Down on the Batture

The Batture

- 3 The Batture The Mississippi River winds past the City of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of land and trees. This is the batture, where the water beats against the land, and it is where the river breathes. At low water the batture may be a half mile wide, but come April it will often be zero feet wide as spring rains to the north swell the Mississippi from bank to bank, flooding the trees. It is one of the most surprising places in America. The batture is largely woods here above the city, but it is certainly not wilderness. A scattering of construction yards and pumping stations give way upstream to grain elevators, power plants, and refineries. Against the banks rusty barges hold fast to their moorings . Out on the river, supertankers from world ports and tugboats the size of buildings are in motion, the drone of their motors more constant than the wind. Armies, gun boats, and entrepreneurs fought over the control of this traffic for three hundred years. Pristine is not the word that comes to mind. It is, nonetheless, a wild place. Nobody manages the batture, not down in the trees. Its ownership and occupation are a tangle of obscure authorities, some as primitive as squatters’ rights, and a briar patch for lawyers. Parish police monitor what they can see from their automobiles passing by on the levee top, and one levee board has gone a step further by posting no trespassing signs at the bottom, most of them contradicted by well-used trails that wind past them and into the trees. All of which help make the batture the rarest commodity to be found in an urban community, an - 4 The Batture undesignated space. It does not open at seven in the morning nor close at sundown, nor does it have rules about open containers. Or, setting aside guns and drugs, just about anything else. One might think, horrors!—what an invitation to mayhem this is. Yet, I have frequented the batture for close to thirty years, often with a small dog in tow, and I have never been menaced, have never seen anyone more menacing than a bullying group of schoolkids one day who were quickly shamed as we came up and abandoned their pursuit. I have met all walk of people wandering through here, the majority of them on the short end of life, and my most frightening experience was finding a man I thought had frozen to death under a tarp on a morning that had caught sudden snow. Here along the lower Mississippi, so close at hand, is a separate world. It has witnessed great ambitions, keelboats and steamers, expressways and casinos, glittering plantations, world-class pollution , and the severed heads of slaves on poles. It has also served as refuge for weekend fishermen, transients, teenagers, wild boars, and remarkable bursts of creativity, as we will soon see. It is a place where human beings come for the very purpose of being beyond the rules of designated places, to be in contact with the trees, the river, and a sky in the late day that is turning from light blue to pink to a violent orange, and a couple of men with cans of beer are looking at it, not talking a great deal, wired to a something that is vanishing before their eyes. I take my dog and go down. ...