Gators and Oil and Snakes, oh my!

Well, I'm back from Louisiana safe and sound and what a trip it was.  We did everything from a swamp tour to look for gators to digging for oil on the beach in Grand Isle.  

Welcome to the South.

As seems to be the pattern with these field seminars, we got up bright and early (4am) on the morning of October 26 to head to the airport for our flight to Louisiana.  We touched down in New Orleans about 11am CT.  Our first stop was the levee across from the Ormand Plantation.  We had class sitting right there on the levee looking at all the ships go by on the Mississippi.  What a way to start the trip.  After class, we walked back over to the plantation and got to see some of the huge live oaks on the property.  Our next stop was Zam's for a swamp tour!  Of course, before we even get on the boat, they had pythons out for us to hold.  That was awesome.  We hopped on to the boat and made our way out to look for gators.  We found a few gators and spotted a turtle or two.

 When we got back from the tour, we got a chance to hold baby gators, and young 3-foot and 4-foot gators.  And an 8 foot python. Wicked sweet.

We finally arrived in Cocodrie at LUMCON (Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium), where we were staying for our entire trip.  Glenn gave us a two-step lesson in preparation for the dance the following night.  It was a lot of fun.


The next day (October 27) began with a lecture on the history and geology of the Mississippi.  Really nifty because apparently the mouth of the Mississippi has moved around a lot in the last few thousand years and it wants to move again now, but we're keeping it where it is so we can continue to use it for commerce.  After the lecture, we all suited up for a canoe trip into the marsh.  We found a good spot to go "ashore", got up to ramming speed and were able to pull the canoes up onto the reeds.  We tromped around the marsh for a bit and played with some of the snails.  We had some sinkage issues with a few people, which was highly comical.  We also probed the marsh to see how deep we could go.  We were able to push the probe to about 15 meters, which represents about a 3000 year old marsh (1 meter down is about 500 years old).  We tried the same in Barn Island Marsh right down the road from Mystic and only made it in about a foot or so.  Quite the difference.  We finished up by looking at some oysters and then headed back to the dock.  After lecture, we got a chance to watch a shrimping operation just down the road from LUMCON.  We watched the shrimp offloaded from the boat and into a large basin, then onto a conveyor belt and into large boxes with ice to be shipped out.

The process was interesting, but boy did it smell, especially the batch that had gone bad. Yikes. We were able to ask the woman who owned the operation a bunch of question about how the oil spill had affected her and how Katrina had affected her.  It was fascinating.  She's a wholesaler.  She buys the shrimp from the shrimpers and then ships the shrimp in large icebox trucks.  She buys mostly from foreign shrimpers who come for the season.  Most of the local fishermen are working for BP now.  After that, we went back to LUMCON for the rest of our lectures.  That night was dancing!  We went to a traditional dance hall, the Jolly Inn, in Louisiana and spent the night dancing the two-step and the waltz with each other and some of the locals.  It was so much fun.


We spent October 28 on Grand Isle.  That was quite the day.  We started in Port Fourchon, a very significant seaport in the oil industry.  Half of the drilling activity in the Gulf and 75% of all deepwater production is supported out of Port Fourchon.  The port was almost dead when we were there.  Usually, there are around 1200 trucks coming into and going out of Port Fourchon every day, but since the oil spill, it's been pretty much dead.  From Port Fourchon, we headed on to Grand Isle.  We spend the day with Chris Hernandez, one of the officials on the island as well as a jack-of-all-trades type.  He was utterly captivating.  What a storyteller.  He introduced us to Mayor David Carmodel and the BP liaison, "Moose", who is also coaching the basketball team at the high school.  

From left to right: Chris Hernandez, Mayor David Carmodel, Moose

Both David and Chris shared their experiences during Katrina and their thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  David was talking about how he and Chris are usually the last ones off the island when there's a storm or an order of evacuation.  He said that during Katrina, he was leaving the island and was almost halfway over the bridge when he remembered the homeless man.  He told the driver to turn around so he could go back.  The driver hesitated and David told him, "I don't leave anyone behind."  So back they went.  David waded across the island in waist-high, sometimes chest-high water until he found the homeless man and brought him off the island with them.  He put him into a hotel in northern Louisiana and paid for him to stay for a few nights.  A few weeks later, David remembered the homeless man.  He'd been a little distracted, so he called the hotel and asked about him.  They told him that he'd done such a good job cheering up the residents that they hired him as a janitor, but that David had accrued thousands of dollars in hotel bills due to paying for him to stay in the room.  David was so happy that the homeless man had a job and was safe that he didn't mind paying the money out of pocket.  David also told us a short tidbit about dolphins.  If you see dolphins hitting their tails on the water, there's a storm coming, maybe not immediately, but it's on its way.  The folks on Grand Isle have learned to read their surroundings after all these years of experience.  Chris also shared his experiences during Katrina.  He told us that during Katrina, he called up David and asked him what David wanted him to do.  If David needed him to stay, he would, but he needed to get his family out.  David told him to go with his family, but Chris refused to leave without him.  The way Chris talk, you can't help but listen.  He puts his whole body and soul into recounting even what he does on the island during Christmastime (he dresses up as Santa and goes around giving out candy canes to all the small children on the island).  Chris also opened up his home to us and shared more of his Katrina experiences right there in his basement.  He told us that he is usually one of the last to leave the island and one of the first to return.  He returned after Katrina and after checking the rest of the island, he made his way home to check on his house.  It was still there, but when he checked on his father-in-law's house and his son's house right near his, they were both gone, not a trace left.  It was a very emotional story, even 5 years later.  He explained that he had to be the one to return to his family and tell his father-in-law that there was nothing left.  He said it was one of the hardest things he's ever had to do.  Once his family returned to the island, they went through the wreckage of his father-in-law's house to see if they could find anything.  Amongst the things that they could salvage was a large pot that had been the family for a few generations.  They cleaned the sand out and still use it to this day.  Before going to Louisiana, I could never understand why people would want to live in a place that constantly gets hammered by hurricanes.  It didn't make any sense to me, but now I get it.  It's just the way of life and it's a community of people that support one another and help each other survive.  You build, it gets destroyed, and you rebuild, but you don't lose your community.  Chris also told us everything that's been happening in regards to the oil spill.  He says it's a huge cover up operation, that people working for BP can't say anything, even to their spouses, or they will be fired.  He took us to one of the beaches so we could dig to see if there was still oil.  Unfortunately we were successful.

We didn't have to go very deep at all before we found oil-stained sand.  How depressing, especially since this beach has already been cleaned, supposedly.  After spending the rest of the day on Grand Isle, we headed back to LUMCON for our blue crab dinner!! Win!  Their way of cooking blue crabs was totally different than what I'm used to.  I'm used to getting thoroughly messy due to the Old Bay covering the crabs on the outside.  The crabs we ate were cooked with the spices in the water, so no mess on the outside, just flavor on the inside.  So good.

We left early enough on October 29 to watch the sunrise as we were driving to New Orleans for our last day.  We had a walking tour of New Orleans, led by Glenn, where we saw St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo, William Faulkner's House, Tennessee Williams' House, various types of traditional architecture, the Preservation Hall (a very famous jazz hall), and, of course, Bourbon Street.  We had some free time to explore Bourbon Street.  It was...interesting to say the least. After Bourbon Street, we boarded the Natchez for our tour of the Mississippi River via paddle steamer.  

It was really fascinating.  We got to see and learn about a lot of the industry that is based out of the Mississippi River and the types of boats that travel up and down it every day.  We also got a chance to explore the engine room of the Natchez.  Huge and very cool.  Natchez was the final excursion for the day before heading to the airport to return home to Mystic.  Louisiana was quite the trip.  Not as fast paced as California and much heavier on the emotion side of things, but still a very worthwhile trip.  What a learning experience.