My Bayou: New Orleans through the Eyes of a Lover

A Brief Interlude with History, Science, Wildlife, Mythology, and Civil Engineering

67 a brief interlude With history, science, Wildlife, mythology, and civil engineering Rumors confirmed! a large alligator Was apprehended on the banks of Bayou Saint John. There was a photo in the newspaper. That settled it. Lance would never swim in this bayou. Ever again. Not as long as there was breath in my body. The situation called for an expert opinion, so I talked to Mark Schexnayder , who was a coastal advisor for the Louisiana State university agricultural Center. While he was with the agCenter, Mark also worked with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on managing the bayou, restocking the fish population, and cultivating vegetation—such as bullrushes , irises, and oyster grass—along the banks to provide nutrition for the fish and also help the ducks find good nesting ground. I figured he ought to know about alligators. First, Mark wanted to give me the thumbnail version of the bayou’s ecology. “What we have here is an unnatural body of water,” he said. I was Constance Adler 68 surprised to hear it. It seemed abundantly natural to me. He explained that a natural body would have a free flow of water coming in and water going out. Bayou Saint John hasn’t been natural in that way for a long time. In fact, there were a number of agencies devoted to preserving the bayou on life support and keeping it pretty. “So who’s in charge of the bayou? Who owns it?” I asked him. The answer was complicated. The orleans Levee Board maintains the banks and the structures near the mouth of the bayou at Lake Pontchartrain. City Park lays claim to the central portion between Robert E. Lee Boulevard and the Magnolia Bridge. Since there are drainage outlets from the bayou that lead into the city’s pipes, the Sewerage and Water Board presides over the section from Magnolia Bridge to the end at Lafitte Street. Wildlife and Fisheries gets involved whenever a question arises about the animal population . Then Mark (now fisheries oversight director for Wildlife and Fisheries) was also monitoring the water level and quality so the salinity didn’t go too far out of whack. “all these people have to get together in order to get anything done with the bayou,” he said. “So it’s not a simple thing to pin down who owns the bayou.” It wasn’t always so complicated. In its prehistoric years, the bayou was just a geological anomaly, a rift in the ground that became a four-mile-long, narrow, shallow channel, probably a tributary of Bayou Metairie and Bayou Gentilly that drained storm water into Lake Pontchartrain. Back then it was known as “Bayouk Choupic.” “Bayou” is a French recasting of the Choctaw word “bayuk,” which means “sluggish stream,” and Choupic is a fish that thrives in mud. after the Chapitoulas, acolapissa, and Houma tribes moved out and white Europeans took over, the bayou became the way for barges to bring in goods from the ships that had come into the lake from the Gulf. Rather than take the long way up the river, these barges could unload at the bayou’s headwaters, and then it was a short portage downtown to the markets in the French Quarter. In 1931 the city built a lock at the bayou’s mouth where it meets Lake Pontchartrain, and in 1962 this was replaced with a dam. Then in 1992 the city put in a sluice gate on the lake side of the dam to exert some flood control. The WPa had cut off the headwaters My Bayou 69 with a concrete bulkhead, so that now the bayou seems to disappear underground near the post office at Lafitte Street. The dam and sluice gate near the lake end not only put a stop to large boat traffic on the bayou, but they also do not allow mature fish into these waters because the gate, which was designed to open and close as needed depending on water levels, remains closed all the time, while the dam was never intended to open for anything. Mark is much more concerned with the fish life than barges, which is why he calls the bayou unnatural. Without an inflow of fish with new water, the bayou would languish and stagnate. Fortunately , the fish-restocking program helps maintain the health of Bayou Saint John for the short term. The eventual goal...