Grand Isle, a small barrier island on the Gulf Coast only 50 miles south of New Orleans but if you want to drive the highway it’s more than twice that. Barely 4 miles long and a stone’s throw wide, a couple of thousand people live here year round while many thousands come to fish and vacation. In the live oak woods on the leeward side there are a few old homes down on the ground but everything else is built up on piers, 8, 10 feet, some higher. Storms and currents keep moving sand around, leaving long, narrow sandbars just offshore. If plants establish a dune system they collect more sand and you have a barrier island. When people build towns there it requires special adaptations to cope with big storms and to protect the dune system. When the oil and gas industry invests in off shore drilling it requires even more.
Back in the 90’s I taught school in an urban setting in Kansas City, MO. We had money, lots of money. In the education business you learn fast; spend all the money as fast as you get it, all of it. Not unlike the biblical principle except in this case it could be the Board of Education or the state or the judge in charge of the desegregation plan that giveth and taketh away. If you don’t spend right away, it may be reassigned. Part of my job was to develop program, to spend money on projects that infused our Environmental Issues theme, across the curriculum. Bringing a busload of 7th graders to Grand Isle for 4 days is how I was introduced to the island. That program lasted 5 years before the money dried up, my job disappeared with it and I moved on. It was a good program, no frills, good science, a window of possibility none of those street kids would ever experience if not for the state’s money and my job. I still hear from a few of them. They remember details we hoped they would. They remember the food chain works in two directions and people are at both ends, and how water, CO2 & Nitrogen cycle, that if you tug on any part of the environment, the whole environment responds. They think it was worth it even if the state did not.
I went back to Grand Isle this week, first time since I was there with students. The levee along with its road has subsided into the marsh. In its place is a 12 mile stretch of elevated causeway. Great swaths of grassy marsh have disappeared, now open water stretches where we waded and seined for crabs. In ’91, on the beach, they had built jetties perpendicular to the beach, out into the surf. Huge granite boulders were stacked in rows to stabilize the sand against storm surges. Granite boulders on a Louisiana beach; they didn’t wash up there, they came on railroad flat cars all the way from Tennessee. They are still there but somewhat rearranged by wear & tear from 25 hurricane seasons. I thought about the students, 12-13 year-old street kids with their shovels and buckets, waves washing over their feet and ankles as they dug in the swash, collecting macro invertebrates and shell fish. I thought about the shrimp and crawfish boil we were treated to by the people at Conoco Oil’s shore base.
Sun was setting, I was sitting on a granite boulder watching colors change, hoping to see big birds on their way to roost in sheltered water somewhere. In the low light I didn’t see the them until they were on top of me. By the time I got the camera up they were overhead. Pelicans, not a hundred feet up; I turned to follow them and noticed a full moon in the frame. Shutter-click and they were gone. Out in the gulf you could see oil rig lights and barely hear the drone of a diesel engine coming off the water; a shrimper pulling a trawl, far enough out I couldn’t see his lights. The breeze kept mosquitoes at bay but inside the berm they would be buzzing. Everybody’s got to eat.
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