Invasive Species
There were eight of us signed up for the 10:30 Manchac Magic tour, “an awesome kayak and canoe tour through the historic Manchac swamp”, and we sat expectantly on our orange plastic, two-seater kayaks, bobbing like giant bath toys. It was a cold autumn day in Louisiana, though the sun was strong and the sky was, there’s no other word for it, blue. There was Spanish moss — tick! — draped over the limbs of the twisty cypress trees — tick! — and also over the branches of the stock-straight tupelos — tick! — and definitely no alligators — no tick! — as it was too cold for them, plus this was one of those tasteful, considerate tours which do not, unlike the airboats that do a brisk trade on other swamps that are also a comfortable drive’s distance from New Orleans, throw marshmallows into the water to make it worth the alligators’ while.
A pecking order quickly emerged. Bringing up the rear: the wholesome couple from Denver, Colorado, who’d flown in for a wedding, their speed or lack thereof due largely to the guy-half of the couple spending a lot of time fiddling with complicated camera lenses and reducing their paddling power by (at least) 50 per cent. Next, Rachel, a twentysomething biologist from Tucson, Arizona, and our guide and minibus driver for the day, trying to gently chivvy the Denver couple along. Vying for middle spot: an attractive Dutch couple with whizzy jobs who’d flown in from New York for the weekend and were “practising intermittent fasting”, the lady-half told us while snacking on a muffin.
Also in contention: my sister and me, who had found ourselves, for various reasons, with a spare weekend in New Orleans and a jones for the great Southern American outdoors, in which we were demonstrating irregular bursts of kayaking excellence swiftly followed by lapses of concentration that left us wedged in the sawgrass banks. Up ahead, way ahead, the two shaven-headed brothers in high-performance thermals with perfectly synchronised paddle technique from I’m not sure where because the primordial rules of group dynamics had dictated that they would be the pair that no one talked to.
We stopped under a large cypress with a craggy stump of a branch sticking out at near90° from its side, maybe the result of a hurricane or a lightning strike, or both, said Rachel, and all that stopped that particular large cypress from being cut down by the European loggers who, in the 18th century, widened the bayou so they could float the trunks all the way to the Mississippi. Apparently, it was the Bayagoula Indians who first showed Europeans this secret route out to the Gulf of Mexico. In timehonoured tradition, the Europeans gave them smallpox in return and the Bayagoula were all but wiped out. And it was true there were no other large cypress trees either.
With her kayak parked between the cypress’s stalagmite-like root formations, which stuck up, a little rudely, from the water, Rachel told us about the native vegetation and about the “knees”, which is apparently what those tree-stalagmites are called, and pointed out the edible plants — the heart of palm, something called “bull’s tongue” — which we could eat if we were desperate and not returning to New Orleans in a matter of hours to feast on tourist gumbo. She pointed out the plants that have come more recently: the bobbing water lettuces of South America and northern Africa which are now rife in the Gulf Coast and really do look like little lettuces, the fancy kind; salvinia minima, a small floating fern that
is crowding out the duckweed that is the staple diet of their namesakes (“Though, I don’t know,” said Rachel, “maybe in 200 years they’ll learn to eat it”); and the water hyacinth from Brazil, brought over for the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair because of its beautiful blossom, now carpeting the bayou with a tangle of meaty green leaves that block off the waterways completely in places so that we have to hack with our paddles and not so much glide between them as heave ourselves over.
Though Bayou Manchac is 18 miles long and reached out as far as our eyes could see, this particular stretch was unusually congested with other tourists on other kayaks, on other tours with other companies. Every half-hour we passed a returning group — sweaty men in shiny, synthetic shorts; couples in fleeces clutching bags of trail mix; po-faced adolescent girls with centre-parted hair — and despite us being the only human beings anywhere around, and the fact that we were so close we could easily perform a paddle high-five, we behaved like commuters on a suburban railway platform and passed each other without acknowledgement. It was almost like being at home.
Rachel stopped our group again to give us some key swamp trivia — did we know that Spanish moss is not, in fact, a moss but a bromeliad, and that it was used by Henry Ford to stuff the seat cushions of the Model T? (We did not!) — and she asked us to note the silvery colour of the bare tupelos, which, once she’d drawn our attention to it, was clearly closer to grey. “It’s winter,” she conceded, with a light laugh, “but they’re not doing too good!”
Climate change has brought more hurricanes, she said, which cause the water to surge from the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Mississippi has been leveed once again, the flood defences that came down in Hurricane Katrina rebuilt, though it means the bayou gets no fresh water in the spring flooding. The salinity of the water has increased, she said, and the tupelos can’t cope. (I read later that the US Army Engineering Corps has said that the unprecedented speed of the rising sea levels could mean these new flood defences, completed to great fanfare, will be insufficient in four years.)
It was time to go back to the minibus, our gumbo awaited, and we paddled back the way we had come, casting sideways glances at what we now understood to be dying tupelos — or perhaps they were already dead? — pulling over into the clumps of rampant water hyacinths to let the outbound tour groups pass. Soon we could hear the drone of the I-55 highway, which runs above the bayou on concrete pillars built right into the water. Rachel told us that she’s worked out she could take the 1-10, which also passes close by, from her place in New Orleans to her parents in Tucson, a 20hour drive, and only make seven turns.
My sister pointed at the silent, shaven-headed brothers up ahead in a let’s-take-those-fuckers-down kind of way, but after a few paddle strokes the brothers, who were as ruthlessly efficient as ever and had no idea they were in a contest, were already out the other side of the I-55. We gave up and let ourselves drift into the shadow of the highway. It was clear we never stood a chance. ○
In next issue’s Journal:
Max Olesker schvitzes, Mick Brown listens to YouTube, and Ed Caesar has a kebab.