How Land Loss Happens

The following is an excerpt from C.E. Richard’s book Land’s End: Field Notes from the ‘End of the World’, forthcoming from McFarland late next year. Updates available at facebook.com/cerichard2015.

In the unrushed moment that I’m afforded now, creeping forward slowly behind the long line of yellow wagons and trucks, I look around through the November gloom and try hard to make my eyes do what Mr. Nacie’s could so easily this afternoon, to see what is not here. What is not here yet. And, for an instant, it’s as though time lapses, entirely and all at once; the scene around me cycles, and imagination gives a glimpse of how it happens …

Loss

... These fields settle and sink. Puddles form in the places where tractors turn the headland, and those puddles swell from season to season into pools. Underfoot, the earth softens, moistening into mud. From the south, the sea creeps closer, still out of sight, but now and then storms surge; tides rush in momentarily, then recede, leaving behind a residue of crusty salt that covers the ground and its green shoots like hoarfrost. In no time at all, the dense acreage of lush emerald cane falters and browns, thinning. Sweet turns to salt, and once-fertile soil is now left fallow. Empty cane wagons, tractor attachments, plows, harrows, and disks—all are left to rust in the fields, waiting for new plantings that never come. Thistles and milkweed, lanky goldenrod stalks spring up around them, and everywhere else. Tall stands of cultivated cane have turned to weeds, then wild rushes, then cattails and reeds. Salt grass supplants tender green leaves, all toughening into scrub. Farmland is becoming marshland. Fiddler crabs now scuttle the mud between the old furrows, waiting for the next time south winds will push the fringes of the sea far enough inland to dampen their gills. Chittering killdeers skim the muddy edges of the grasslands, while long-legged white birds wade out where the water is rising. Before long, it is coming and going in the steady pulse and pull of tides. The mud stays wet all the time now, and in some spots, low-lying pockets of salt water stay in place even when the tide has pulled back. Those pockets grow to pools, pools to irregular ponds. They wend outward and join, deepening and reaching across the mudflats to touch each other. Grasses cease to grow in them altogether, and ponds lengthen into channels, unspooling out, interlacing with each other, branching away toward the ever-widening bayou, and what was once a sugarcane field is now no more than tatters of land. These last islands shrink and grow farther from each other, as the water continues to widen and rise, rolling in from the south, faster and deeper, until all signs of fertile earth have slipped beneath the smooth, uniform surface of open water, stretching out south as far as eyes can see, hiding any sign that anything else was ever here. 

[Recommended for you: For Frank McMains, photography affords a perspective of Louisiana's startling land loss.]