The Buck Stops Here (31 page)

Again, he laughed at me.

“Alligators are territorial,” he said. “So much so that I bet if you tore that fence down tomorrow, they’d all still be right where they are six months from now. That’s their territory now. They don’t have a desire to go anywhere else.”

As we reached Armand’s dock, I put the frightening sight out of my mind and focused on the day ahead.

“Now,” he said, all business as we walked out onto the dock, “I wanna take you out in the bayou and show you around, so we got two choices—either my little motorboat, or a pair of pirogues. Pirogues won’t take us as far, but it’ll get us places the motorboat won’t go.”

“That’s my preference, by far.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

One pirogue was already in the water, so we retrieved a second one from where it was propped up against the house. Together we got in place to lift it: I took the back, and much to my surprise, I realized that the fiberglass craft couldn’t have weighed more than 50 pounds.

“It’s so light!”

“One of the advantages over a canoe,” he said. “Because of its flat bottom, it’s a little less stable, but you can take this baby anywhere, even where it’s super shallow. As some folk like to say, you can paddle a pirogue on a heavy dew.”

We put it into the water next to the other one, and then I told him I needed to make a pit stop before we set off on our journey.

“Oh, of course, I’m sorry. Go up the steps to the back door, there, and down the hall to your left. Second door on the left.”

“Thanks.”

I really did need to use the bathroom, but I also wanted to get a peek inside of his home as well. While he loaded supplies into the pirogues, I went up the back stairs into the elevated house, my eyes adjusting from the brightness outside to the darkness within.

From what I could tell, the place looked like a typical bachelor’s home, with a small stack of dirty dishes in the sink and some books and magazines spread on a cheap wood coffee table next to a comfortable chair in the living room. I found the bathroom easily enough, directly across the hall from what looked like a home office. I was sorely tempted to rifle through his papers just to see if I could find any evidence of contact with Les Watts or James Sparks. But as at Veronica’s house, I doubted that anyone would be so careless as to leave such proof lying around.

I heard voices outside, so I peeked from the bathroom window to see that Armand was standing on his little dock and talking to a woman, a spry-looking slender lady in her fifties or sixties. After they finished talking, he came into the house. She, on the other hand, walked to a small shed nearly hidden by the brush at the back of the property next door. When she reached the shed, she did the oddest thing: She carefully looked both ways—as if to make sure she wasn’t being observed—before she pushed open the door and quickly slipped inside. Strange.

I could hear Armand in the kitchen, so I washed my hands and then walked up the hall to find him.

“Hey,
cher
, I was just thinking that you need yourself a hat. It’s a hot one out there today.”

He didn’t seem suspicious, so I relaxed a bit. He chose a hat for me from a few that hung on the wall, and then we left.

Getting used to the pirogue wasn’t hard. It didn’t feel as stable as a canoe, but he was right—it skimmed over the surface of water that couldn’t have been more than six inches deep. Incredible!

I sat and used a paddle with my pirogue, but he stood in his, using a pole instead, pushing himself along by pressing it into the muck of the bottom. As we went, he told me about what we were seeing, the grasses and trees that were unique to the swamp. All along the way he stopped to run tests, either gathering water samples or measuring distances between landmarks. I asked what that was about, and he said he was tracking the rising water of the swamp, and the encroachment of salt water from the gulf.

Except for the mosquitoes, the morning spent paddling among the marshy wetlands was one of the most thrilling I had had in a long time. Everything was so lush, so green, so alive. We saw birds and nutria and fish. We passed a great blue heron and a number of snakes—some several feet long!—and, finally, an alligator. This time, however, there was no ten-foot fence between us.

But, just like the ones back at the pit, it was perfectly still, resting in the shallows and watching us go by. Armand didn’t seem worried, even though the only thing between us and him was a thin layer of fiberglass.

“He’s just catching some rays, takin’ his time,” Armand said.

I asked him about the day before, when he spoke of “polin’” alligators, and he described the process to me, the old Cajun way of finding a gator in its underwater den and fishing him out.

“Big Parain, he taught me how to do it,” he said. “He’s the best at it I’ve ever seen.”

Armand spoke with pride, but the thought of a man wrestling an alligator until he could get to the soft part of its head and stick a knife in it gave me the shivers.

Despite my best attempts at manipulating the conversation, I found it impossible to engage him in a discussion about the past and his old computer work with the Cipher Five or James Sparks. Not wanting to seem too transparent, I finally gave up, determined to try again later.

We stopped for lunch at a fishing camp, a little shack on stilts that looked abandoned but had a wide front deck for sitting. We climbed up onto the wood and made ourselves comfortable. Armand opened the cooler that had been in his pirogue and took out the lunch he had prepared for us, thick fried oyster sandwiches on French bread with mayonnaise and lettuce—something I would have called a submarine sandwich but he called a “po-boy.” Delicious.

As we ate, he told me about his work, about the quest that drove him, day and night, to save the Louisiana coast.

“It’s disappearing, you know,” he said. “At a rate of about thirty square miles per year.”

“Per
year?
”

He nodded.

“We’re losing an area the size of Manhattan every ten months. It’s the fastest disappearing landmass on earth. Three million acres, just washing out to sea.”

Living in the Chesapeake Bay area myself, I knew of the problems that could beset a coastal area—and I had heard that Louisiana had some big issues—but I had no idea it was that bad. According to Armand, it was caused by the routing and leveeing of the Mississippi River, which prevented the silt and sediment from flowing naturally into these areas and continuously building them up. The oil companies hadn’t helped matters by cutting a number of artificial canals directly through the swamp.

“The solution I’m working toward involves artificially diverting the Mississippi through conveyance channels all along the way. It’s not ideal, but if we don’t do something soon, the consequences will be disastrous.”

He went on to list the problems that were presented by the disappearing coast. He talked about the losses of seafood, the oil infrastructure, migratory resting grounds. Most startling of all was the news about hurricanes.

“You know, the marsh acts like a hurricane buffer. Every two point seven miles of marsh can dampen storm surge by a foot.”

“I don’t understand.”

He said that when Hurricane Katrina struck, the category-three storm killed nearly two thousand people and became the costliest natural disaster ever to hit the United States.

“The more the marsh recedes,” he continued, “the worse the next hurricane will be. As bad as Katrina was, can you imagine a category-five storm coming here? That would create a flood wall reaching twenty-two feet high! The devastation would be biblical in proportion.”

I asked Armand why nothing significant in the way of storm preparation had been done before Katrina, and in reply received a long, involved overview of dirty Louisiana politics. In his opinion, the rebuilding of the city was taking first priority, but swamp restoration had to be done too. Unless the government sent an additional fourteen billions dollars for the project, the problems of the disappearing swamp would continue to compound exponentially.

He also talked about the computer modeling program he had created, which enabled him to manipulate satellite images and project exactly what would happen if they did or didn’t do anything to stop the erosion. His jargon became a bit technical, but I was extremely impressed by his intelligence.

After lunch he showed me a canal that had been dug by the oil companies to provide a more direct route to deliver supplies down to the oil rigs in the gulf.

“Nothing wrong with these canals in the beginning,” he said, lifting his pole as the current slowly carried us down it, “but now they findin’ that the canals are widening all by themselves. One canal, when they dug it, was fifty feet wide. Now it’s two thousand. See them dead trees? They used to be on the bank of the canal!”

I looked where he was pointing to see a row of dead trees in the water, a good 30 feet from the current canal bank, stark skeletons against the blue Louisiana sky.

The more we saw, the more despair I felt—and I was new to this swamp. I could only imagine how deeply it hurt the ones who lived here to watch their precious land simply wash away, helpless to do anything about it.

Thirty-Six

Our journey brought us full circle, and we arrived back in familiar territory by sunset without my ever realizing that we had turned around. The swamp was a confusing place, but Armand seemed to know every cypress stump and millet field as if they were road signs. By the end of the day I had counted 15 alligator sightings, along with 12 snakes and a multitude of snapping turtles. The swamp was beautiful, but it was also wild. Armand was sorry that we did not spot any bears or deer. According to him, the swamps were full of all kinds of animals, especially wild boar.

Back at his dock, I was surprised to see a celebration going on, and Armand explained that he had asked his aunt to put together a “crawfish boil and
fais do-do
,” a sort of dance party, in my honor. I was a bit humbled until he added that they were always looking for an excuse to party—and that the last one had been a mere ten days ago to celebrate the running of the brown shrimp.

Back on shore I was introduced to Armand’s friends and relatives, most of them Cajun. Tables had been set up on the back lawn and topped with newspapers, and there was a gigantic pot boiling on an outdoor cooking fire, filled to the brim with crawfish. Truly, I felt as if I were in a foreign land, since just about everyone over the age of 30 was speaking not English but Cajun French. Three of the people were playing music—one on an accordion, one on a fiddle, and one wearing a sort of washboard which he ran up and down with metal spoons. Armand said the washboard was a
frottior
, which was a common instrument in
zydeco
. I didn’t know much about that. I just knew I loved it.

As it turned out, Armand’s aunt, whom he introduced as Ton Ton, was the woman I had seen him talking with on the dock earlier. At first glance I thought she was in her sixties, but once we were face-to-face, I realized that she was merely weathered and probably only in her forties. Her skin was deeply tanned and wrinkled, her hands red and gnarled. She treated me oddly, as if she were suspicious of me, and I had to wonder if she was being territorial about her nephew. Certainly, the two of them were close, and as the evening wore on, I learned that she had raised him herself, serving as a mother to her sister’s child. According to Armand’s godmother, Big Nanan, Armand was their pride and joy. Between his looks, brains, and charm, I didn’t find that surprising at all.

Armand eventually rescued me from his family and swept me into a dance. After that I had a series of dance partners, all of them friendly, many of them accidentally stomping on my toes as I tried to learn the Cajun Two-Step.

As I danced I kept thinking about what I had seen that morning, when Armand’s aunt had gone into that little shed at the back of her property so suspiciously. Once it was dark, I thought I might be able to slip away from the crowd and take a peek in the shed for myself. People were so wrapped up in the dancing and the conversation that, finally, I seized the opportunity to slip away by pretending I had to get something out of my car.

I walked around the front of the house and opened the car door. Though it was too warm for a sweater, I pulled one on anyway, mostly for the dark coverage it gave my arms. I shut the car door and looked around, but I seemed to be alone and unobserved at the moment.

I quietly backed away from the house, toward the road, until I was well hidden by the darkness. Then I walked as quickly as I could to the far side of the property, skirting along the brush line to get to Ton Ton’s backyard.

It was dark—really dark.

Without a full moon I didn’t have much to go on, and my terror was that I would walk straight into a snake or an alligator. I could hear all sorts of small rustlings in the bushes, but I kept my eye on the shed’s roofline, which was just sticking out from the edge of the brush.

I reached the little building undetected. Once there, I didn’t dare go inside, just in case it housed a big alligator or something. Instead, I pressed my face to the window in the door. With the sound of my heart pounding between my ears, I waited for my eyes to adjust. There was something big in there, something metal that just barely glinted in the small amount of light that came in from a hole in the ceiling. I squinted, trying to make out the familiar shape. In a flash I realized what it was, and I almost laughed out loud. It was a still—an old-fashioned, straight out of Prohibition-era, whiskey-making still!