At Simmesport, LA, the US Army Corps of Engineers engages in an epic struggle with the Mississippi RIver to force it to continue in its current channel through Baton Rouge and New Orleans and on out to the Gulf of Mexico. Through a series of river control structures, levees, and spill ways, it allows 30% of the total flow of the Mississippi River to split into the Atchafalaya River - a mighty distributary that flows down to the Gulf of Mexico south of Morgan City, LA. There at the Gulf, no longer constrained by levees, it creates new land in the form of marsh, and its tidy delta can be seen on google earth maps or any other satellite views of the globe.
But the more prominent feature by satellite is the massive freshwater basin swamp of the Atchafalaya. From Simmsport in the north and south to the Gulf, the Atchafalaya River Basin forms the largest freshwater swamp in North America. Levees define the boundary on the east and west, serving as flood control and bounding a national ecological and wildlife preserve. During times of flood on the Mississippi River, the Old River Control Structure and Morganza spillway further south divert even more water out of the Mississippi River into this great Basin to protect New Orleans. The Atchafalaya Basisn is not a tidy place or picture when viewed from above. With its large rivers, bayous, lakes, backwaters, canals, pilot channels – it is a true wilderness – and significant geographic barrier and divider between southeast Louisiana and the rest of the state.
I grew up in Lafayette, LA - west of the Atchafalaya Basin. At thirty feet above sea level, it is the high ground and beginning of the southwest Louisiana coastal plain. Growing up in town, we never thought much about floods or worried about them. I always had a strange pride in that. Baton Rouge sits on the east side of the Atchafalaya on a bluff along the Mississippi River. Lafayette and Baton Rouge share the geographic benefit that they were not born of the Mississippi River. They sit on higher bluffs of some unknown geographic upheaval - unlike the bottomlands and marshes encompassing the Atchafalaya, Lakes Maurepas, Lake Ponchartrain, and Pearl River Basins east and south to the Gulf.
Southeast Louisiana was formed over the eons by the Mississippi River splaying its flood waters and associated sediments like a wild garden hose, slowly building land from the Gulf of Mexico as the water receded depositing the soil eroded away from the great interior of North America drained by the river. Whether from Lafayette to the Pearl River on I-10/12 or from Lafayette to New Orleans on Hwy 90 or from Opelousas to Baton Rouge on Hwy 190, these drives each bring perspective on this ancient and current delta of the Mississippi River. If you drive with curiosity, interested in these types of things, observant of the terrain, the miles of bridges, passing through mile after mile of bald cypress and tupelo swamps, water oak and sweetgum bottomland forests, and open freshwater marsh, you may become in awe of what the river and time has created.
Towns and cities within the ancient delta of SE LA survive behind an extensive levee and flood control systems. Most development is along the high ground of the current and ancient Mississippi River courses. Today, small bayous like Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Teche are shadows of their former glory when they formed the main channel of the Mississippi River. In the present day, these old river courses are ironically the high ground where as seen from high above the earth on a Google map, people live on fingers of ground stretching toward the Gulf. Ground created by eons of flooding, deposition, flooding, deposition, flooding... Relentlessly flooding and depositing silt until the river built itself so high, gravity forced it to find lower ground and a new course to the Gulf.
Today, the highest ground in the ancient delta is along the current Mississippi River on its way from Baton Rouge through New Orleans and out to the Gulf. The peak elevations of southeast Louisiana at the river banks behind levees, the land gradually declining back into swamp and marsh until once again manmade levees are expanded to protect the low ground. New Orleans is one of these places - the highest ground of the city along the river, declining to below sea level, protected by levees that ring the city, and dependent upon a massive network of canals and pumps to move rainwater up and over the levees. A feat of engineering going back to its founding when this high ground along the River was established by the French, growing into an international port trading on the great river and commerce of North America and connecting it to the world.
My father grew up in New Orleans - in a large, wealthy, Catholic family in an Uptown neighborhood. Uptown as in up river from the city center as directions are measured in relation to the river. His grandfather was a German immigrant from the town of Renchen in the state of Baden in the late 1870s. Traveling the Mississippi, he eventually settled in New Orleans, manned a butcher’s kiosk at the old French Market along the river warehouses, and over time grew a meat packing company.
Few in the family – and I remember this as a constant complaint of my dad - ever made the two and a half hour drive west to Lafayette after he moved there in 1965 to take a professorship at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Crossing the Atchafalaya meant going across some mystical and potentially dangerous wilderness. I don’t think Dad ever really came to terms with moving to the other side of the Atchafalaya. Despite his frustration with his own reticent family, I also remember his own muted disrespect for things and people across the Atchafalaya from New Orleans that he’d throw out on select topics.
Until the mid to late 1970s there was no completed interstate between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, nor between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Both paths eventually required long multi-mile bridges across the flooded basins. The difficulty of the drive in the old days began with the decision on whether to go north or south to get around the basin. Evenutally a decision was made after extensive plotting and argument. Often the decision was made to go north to Opelousas and then across the northern portions of the basin on Hwy 190, crossing the Atchafalaya at Port Barre and the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. There in Baton Rouge, you picked up I-10 for a short stretch until you reached the unfinished portion and exited to Airline Hwy where you made the final drive across the Bonnet Carre spillway and eventually into New Orleans.
To go south meant highway 90, crossing the Atchafalaya at Morgan City and then the Mississippi River at the Huey P. Long bridge in Metairie – essentially by then in New Orleans. But this route from Lafayette at the time was longer, less developed, longer stretches without services, and more susceptible to delays. At the time both routes took well over three hours in what today is an easy 2.5 (Well it was easy for a time, but in the last decade or so, growth and lack of new infrastructure or new river crossing now makes Baton Rouge a traffic bottleneck that increasingly makes this a longer and more frustrating drive and is once again we debate the best route to cross the Atchafalaya.)
His family like most New Orleanians of the time had little interest in things outside the city. Where today, you'd swear New Orleans invented Cajun, then, the city dismissed and looked down its nose at all things Cajun and the wilderness outside the levees of New Orleans. Cajuns were exiles from Nova Scotia, forced to settle in the marshes, swamps, and praires west of New Orleans. It was country and unsophisticated and simply not New Orleans. Dad never failed to comment upon that distinction when incorrectly referenced on TV or used in an advertisement. New Orleans was the big city, a city of history and importance. Formerly French and Spanish ruled, and aristocratic in its way, filled with self-importance over its place and history of commerce, music, and food. What reason could possibly exist to leave the city – an island of culture in that ancient ocean of swamp and marsh wilderness.
Over its history, Colonial French and Spanish, Black people - enslaved and free, and immigrants from around the world disembarked at New Orleans - one of the greatest ports of North America. The city became a melting pot of Black, French, Irish, German, Italian, and southern US - stewing over the years into a culture and perception of specialness that later generations adapted for their city and themselves. Commerce and the money that came with it contributed to this self-perception. This port on the Mississippi River, the major artery of North American commerce bringing food and products from the interior. These goods made their last stop to change hands in New Orleans before continuing on their way to the Gulf of Mexico and out to international destinations around the world. As they passed through New Orleans, these boxes and barrels of food and machinery found themselves stored in the warehouses that lined the river for miles – sharing space with cargo headed in the opposite direction coming in from lands across the globe on their way into the interior.
But the region is more than New Orleans, which is to say that regardless of how we try to simplify a place, characterizations, generalizations, and stereotypes rarely reflect the actual differences of peoples and cultures. New Orleans is like neither Baton Rouge nor Lafayette, and none of these three are like Shreveport or Monroe. Despite their shared civic boundaries, South Louisiana is not north Louisiana and south Louisiana is not New Orleans, and the resistance to crossing the Atchafalaya is just one example.
The Mississippi River on its way from Lake Itasca to the Gulf crosses, divides, and contributes to the creation of many cultures. As it flows between the boundaries of Tennessee and Arkansas it enters the famed Delta country. The geography on the west bank in Arkansas of broad flat expanses as far as the eye can see opposes the bluff lined banks and hills on the Tennessee side. Framed by the Ozark foothills on the west, the enormous Arkansas Delta is less known and perhaps less infamous than its sister region of the Mississippi Delta that begins just below Memphis where the bluffs of the east bank give up.
Delta is a confusing term. As opposed to the Mississippi River Delta at the mouth of the river, the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta is a geologic oddity of past eons where the river deposited silt in some enormous depression in the earth through the millenia. Today, it is stark by its flatness and openness. Some of the richest farmland in the world, denuded of trees replaced by cotton, rice, soybean, and corn. This Delta stretching down to Vicksburg where the bluffs, as at Memphis, attempt again to constrain the River.
Near Simmesport, LA nature gives up attempting to constrain the river. Here the great Red River of the west joins the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers in what was a web of interchanging flows and flooding until the US Army Corps of Engineers decided to take over the effort of constraining the river to the Gulf. From this point south, the massive delta of marsh and swamp formed from the Mississippi and its mighty distributary, the Atchafalaya River stretch to the Gulf, only interrupted by settlement along the current and former river channels and behind levees that protect from flooding.
Left to its natural evolution, the Mississippi River today would flow through the Atchafalaya River. Indeed, in came very close in 1973 when floodwaters nearly changed the course of the river in what would have been a natural disaster on an unimagined scale - flooding hundreds of thousands of people, rendering millions along the river to New Orleans without drinking water, starving the worlds largest petrochemical manufacturing of needed process water, and ceasing critical maritime transportation. But the massive Old River Control project, a collection of levees and massive spill way gates survived, and continues to channel a minimum of 30% of the normal flow of the Mississippi River through the Atchafalaya River.
In the 21st century, ease of travel, media, generational movement, and the decline of the city in importance commercially have muted the distinction New Orleanians held of themselves. But it remains, and in 1965 when Dad accepted a job at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and crossed the Atchafalaya with his new wife to Lafayette, it was ingrained in his mind and perception of the world. But my world is different – shaped by growing up across the Atchafalaya, crossing it many times to visit family, to go to college. Then a career involving homes, travel, and infrastructure across southeast Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas which brought me to reflect on geography, natural disaster, history, and culture. This concept of crossing the Atchafalaya is more than a crossing a natural barrier, it is also a mental distinction with and without merit. It represents a common sense of place of the Gulf Coast - but not a place to generalize - but rather one to explore and understand the diversity of people, cultures, history, and geography.
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