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BOOK REVIEW
Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast
Mike Tidwell (Pantheon Books, 2003)

Stephanie Showalter, J.D., M.S.E.L.

Louisiana is sinking? Sounds crazy, right? But it is true, as revealed in poignant detail by Mike Tidwell in his book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. The massive levees built to prevent flooding along the Mississippi River in the early part of the 20th Century have robbed the Louisiana coast of sediments that used to compensate for the settling of the land underneath the state’s bayous. While on assignment for The Washington Post, Tidwell, an award-winning travel journalist, hitchhiked through the bayous of Louisiana on Cajun fishing boats and discovered that Louisiana was sinking. Approximately fifty acres of wetlands are lost every day. Tidwell returned in April 2000, “to carefully document as much of this world as I could before it departs.”

What ensues is the road trip, or more accurately, the boat trip of a lifetime. Tidwell meets Cajun shrimpers and Vietnamese crabbers, goes shrimping in “the battlefield” during May, spends a day shadowing one of the last French-speaking Native American traiteurs, a traditional healer, and travels to the offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Rich in history and colorful characters, the account vividly presents the Cajun culture and a dying way of life. Descriptions of the Cajun traditional celebrations, food, homes, and towns abound. Tidwell adds additional flavor to the narrative by writing the dialogue to reflect the unique dialect of the Cajuns, choosing to include the altered grammatical style of Cajun speakers and omit the th sound. The word “this” is written as “dis,” the Cajun pronunciation. Personal stories reveal details beyond the generic historical, political, and cultural information. A father struggles to come to terms with a son’s choice to abandon fishing for a steady on-shore job; a town grieves for fishermen killed during a storm; the new arrivals to the coast, the Vietnamese, have trouble fitting in; and the fifteen thousand members of the Houma Nation, the largest Indian tribe in Louisiana, living in poverty and isolation, maintain and pass on their Indian heritage.

Bayou Farewell, however, is more than a travel log. It is also an account of the environmental devastation wrought by human attempts to harness a mighty river and the canals built to facilitate the delivery of oil and gas from offshore platforms. New Orleans now lies below the level of the Mississippi River, dangerously vulnerable to the next powerful hurricane. In addition, there are over ten thousand miles of canals throughout the Louisiana coast, causing massive erosion and serving as conduits for saltwater to enter freshwater and brackish ecosystems, destroying cypress swamps and driving species, such as oysters and alligators, further inland. But, not all hope is lost. Interwoven with the stories of vanishing land and habitat destruction, Tidwell gives equal time to Louisianians working hard to restore the damage. Through his discussions of plans for a Third Delta Conveyance Channel, a $2 billion construction project which would deliver much-needed sediment from the Mississippi River to the Louisiana coast, and projects to induce sedimentations by building Christmas tree walls in the bayous and planting marsh grass, Tidwell highlights the human capacity to fight and maintain hope against incredible odds. Compassionate and respectful, Bayou Farewell is a beautiful eulogy for the Cajun coast. May time prove it was delivered too soon.

University of Mississippi