The Mississippi River Floodplain Is Shrinking

Pantheon Books, 2003
348 pp., hardbound, $23.00
ISBN 0-375-42076-2

John McPhee wrote a book in 1989 called “The Control of Nature.” The first chapter of the book described the ongoing attempts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi River. In his typical well-written style, McPhee detailed the ambitious plan of the Corps to keep the river from changing its course, as it had done within natural cycles for thousands of years.

Allowed to run its natural course, the Mississippi would now flow through south Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin and Baton Rouge and New Orleans would have become backwater towns, stripped of the main artery of their very existence.

“The Control of Nature” focused on the history of the great river and man’s attempts to harness this giant and control its flow. In spite of the tremendous number of dams, locks, levees and other flood and flow control devices, the Mississippi is still trying to have its way.

In “Bayou Farewell,” Mike Tidwell uncovers another little-known part of the Mississippi River puzzle—an area the size of Manhattan is disappearing from the Louisiana coast every year, due primarily to the controls being exercised by the Corps and the destruction of the marshlands by gas and oil companies.

The incomprehensible loads of sediment that came down the Mississippi for 7,000 years built up the delta and created the coast of Louisiana. Every year, spring floods carried more sediment and the buildup continued. When humans began to settle along the Mississippi’s floodplain, they soon found that they were underwater on a regular basis. With an eye toward flood control and navigation, levees have been built since the 1700s in an attempt to tame the mighty river.

Since its origin in 1775 when it was assigned the duty of building fortifications at Bunker Hill, the Corps has participated in numerous civil works projects, including flood control and river navigation.

The great floods of 1849 and 1850 prompted a national interest in controlling the Mississippi. In the years that spanned the Civil War, studies were done and literature was created which revealed that a uniform approach was needed if the river was ever to be controlled.

In June of 1879, the Mississippi River Commission was created by an Act of Congress. Its primary mission was to control the Mississippi River and keep it navigable along its entire length.

As Mike Tidwell points out in “Bayou Farewell,” the Corps did its job all too well. The levees and locks and other flood control measures created an unforeseen problem—the tons of silt that had created the Louisiana coast were now rushing down the man-made raceway and being deposited off the end of the continental shelf, far out into depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

Consequently, the coastline had begun to shrink and the loss had to be stopped. This, combined with the destruction of the sensitive marshlands by oil and gas exploration, was creating an environmental disaster of monumental proportion.

The very existence of a large population of people in southeast Louisiana was at risk. Their way of life was in jeopardy. In a very hands-on style, Tidwell investigated this tragedy-in-the-making. He lived and worked with the people of southeast Louisiana, the very people whose lives were being affected by this disaster and who, for the most part, were powerless to do anything about it. “Bayou Farewell” paints a portrait of a part of this country that is as rich in its culture and natural resources as any place on Earth.

Among the people that Tidwell encountered are the Cajuns who depend on the seasonal shrimp harvests; the Vietnamese fishermen who found a home much like the one they left in the mid-1970s; the little-known Houma Indians; and an amazing assortment of characters from faith healers to pilots of supply boats that service the immense offshore drilling operations. He does a great job of describing the food, the music, and the natural environment and all the creatures that thrive in the richness of the coastal marshes.

At present, the state of Louisiana and the Corps of Engineers are hard at work on mammoth projects in the Mississippi Delta region in an attempt to recreate that which has been lost. Mike Tidwell has written an enlightening narrative on how this problem came to be and, more importantly, what’s being done to repair it.

After visiting several related websites, I saw that these measures are beginning to meet with some success. With continued progress, these projects could serve as models for future environmental-restoration efforts throughout the world.

When I first heard about “Bayou Farewell,” I was very excited to read it. Part of the appeal was that it was a book about my home state and a very large part of its history. I was born two years after the last big flood of the Mississippi River. My hometown was underwater due to the flooding of a river that was 100 miles to the east!

Any reservations that I might have had about this book had to do with the way that some authors have portrayed the people of Louisiana and their heritage. Past accounts and attempts to accurately convey the Cajun dialect, for instance, have often failed, to a great extent. Mike Tidwell, however, took the time to explain, in just enough detail, the essence of Cajun French, and he did it very well. C’est bon, Mike!

“Bayou Farewell” is a well-written chronicle of man’s attempts to control nature gone awry. It’s also a paean for those of us who think there’s still time to fix things that we haven’t completely broken. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, hope springs eternal in the human breast. §