KWQ&A

Text Box: The Random House Q&A with Ken Wells about the origins of his novel, Crawfish Mountain. November 2007 What was the inspiration for the book? At first, I simply had in mind to write a novel that included Cajuns, alligators and lots of great fishing; sex, political shenanigans, environmental outrages; outsized political and corporate characters, gumbo recipes and gorgeous wetland tapestries. And since I was writing about South Louisiana, I didn’t have to make any of it up. But clearly, you seemed to have a cause in mind. Actually, Crawfish Mountain predates my other novels and grew out of an idea I had circa 1986 while living in San Francisco writing for The Wall Street Journal. A Louisiana native, I’d moved away from the swampland about a decade before and had just returned from one of my annual trips home to see my family. My visits down there are always ritualistic—a half a day of required greetings and visits to relatives and a short list of friends, then getting in a boat and heading out there, into the bayous and/or swamps for days spent fishing or just exploring. On this particular trip, during a fishing jaunt with my dad and brothers, we spent much time discussing the alarming rate at which some of our oldest and most beloved fishing holes in the vast Cajun estuary were disappearing as the marsh around them died and sank. We had a long history in these places: Dad had fished some of these spots as a teenager in the mid-1930s, and I calculated I’d caught my first Louisiana redfish in one of these fishing holes as a six year old in 1954. So fishing led you to this story? Absolutely, estuarine ecology is a pretty serious matter, but in my family so is fishing, thus we took a deeply personal interest in the subject. And even by the mid-1980s, smart people had a pretty clear idea of the forces that were responsible for what was escalating into an epidemic of coastal erosion and subsidence. It was just that no one was doing much about it. The book on one level seems to be deeply reported. Did you actually do intensive research on the wetlands issue? Some, mainly to bring the science and politics up to date. But per above, I had a long and personal background. I lived the life—I grew up, literally, with a fishing pole in my hand and spent a great deal of my weekends and vacation time through my early adult years on the water, in the marsh, in the swamp, fishing. Of course, I realized only after moving away from the bayous in 1975 what an extraordinarily beautiful and wild place I’d left. And it took me a while also to realize that fishing was simply the portal for something deeper. I think I simply like being out there as much as I love to fish. Tell us about that place. You make comparisons to the Everglades and yet it seems true that many people simply don’t actually know that much about what you call the Cajun Coast. True, it’s one of the most gorgeous, wild, fertile ecosystems you’ve never heard of. Stretching from the Mississippi border on the east clear to Texas, the Cajun Coast is one of the great ecosystems on earth, an easy rival to the Florida Everglades. It holds 30% of the Lower 48 state’s coastal marshes and serves as one of the globe’s most important migratory bird flyways. Its annual coastal commercial fisheries catch dwarf’s Chesapeake Bay’s; indeed, it is bigger than any state’s save for Alaska’s. Oh, and by the way, it also encompasses the Great Atchafalaya Swamp—at a million acres, the largest contiguous hardwood swamp in North America. Characters in your book spend a lot of time angling for redfish. What is a redfish anyway, and what’s so special about them? It’s my holy fish—pound for pound, it’s the scrappiest fish in the salt water bayous, not to mention that it’s absolutely delicious. Catch a five pounder, fillet it and throw it on the charcoal grill—seriously, there’s nothing better. (Or you can slow-cook redfish in a spicy tomato dish the Cajuns call courtbouillon (pronounced coo-bee-yohn), which is usually served over steaming rice.) In most places, the redfish is known as the red drum and you catch them up and down the Gulf coast and all the way up to Cape Hatteras. They grow quite large—60 pounds at the outer limits. But I don’t think they’re fished as passionately anywhere as they are in the bayous. There’s also a remarkable conversation story behind the Louisiana redfish. In the blackened redfish craze of the 1980s, the redfish almost disappeared from the bayous as gill netters caught them by the tens of thousands to satisfy the restaurant trade all over America. Luckily, conservation and sports fishing groups intervened and got the Legislature to ban gill nets, and the redfish has made a startling recovery. (The pictures at left: my brother Bob and I with some nice reds on trip in October 2007 in the bayous near Montegut, La.) But a central theme of Crawfish Mountain is that the ecosystem down there is in serious trouble. What’s going on? Louisiana’s Delta—particularly its eastern quadrant—has been contracting ever since the systematic leveeing of the Mississippi River for flood control purposes in the 1930s. All that silt that once built the mighty delta—in part through periodic flooding—now shoots downstream into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where it serves no purpose other than to muddy and pollute the water. And that’s only a part of the story. Louisiana’s estuary is also the most industrialized in North America, owing to the presence of prodigious amounts of oil and gas that have been extracted in a serious way since the end of World War II. To get to those hydrocarbons in this watery, boggy terrain, the oil industry cut literally thousands of miles of canals that made it easy to float in equipment, supplies and workers but in far too many places cut through the ancient, delicate interface between the fresh and saltwater marshes. This set off widespread salt-water intrusion—and the die-off of thousands of acres of upland marshes and cypress swamps, a die-off that remains unabated. Between theses forces and the channelization of the Mississippi River, Louisiana has lost an estimated one million acres of coastal marsh in the past six decades. If unchecked, the state stands to lose another 320,000 acres by the year 2050--a tract a quarter of the size of Everglades National Park. And this just isn’t an issue involving loss of fisheries, displaced alligators and magnificent birds. At stake is the very habitability of the coast, its ability to absorb the blows of future hurricanes and the survival of the state’s 250-year-old Cajun culture, which is inseparable from the wetland environment that nourishes it. As serious as those issues are, your novel is in large part a political farce and social satire. How much of that is drawn from your own experiences? I have deep and abiding affection for the motherland, but Louisiana is also an environmental and political paradox—sometimes derided as America’s only Third World country. It’s a place with a long history of colorful political rogues, a wide tolerance for political scandal and chicanery and a laissez faire attitude toward life in general. I’m old enough to remember when Gov. Earl K. Long, having gone on a very public bender with a Bourbon Street stripper, was committed to a mental institution after what was described as a “nervous breakdown.” But Earl K. regained his senses long enough to fire the director of hospitals. He then discharged himself from the state psychiatric ward where he was being held and went on about his business like nothing had ever happened. This did not seem to dampen his popularity with voters. And recall former Governor Edwin Edwards. During a race for reelection—and despite the incessant whiff of corruption and scandal about him--he was so confident that the state’s Cajun majority would return him to office that he declared, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.” (He went on to a landslide victory, but scandal finally caught up with him; he’s now in federal prison serving time for his part in a casino bribery scheme.) There is an upside to this laissez-faire attitude: it informs the affable decadence of New Orleans—indeed, when it comes to indigenous food, music and the sociable arts, few places are more fun or hospitable than New Orleans and the South Louisiana region in general. But this laissez-faire attitude also helps explain why for decades a coast that held one of earth’s great ecological treasures was handed over with little care or regulation to the oil and gas and shipping industries to do with as they pleased. It’s not that people all along weren’t sounding the alarm—they were. It’s just that for a long time, nobody was listening. Tell us about Cajuns. Your book, in part, seems to be a primer on Cajun mores, and homage to their attachment to their marshy coast and bayous. My mother and grandmother spoke Cajun French and the little place I grew up in, Bayou Black, La., was probably 98% inhabited by Cajuns. And though Wells is an English surname, my father being an uplander from Arkansas, I consider myself Cajun. I don’t speak the language, beyond the idioms, though I understand Cajun French fairly well. And I spent a lot of time absorbing the cadence of the speech and the stories. The Cajuns who have fished, trapped and hunted the bayous and wetlands since their arrival in the mid-18th century were decent natural stewards of the low country from which they took their sustenance and which came to define them. Theirs in the main was a subsistence existence and they left a small footprint on the land. But the arrival of Big Oil found them under educated and politically unsophisticated and unorganized, and simply no match for the slick, high-powered, deep-pocket oil companies and their post-War ambitions to serve the escalating energy needs of a growing nation. The oil companies came with their powerful influence peddlers (who curried and bought the favor of politicians) and the equally powerful lure of jobs and taxes. The economic upside is unquestionable: the oil industry almost single-handled pulled the Cajun coast out of its scenic poverty. But the environmental price to the coast has been enormous. You seem to have keen knowledge of what you call the Oil Patch and the characters that inhabit it. Is that research or experience? Mostly experience. The South Louisiana oil boom was in full roar as I grew up and I had lots of friends and their fathers who worked the oil fields, and some of them were expatriated Texans (all of whom, by the way, were a whole lot nicer than the oil villain in the book, Tom Huff.) So I ended up absorbing the lingo and attitude through osmosis. And as a junior reporter down on the Houma, La., paper, where I got my start, I occasionally covered oil-related issues. And later, I actually wrote about multinational oil companies for The Wall Street Journal and ended up doing stories about the fights over coastal drilling in places like California and Alaska, not to mention that I also covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Do you consider your book anti-oil? No, I drive a car and actually think there can be reasonable accommodation, in many places at least, between environmental preservation and oil and gas drilling if proper care is taken and regulations are observed (though I also think there are some places that are so spectacularly wild, scenic and special that they ought to be protected from industrial intrusions of any kind.) The novel is really a send-up of corporate greed, hubris and stupidity, of which there sadly seems to be an excess in the land. And by the way, among the foils to the ambitions to the novel’s rogue oil man, Tom Huff, is another oil company mortified by his criminal inclinations and deeply worried that it will be tarred by the same brush when scandal breaks. And that’s actually a more accurate mirror of what’s happened to the Cajun Coast. It wasn’t that every oil company acted irresponsibly, or that every dredging project was done with reckless malice, or that every politician was in bed with the oil companies. Early on—at least until modern science caught up to the value and delicacy of wetlands—a lot of harm was done in ignorance. But, alas, a lot of it was done with only greed and the profit motive in mind. In the book, you don’t seem to have much use for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. No, that’s a different story. It’s now widely known that the Corps, over a long history of bad and bureaucratic decisions, was largely responsible for the levee failures that drowned New Orleans and its surrounds during Hurricane Katrina. And that’s but the agency’s latest gift to Louisiana. I was still down there in the early 1970s and covered for my paper the proposed “improvement” of a deep water beeline navigation channel from the Port of Houma to the Gulf of Mexico; its sole obvious purpose was to make it easier and cheaper for the oil, shipping and ship-fabrication industry to move supplies, equipment and workers to and from the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. A coalition of local commercial fishing groups and a handful of environmental activists—armed with credible science—prophesied that the channel would turn into an environmental disaster as it cut through virgin marshland, destroyed the intricate salt-water interface and acted essentially as a deadly salt water siphon into the fresh water system. The Corps and its industry allies derided all of this as nonsense and the project went ahead. Yet today, the Houma-Terrebonne Navigation Canal, as it is known, is widely acknowledged to have destroyed thousands upon thousands of wetland acres and cypress forests throughout Terrebonne Parish. Area lakes that once held fresh water fish species support saltwater species as the salt bubble moves closer and closer to population centers, threatening drinking-water supplies. Furthermore, it leaves Houma, and the 100,000 people who live in and around there, exceedingly vulnerable to hurricane surges. Those who think this danger isn’t real only need to look three parishes east, to nearby St. Bernard Parish. About 95% of the parish went under three to seventeen feet of water from a surge that traveled up another Corps-built navigation channel, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, during Katrina. The origins of this have distressingly similar parallels: locals, mostly commercial fishermen and sportsmen, pleaded with the Corps not to build the channel, which would serve only a handful of New Orleans shipping companies, or minimally to put a lock on it downstream to protect the area from salty tides and surges. The Corps built the project--without a lock. Over its 40-year history, the MR.GO, as it is known without affection, killed off thousands of acres of buffering marsh in the eastern quadrant of St. Bernard before finally delivering its killer blow from Katrina. What’s the situation now? In contemporary Louisiana, there are many born-again environmentalists, including at the top levels of state government, who fully understand the nature and scope of the damage and are fighting the good fight for coastal preservation and restoration. But this is an expensive proposition and the federal government—though its agencies, the Corps in particular, have their fingerprints all over the scene of the crime--has been slow to pony up the $13 billion necessary to credibly start fixing things. Meanwhile, our fishing holes continue to disappear. By one estimate, the state is losing the equivalent of a football field an hour to coastal erosion. That seems a lot to pack into a novel. Actually, Crawfish Mountain is at heart a gumbo western in which an eccentric cast of characters fight over the marsh instead of the open range. There’s a high sheriff (and a low one.) There are love affairs, double crosses, gunplay, fistfights, chase scenes (in boats instead of on horseback), dastardly bad guys and a dog smarter and braver than Rin Tin Tin. It is ambitious, to the extent that I wanted to try to get inside the nutty paradox of it all. I actually don’t consider myself a polemicist; I simply had a burning desire to tell a story close to my heart. --Ken Wells, New York City, October 2007

Text Box: Save the Cajun Coast!