High tide was eight-twenty and going out all morning. I told him ten.
The tables are off out here. Half an hour, most days. They've been off for years because the bottom keeps moving and the tables don't. I go by the culvert instead. When the water starts pulling through the old pipe at the end of Chauvin you've got about four hours to be wherever you're going to be.
At eight I could have run him straight over the old streets and he'd have gone home not knowing there were streets. At ten the yellow line on Marigold shows for maybe two hundred feet before it goes under again. A man buying land wants to see a road.
That was the only part of the day I planned.
Thursdays are groceries. School's out, so now it's Thursdays and whatever else comes. Four houses. It was six. One of the six was Kaylee's. Kaylee's in Houma now, in a bedroom with a door on it, and she sends me pictures of a dog that isn't hers.
Miss Odette wanted coffee, bleach, a sack of rice, and she wanted me to look at the diverter again because she'd decided it was stuck. It wasn't stuck. The gutter screens were packed solid with oak trash, so the rain was running over the top of them instead of down into the tank, which is a different problem and an easier one. I went up. Four minutes. She stood at the bottom the whole time saying girl, get down off there, you're going to break your neck and then where will I be, and I said yes ma'am and kept cleaning. Her cistern holds two thousand gallons. She's down to about a third. That is not where you want to be in June. I told her so and she said it would rain.
The Trahans needed the propane swapped and their mail brought in from the box out on the highway. Two envelopes and a seed catalog nobody ordered. Mr. Trahan runs the generator one hour after supper and one hour before bed and the rest of it is the panels and the battery cabinet, and he is proud of the hour. He'll tell you about the hour. Their plywood lives on a rack he built under the house, every piece cut and numbered to a window. If it's a bad one they go to his sister's in Thibodaux. Miss Odette doesn't go. Never has.
Mr. Pham gave me two pounds of shrimp. I didn't ask, and it's worth more than the run. The freezer is why he burns the fuel he burns. He knows that. Knowing it hasn't changed anything. I put the shrimp in the cooler under the bow with ice I got off Odette.
Then I went out to the marina for the man.
The run out was still all right, the air off the grass cool where the sun hadn't got to it yet. That doesn't hold.
Their boat couldn't get in. I knew it before they did. Twenty-four-foot bay boat, big outboard hung off a bracket, and a thing like that wants more than two feet under it. There is nothing like two feet anywhere past the shoal at the old launch where the parish used to keep its pumps. So they tied off out there. He came down off the bow with a bag and something rolled up under his arm and I held the gunwale and told him to step in the middle and sit down.
Terry. Maybe fifty. Fishing shirt that had never been fishing. Boat shoes with the price sticker gum still on one heel.
My boat is a fourteen-foot flat-bottom, fifteen-horse tiller, floats in five inches. The plate says three hundred forty-five pounds of people. Terry was big enough that it was going to be him or nobody, which didn't matter to me. The day was a hundred dollars. I don't get paid by the head.
He put his vest on without being asked. I liked that. I have to wear mine anyway.
He looked at the tiller, then at me. Then he got in.
Out the cut I told him ten minutes flat and then not flat, and he said that was fine, and twelve minutes later he asked could we slow down a second and leaned over and got sick off the downwind rail. Almost nobody gets that right the first time. He apologized twice. I said it happens. It does happen. The parish appraiser did it in April and got it on my transom.
After that he was all right. Drank a warm water out of my jug and looked at things.
You come in from the south. The north side silted in years ago and there's a fence line under there that will take a lower unit off. From the south you run what was Cypress Bend. It still holds a channel because the street was cut down between the yards and the yards kept building up, so it carries a foot or two more than anything around it. Marsh grass both sides now, right up to where the curb was. Some places you can still see the curb.
Two hundred feet in, the yellow line came up under the boat and ran along and went back down.
"Is that the road?"
I said that's Marigold.
He got his phone out and shot it a couple of ways. Then he put the phone away and just looked at it, which I thought was decent of him.
At Marigold and Chauvin Loop I cut over the Doucet driveway. You can do that from about half tide up. Straight shot, saves eight minutes. It works because the slab is gone but the apron out front is still flat and nothing stands up out of it. The Landry apron has rebar in it. Past about a foot of water over that you find the rebar with your lower unit. The Doucets carry fourteen inches on a normal high.
Terry said he couldn't believe how shallow it was. I said this is the deep part. He laughed like I'd made a joke.
Past the Doucets I swung wide and took the long way around the block, and he asked why, and I said birds.
Pair of black-necked stilts nesting on the crown of the old turnaround at the end of the loop. Skinny things, pink legs. They lay right on bare ground, anywhere there's a little high, and they start screaming at you from a hundred yards out. Run through there and they come off the nest and something has the eggs inside a minute. I don't think about it anymore. It's just not a way I go from April to July.
The rookery is another quarter mile up, in the wax myrtle that came in on the lots on the west side. Ibis and egrets packed thick enough you smell it before you see it. Terry saw pink moving down at the shallow end and asked if those were flamingos.
Spoonbills. Four or five of them work that corner most mornings. I told him and he wrote it down. Spoonbill, with the date next to it.
We were on the ridge about two hours.
The ridge is the only ground out here that's still ground. It runs northeast to southwest along the natural bank of the bayou, from before any of it was a subdivision, and that's where the live oaks are. Some are dead. The live ones all lean the same way and have nothing on the water side, so each one is about half a tree. Two have gone over completely and their root plates stand straight up out of the water like a wall you could park a boat against. The pines are gray sticks. That's the whole story on the pines.
Terry had his map unrolled across his knees with numbers written on it. He'd have me hold the boat off a piling or a stump while he found a stake. The stakes are wood lath with pink ribbon stapled to the top. Somebody had been out ahead of him already and put in a lot of them.
By eleven the water had gone to glass and threw the sun back up at us. The gunwale gets too hot to lean on. You learn to hold off with your palm flat and quick and to keep your feet on the ribs instead of the floor. Terry's shirt went dark down the back and then dark all over and he quit mentioning it, which is the right way to handle it. He asked once whether there was shade anywhere. There isn't. He worked another forty minutes, then sat down in the bottom of the boat with his back against the seat and finished his numbers there, out of a wind he wasn't getting anyway.
What I noticed about the stakes is they're crooked. They don't run a line. They go up the ridge and jog inland and skip and come back, and there are big pieces of good high ground with no stake anywhere on them.
I asked him, because it looked sloppy to me. I figured somebody got paid to walk the whole ridge and walked part of it.
He said no, that was on purpose. The lots the program bought after the second time have to stay open ground. Forever. It's written into the deeds. Nobody builds on those, not him, not the parish, not anybody, ever. So the only lots he can work are the ones that never got bought, and those are scattered all through the rest of it.
"It makes the layout a nightmare," he said.
He didn't say it mean. He said it about the way Mr. Trahan talks about his hour.
He was easy to talk to. Thirty-one units on posts, sixteen feet up. Floating dock system, common boathouse. They'd barge the pilings in because there's no road out here and there won't be one, the deeds won't allow a road. He said they were going to bring people back out here.
He used the word recovery a few times about the whole thing, the way you'd use a name. I figured it probably was the name.
He asked how long I'd lived here. Always. He asked what my folks did and I said my mom does billing for a clinic in Houma, three days on, and my dad's on a boat. He asked had I thought about doing something with all this, and moved his hand at the water when he said it, meaning I guess the way I'd been getting him around.
I said I'm saving for a wider hull. A sixteen-forty-eight will carry three people and a lot more ice.
He said that was smart. Then he was quiet a while and looked at a dead pine like he was pricing it.
We came back through at one. The tide was down enough that I had to go around the Doucets instead of over. He didn't notice we'd gone a different way. That's what he was paying for.
At the marina he counted me five twenties out of a bank envelope and shook my hand and said if the permits come through they'd need somebody to run people in and out during construction, and he'd remember me. He said it like he meant it. He probably did. Then he climbed up into the bay boat and a guy in a clean cap idled them off toward the channel.
A six-gallon tank is thirty dollars out here. It comes in by boat, and everything that comes in by boat costs what it costs. I burn about a gallon an hour running, less if I'm not in a hurry. Call it four gallons for the day, and two of those hours I was sitting still holding a boat off a stump.
Afternoon I did the other two houses. Mr. Naquin's last because he's slow. He wanted his tank pumped, which isn't me. That's the honey boat out of Montegut, second week of the month. I said I'd call it in.
He asked had I been out to the west side.
I said I had. I said there were spoonbills.
He said his mother's kitchen was where that rookery is. Said you could see the water from the window over her sink and she never did like it. Said there was a chinaberry tree.
I said yes sir. I've heard about the chinaberry. He tells it about twice a year and it isn't a long story and it doesn't cost me anything to hear it.
But the water was still going and I wanted to be clear of the loop before it dropped off the Landry driveway, so I said I'd see him next week. He said all right, cher, and stood out on his landing while I backed off.
Running out I counted the money against the gunwale with my knee on the tiller. Hundred off him, sixty-two off the week, less the fuel. Eleven hundred and change in the can. A sixteen-forty-eight with a motor that isn't junk runs about seven thousand, less if I take one without a trailer, and I don't need a trailer. I'd been watching two of them. One sold in May.
Then the light went long and orange and came across the ridge flat and caught all that pink ribbon at once, so from out on the water you could see every stake there was, the whole crooked line of it going up the high ground and jogging inland and skipping and coming back. Twice in one day I'd been out there at the right hour. It was pretty. I don't know another way to say it.
An ibis came over the boat low with its bill down, going home to the myrtle. Then four more strung out behind it.
I had an hour of water left. So I ran up to the culvert mouth at the end of Chauvin where the current pinches through the old pipe, tilted the motor up, cut one of Mr. Pham's shrimp and put it on the bottom. Redfish, about eighteen inches. Let it go. Then a black drum. The tide was moving hard enough by then that the line stood out sideways. The bugs came off the grass about the same time and after a while I quit swatting, which is what you do.
By then the south cut didn't have enough under it to get me home. My mom doesn't like me out past the light. I was out past the light.
So I went home the north way, which is longer. There's a fence under there. I know where it quits.
-
The deeds outlast the houses: The crooked line of survey stakes is real law, not sloppy fieldwork, because 44 CFR Part 80 requires every property bought with federal acquisition money to stay open space in perpetuity, barring walled buildings, paved roads, and fill on those parcels forever.
-
Two to three feet by 2050: The Fifth National Climate Assessment's Southeast chapter puts relative sea level rise at the Grand Isle gauge somewhere between 22 and 32 inches above 2000 levels by mid-century, which is the difference between a street and a channel.
-
What approval doesn't buy: In Buncombe County, North Carolina, FEMA approved 251 of 278 submitted buyout properties and released roughly $29 million, but the reporting on that milestone doesn't establish how many owners actually got an offer, closed, cleared a mortgage, or found somewhere else to live.
-
Birds move in fast: Louisiana wildlife staff found black-necked stilts nesting on newly built marsh terraces before anyone had planted them, which fits what Cornell's life history account describes — bare ground, a little high, shallow water beside it, and a lot of noise when you get close.