When these ancient rivers overflowed, they built natural levees, which now form the containing walls for the Atchafalaya’s swamp. That famous river tends, every thousand of years or so, to choose a new path to the Gulf. Geographically speaking, at least, the Atchafalaya Basin is a wide swath of backswamp and coastal marsh, about 3,000 square miles, bound on all sides by old channels of the Mississippi River. Hydrologically, ecologically, culturally, the Atchafalaya Basin changes so frequently that it’s hard to say just what this place is. Now, often, there is no one at all – just a few birds, a few gators, and the occasional roar of an outboard motor as a boat passes through. Century by century, its human occupants have shifted: native villages replaced with cabins and houseboats, where French-speakers picked moss and caught crawfish and danced to music accompanied by violin and accordion. Generation by generation, more and more mud arrives. Season to season, its waters rise, then fall. The swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin are neither ancient nor timeless, but inconstant, forever new.
#Man in a louisiana swamp song driver#
But of all these stories, the driver has it most wrong. The modern interstate driver sees a different topography still: stuck in standstill traffic atop the I-10 bridge – where, as I rudely discovered, the lack of shoulders can turn an unseen fender-bender into an hour-long snarl – he regards an endless maze of backchannels, winding through a prehistoric sludge that he imagines has always been. Exploring those muddy, mysterious chutes looks like an adventure, if only he can escape the damn bridge. To each eater, then, his own tale of crawfish, as to each swamper his own tale of the swamp. Geographers have another version – they tell us the mud in the Atchafalaya Basin came from further up the continent – as far away as New York, Montana, even Alberta – flowing downriver until it settled into one of the world’s greatest swamps. This crustacean, they say, was commanded by the Creator to carry mud up from the ocean bottom and create the land on which people live. So the Chitimacha Indians have their own crawfish story. He crawfish is an ancient creature, of course, and was a foodstuff long before the first Cajun exiles arrived in the swamps.
As the lobsters journeyed south, enduring heat and humidity, they shrank from their grand dimensions, creating the diminutive creature we know as the crawfish.
There is a kind of folktale in Louisiana: a set of lobsters followed French Canadians exiles, cast from their home in the mid-18th century during the French and Indian War, to arrive in Louisiana.
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