Down on the Batture

Spillway

- 23 4 Spillway “Do you believe in jesusoursavior?” he asks me, first thing. He is holding a jar with a fish in it, but his mind is on the larger question. I’d probably not answer the question, but he cannot be more than six years old, and a small six at that. His buddies haven’t come up to the top of the levee. They are still kicking around in the reeds below. I am lying out on the grass along the spillway with my head propped against the bicycle seat, munching on a snack bar, which buys me a little time to answer. I say a little cautiously that I believe that Jesus was a very good man. This is clearly insufficient. “My mama says that if you believe in Jesus then you go to heaven.” I think that this is actually a question, too, so I say many, many people believe that so she is probably right. He still looks worried, though. He says, “Do you believe that boys can go to hell . . . if they’ve done a sin in the Bible?” I am the wrong person to ask here because what I really believe is that fears like hell can haunt a boy so badly that he wets his bed for years and learns to sleep with the light on, and I am talking from personal experience here, so this is one idea I am not ready to confirm. Instead, I ask him what he has in the jar, although we can both see perfectly well what it is. It is something living up in a pond on the spillway that leads from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, guarded by huge gates that can be opened at flood time to reduce the head on the main river. Fortunately, however, the gates leak year - 24 Spillway round just enough to supply fresh water to ponds between. He tells me,“It’s a fish,” but his heart isn’t in it. The hell idea has got him. I offer him some M&M’s and ask who his friends are. He says they are Joey and I didn’t get the others, one of whom turns out to be his brother, because he comes up now and cuffs the little one and says,“We got to go home.” My companion gets up to leave, looking hesitantly at the minnow which is wiggling around the muddy water in his jar. I give the fish five minutes in the house, maximum, before it is down the toilet. I say, why don’t you put the fish back in the pond? I might as well have said something untoward about Jesus because he backs off without a word, clutching his jar, and begins to chase after the rest. The Bonnet Carré spillway is another accident of the batture, an artifact of flood control decisions made nearly eighty years ago. In this case, the decision to put it here turned out to be a wise one and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who built it, enjoys its moment once every few years when the gates are opened and a low sill of brown water a half-mile wide comes pouring safely through. What the Corps is more reluctant to tell you is that it resisted the notion of building a spillway here, or anywhere else on the Mississippi, for much of the previous half century, insisting on building ever bigger levees instead. It was a policy that, like a bad war, only led to greater investments and greater casualties when the big floods finally came. Not until 1927 when a massive surge took out the Corps’ latest in levees and nearly erased New Orleans did the idea of escape valves like Bonnet Carré finally take root. The one I’m in now is about twenty miles upriver from the city as the crow flies. A larger spillway, and the ultimate safety net for the city and all of south Louisiana, is about fifty miles west of here on the Atchafalaya River. By a twist of fate, the Atchafalaya is the reason I live here now. Spillways are like battures, dry in summer, wet in flood, and one of their side benefits is that they are undeveloped. It seems common sense to keep investments out of the place you are going to pass flood water, although that did not stop the mayor of New [18.117.76.7] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...