish.

In human terms this will mean the loss of unique American coastal cultures; the evacuation of Cajuns and their neighbors might be slower than during a hurricane, but it will be no less real. And every day that the wetlands shrink is a day that New Orleans is more vulnerable to the next major storm. Every 2.7 miles of coastal wetland can absorb a foot of storm surge; where New Orleans used to have 50 miles of buffer, it now has 20 and falling. There isn’t a levee system in the world that can make up for that.