An easy trip
I left Thibodaux, Louisiana at 9 a.m. on July 27, 2022. An hour later, I arrived at Isle de Jean Charles where I had a vision of the world a hundred years in the future.
Thibodaux is a handsome town—a sort-of miniature New Orleans, but without the music, art, architecture, or sophistication of the city 60 miles to the east. What it has is a tight grid of streets, canopied sidewalks, two or three Creole restaurants, and a welcoming scale. Parking is easy and a walk through downtown takes about 15 minutes.
Heading south on Highway 24, I passed the chain stores, car dealers, banks, funeral homes, fast food joints, and emergency clinics characteristic of the American strip. They disappeared by the time I reached Schriever (pop. 5,700), distinguished by its looming water tank. Next is Gray (pop. 7,900), discretely announced by a small, green sign at the town’s entrance. After that comes unincorporated, but aspirationally named Bayou Blue. The song “Blue Bayou” was written by Texans Joe Melson and the great Roy Orbison, and first recorded by Orbison in 1973. But it was Linda Ronstadt—from Arizona—who made the tune transcendent. Judging by the lyrics, Blue Bayou is a veritable Land of Cockayne:
I’m going back some day
Come what may to Blue Bayou
Where you sleep all day
And the catfish play on Blue Bayou…
I’ll never be blue, my dreams come true on Blue Bayou
Bayou Blue however, is an unlikely candidate for utopia. It’s visually indistinguishable from the awkward, urban-rural mix surrounding it; and far from being famous for playful catfish, it’s notorious for grisly crimes. In 1981, a man from there set fire to a local discotheque, killing five people. In an age with fewer mass murders, the story made the NYTimes. Bayou Blue was also the last home of Ronald Dominique, who between 1997 and 2006, bound, raped, and killed 23 young men, nearly all of them poor and Black. This was no criminal mastermind. He made little effort to cover-up his crimes and left evidence everywhere. And yet it took police nine years and 15 victims before they concluded there was a serial killer loose. Dominique was only identified as a suspect in the summer of 2006 after a man escaped his clutches and ran straight to the police. It was another six months before the he was finally arrested. He quickly confessed his crimes.
Continuing south, I passed through Presquile, crossed and re-crossed several bayous, and saw idle shrimp boats and fishing boats. A single-lane bridge under repair in Bourg forced a detour; my satnav sputtered, but so long as I was going south, I was fine. The sun was shining, traffic was light, and the landscape—big sky, low horizon, canals, bayous, dikes, and bridges—reminded me of the Netherlands. I uselessly remembered my only sentence of Dutch: “Kijk voor fietsen!” (“Watch out for bicycles!”)
Past Montegut, Terrebonne Parish, (elevation 7 feet), the houses become fewer in number and further apart. Many are crushed and twisted, with beams poking out like a sculpture by Mark di Suvero. They are the product however of tropical storms intensified by global warming. Hurricane Ida, which came ashore last year at nearby Port Fourchon, had sustained winds of almost 150 miles per hour. The year before, it was Laura, another Category 4 storm. Parts of the parish still haven’t recovered from Katrina back in 2005.
A few miles later, I crossed a causeway called Island Road, protected on both sides by riprap, but nevertheless partly submerged. On my way to Isle de Jean Charles, a derrick was dredging sand and water from the west side of the causeway and depositing it on the east. On my way back, it was the other way around.
“This is the way the world ends…”
Finally, I arrived on Isle de Jean Charles. The island is the ancestral home of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. They arrived here in the 1830s following the Indian Removal Act which forcibly displaced Indigenous Americans from the southeast U.S. to territories west of the Mississippi River. The population on the island was initially quite small, just a few dozen. They subsisted on fishing, hunting, harvesting of native plants, and limited cultivation. By the early 20th Century, they numbered in the low hundreds, barely increasing in subsequent decades. They suffered the usual indignities of Native Americans: suppression of Indigenous and creole languages, discrimination, political disenfranchisement, educational segregation, poverty, and denial of infrastructure investment.
Worst of all was the disappearance of the land itself. The growth of the oil industry beginning in the 19-teens meant the digging of canals, dredging of bayous, and building of levees, all of which prevented the deposition of silt from the Mississippi River. Without it, there was no way to replenish marsh land lost to natural compaction. Even more consequential was the continued extraction of oil and natural gas, which caused still more subsidence. On top of everything, global warming—which has recently accelerated—led to sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, and bigger storm surges. The elevation of Isle de Jean Charles, now just two feet above sea-level, is sinking 0.5 inches per year. Formerly 22,000 acres, the settlement is now 320 acres. Within a generation or less, Isle de Jean Charles will disappear, like Atlantis, beneath the waves.
At land’s end, the view south is at once sublime and restful: Water and grass, grass and water, as far as the eye can see. I felt unmoored, as if I might drift out to sea at any moment. But I also experienced a surcease of pressure, a pleasurable calm. Maybe the end of civilization wouldn’t be so bad? T.S. Eliot’s verse came to mind:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
But then I reconsidered. In 100 years—if we remain on our current trajectory— tipping point after tipping point will have been passed. The global average temperatures will be 10 degrees hotter than now, and sea level 10 meters higher. The Gulf Coast will begin at the former 1-10 freeway; the Atlantic Coast at the I-95.
In fact, this “hothouse earth” scenario, or something similar, may arrive sooner. There is already evidence that five key, climate regulators have been compromised: the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional ocean current, the Amazon rainforest, global permafrost, and the oscillating weather pattern called El Niño and La Niña. The destruction of these would be catastrophic—much more like a bang than a whimper. If that happens, the end of capitalist civilization will resemble the harrowing dystopia of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) more than the “epoch of rest” in William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890). In Ballard’s novel, climate refugees, pirates, and scientists struggle over increasingly scarce resources. They rarely venture out in daytime when temperatures reach 130 degrees, and they struggle to find fuel sufficient to keep the air conditioners running. London and other cities are submerged deep under water, and non-human animals quickly evolve to dominate hothouse Earth:
“The alligators, [many of them over 25 feet long], congregated like hounds around their master, the wheeling cry of the sentinel birds overhead, Nile plover and stone curlew, piercing the morning air. More and more of the alligators joined the pack, cruising shoulder to shoulder in a clockwise spiral, until at least two thousand were present, a massive group incarnation of reptilian evil.”
