Cypress Avenue

“Old growth” cypress in Louisiana is not hard to find, at least on an individual basis. It’s fairly common to see a single, shaggy, gnarly, grey giant standing alone among spindly youngsters. Cypress, in the Seminole language, was called hatch-in-e-haw, meaning “everlasting.” The strong trees, despite their misfortunes (soft soil, rot-filled swamps, hurricane winds), have staying power; in fact, the most ancient tree in Louisiana, “The National Champion Bald Cypress” in West Feliciana Parish, is estimated to be 1,500 years old (growing strong as the Mayans built pyramids to the south). 

Largely hollow, these old trees were spared by loggers and are now some of the only connections we have with the 1.6 million acres of cypress swamps, now  deforested, that once graced the state. Entire old growth bald cypress forests in Louisiana are extremely rare, and some people, depending on how tough their standards are for a virgin forest, would say they’re non-existent.

Last year, though, we were excited to hear about a 100-acre tract in the middle of a Tangipahoa Parish swamp that was said to contain the last stand of un-cut, primary growth cypress forest on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. A 2008 article in the Ponchatoula Times by journalist Amanda Cantrell described an ancient grove of cypress and the man who, in 1956, helped save these giants from the maw of the timber industry. 

On our trips, we ask our guests to imagine the old growth, the russet canopy that would have hung seventy, eighty, or a hundred feet above our heads and the dappled light and the darkness down at the water level.

We wondered how this decade-old news had escaped the notice of the local paddling community. We both work as kayak guides for a company that focuses on stories of the land loss that threatens Louisiana wetlands in the era of global warming. The trees we are used to seeing in Maurepas Swamp, on the western shore of Lake Pontchartrain, are mere cubs, most of them younger than 80 years old. They’re second and third growth bald cypress trees: trees that had grown in the aftermath of the clear-cutting in the Pontchartrain Basin between 1870 and 1920.  On our trips, we ask our guests to imagine the old growth, the russet canopy that would have hung seventy, eighty, or a hundred feet above our heads and the dappled light and the darkness down at the water level.

The gigantic bald cypress trees described in the article, on the other hand, were the ones we pictured in our imagination: an entire stand of trees, we were told, from 600 to 1000 years in age. The article describes an old photograph of a big cypress pulled from the area in which “as many as 10 Ponchatoula loggers (are) circling the massive trunk … with hands barely touching.” 

[Read more: Bald Cypress: The resilient sentinels of the Louisiana wetlands.]

It’s hard to go into a Louisiana swamp and not yearn to experience the forest before its destruction and to see the landscape as described by ecologist Paul Keddy in another 2008 Ponchatoula Times article.  Keddy himself never saw it and like us, had to rely on his research to reconstruct what it must have been like: “Some of these trees,” he writes, “were 120 feet high and from 25 to 40 feet in circumference. ... One large tree felled in ... 1931 was more than 1,000 years old and 91 inches in diameter at the base. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, this tree had already been 300 years old.”  

So Cantrell’s article was a suggestion that maybe Louisiana’s Eden still existed.  We had a chance to see an ancient timber forest. Colossal trees! Old growth.  But first we had to find them in the 27,000-acre state-owned Joyce Wildlife Management Area, which on a map is an intimidating blob of green just south of Ponchatoula. Through this tract runs the Tangipahoa River and its many tributaries—Stinking Bayou, Middle Bayou, Mays Bayou, Cow Bayou, Black Bayou, Bedicoe Creek—and a host of defunct timber and oil canals. The old growth cypress forest was said to consist of less than 100 acres of trees, tucked somewhere within the vast preserve, a few needles in a haystack. 

Fortunately, at the last minute, we met John Dahmer, the son of the man who had successfully prevented the logging company from clearing the land. Dahmer is 78 years old, but you’d never know it to when you’re with him. He grew up hunting, fishing, and trapping in these wetlands and has the the swamp drawl to prove it.  We met him in the parking lot of Delatte’s Country Market on Highway 22, outside of Ponchatoula. He wore a camouflaged baseball hat, which had the words “Happy, Happy, Happy” printed on the crown; a hunting jacket, khaki pants, and a long sleeved, heavy cotton tee-shirt, with a hanky perched in the breast pocket. He peered at us through a pair of oversized aviator style bifocals, which magnified his eyes and gave him a slightly owlish look. A former beleaguered parish politician, he is clearly used to dealing with people and is likeable, having served as Tangipahoa Parish Clerk of Court for over a decade before retiring fifteen years ago. “I had a real estate license, I crop dusted, I taught flying,” he told us. He’s also worked for the sheriff’s department, managed a hunting camp, and been an alligator hunter.  Through it all, he’s witnessed the drastic changes the land has undergone over the course of his long life. 

[Read more: In a paraglider, Ben Depp adds his own perspective to the states’ environmental crisis]

We followed his truck down a series of backroads until they turned to gravel and the property became private. Dahmer fortunately had the permission of neighbors to launch his boat from their land, which abuts the Wildlife Management Area. As we motored down the Oil Well Canal, he pointed out things we couldn’t see—a fish hatch that was causing the water to ripple, the abandoned green heron nests, traces of the oil company which had trenched the canal and constructed a road in a futile search for oil. Two old timber company winch-trucks, rusted and sinking into the swamp, were visible in the distance on the left side of the canal.  Unlike many Louisianans with a Go-Devil mud boat, Dahmer kept his motor throttled low as we passed through the cypress and tupelo trees, mostly denuded of their needles and leaves in the mid-December chill, with a good view of the swamp lands on both sides of the canal. 

“This, of course, is all cutover cypress here,” he said, pointing to the sturdy and thickly-growing cypress along both sides of the canal. He had witnessed the clearcut in the 1950s when his father was mayor of Ponchatoula and the heyday of logging in Tangipahoa Parish was coming to an end. He explained the way the lumber mill, which once stood on the other side of the forest along Highway 51, had been sold and passed from one lumber company to another as the companies came in and systematically removed the timber from their plots. Midway down the canal, he pointed west and said, “This is where the old main line came through. They built a railroad. They’d cut [the timber] and load it on the train and bring it all the way to Ponchatoula. It ended right here. They stopped it. They said we’re not going any further than this.”

"Shit, the whole thing was cutover. From here to the highway. All clearcut. [The tracks] came through right over here somewhere... It was a little like this is it.”

That, he said, as he veered around floating logs and under low-hanging branches, was in 1956, when Dahmer was sixteen years old and the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company was nearly done clearing the forest off to our west. The president of the company was a friend of Dahmer’s father, and the two began discussing something unorthodox. “I was [there] when they had the meeting at my dad’s house. It was on a little side porch,” Dahmer told us. “There were about six or eight people there. I don’t know who—I know Mr. Lindsay who was president of the lumber company—and my dad [were there]. Mr. Lindsay lived a half a block from us.” It was at that meeting that an agreement was made to spare the last few acres for the benefit, Dahmer said, of the people of Ponchatoula.

“And I remember, we took one of the last trains. ... My sister and momma, daddy, Mr. Lindsay.” he said. “That was pretty exciting. Shit, the whole thing was cutover. From here to the highway. All clearcut. [The tracks] came through right over here somewhere... It was a little like this is it.”

So there we were, sixty-two years after that train ride and staring at the same spared forest.  “That’s a pretty tree, there,” Dahmer said and nosed the boat into some cutgrass along the bank. The tree, we guessed, was about a hundred feet tall and heavy at the base. We stared, looking hard at the trunk to which he pointed and trying to find it as majestic as the towering cypresses in our imaginations. It was tall, and it was big.  But perhaps the expectations we had of these trees were too tall for any tree to meet.  They were certainly more of a hurdle than any of the trees in our immediate view could surmount.

[Read more: Commonsense tips to avoid getting lost this hunting season.]

But we weren’t to be so easily daunted. Perhaps the real colossuses were just a ways back in the densely forested swamp. So over the side of the jon boat we went and into the forest we slogged, intent on reaching the Real Grove—the one that matched the Grove inside our heads. We didn’t get too far—perhaps 50 yards or so—before the depth of the swamp water and the difficulty of traversing it stopped us. We stepped into unseen holes that quickly swallowed our legs in this unfamiliar ground.

There were lots of big trees, but the largest of them could probably be embraced by three, or maybe four, men with their arms stretched around the trunk, nowhere near the ten-man trees described by Keddy, or even some of those we’d seen in lots of other places in the state.  Still, they must have been close to four feet in diameter.  Good, strong, towering trees.   But… just a tad underwhelming, a sadly diminished version of the trees in our heads to which they were being compared.  

Dahmer told us that tree ring analyses had been done which show the grove, though never cut, is relatively young. “Those trees are 250 to 350 years old,” he said. “I guess what happened is they had a natural die off.” A 1972 history of the Louisiana logging industry, on the other hand, quotes an interview with Colonel Claude H. Lindsay from 1956, which “stated that the average age of the cypress cut by the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company, Inc., of Ponchatoula was 2,400 years.”  If you were to compare the age of these trees with an 80-year human lifespan, these spared trees would be the human equivalent of ten years old.

Cypress are close kin to the redwoods and a member of the cupressaceae family, which includes some of the tallest and oldest trees on the planet. The famed longevity  of the cypress  has also  made it  a target of the timber industry. 108 years ago, the Southern Cypress Manufacturers Association ran advertisements in House and Garden and other magazines that said, “CYPRESS is in truth the wood eternal.” A 1926 USDA report about cypress, influenced by the trade group said, “New Orleans cypress water mains remained sound nearly a century, and a cypress headboard at a grave in South Carolina was so well preserved after 140 years that the letters on it were easily read. Marble and sandstone grave-stones often decay and crumble in less time.”  Another advertisement by the trade group showed a photo of a tiny creole cottage in Grand Coteau, built in 1819. When the building was torn down in 1910, the ad says, “the cypress, sound as a dollar, was used again in new construction.” Scrawled across the whole ad is the message, “WHEN YOU BUILD TODAY...PROFIT by the LESSONS of YESTERDAY.” 

Was it majestic? No. Was it sublime? No. Were we disappointed?  Also no.

It is hard to say how much cypress has been lost in Louisiana. Logging operations started in the 1700s, when French planters, using enslaved workers, cleared swamplands for sugarcane or other crops. An account of the loss by environmental historian Ann Vileisis is staggering. “Ironically, despite the timeless qualities of its ‘wood eternal,’ over 1.6 million acres of cypress bottomlands in Louisiana alone were liquidated in a matter of decades.” That is about the size of Delaware. She goes on, “The lasting legacies of the cypress industry were the beautiful and resilient structures built from cypress wood it supplied and the vast acreage of mucky, lifeless cutover it left in its wake.” 

If an old growth forest, to use the definition of our friend, Dr. Tom Staiger, is one in which you can turn around and find an elf, then the spared cypress forest south of Ponchatoula lies somewhere between that and lifeless cutover. Driving back south on Highway 51, we tried to find words for it. Was it majestic? No. Was it sublime? No. Were we disappointed?  Also no.

The significance of this old growth lies not so much in its appearance as in the story of its rescue from the saws, chains, and winches of the timber industry, which laid waste to so many of South Louisiana’s precious and vanishing swamps. In the face of that destruction, John Jacob Dahmer made an important, even if somewhat futile gesture: an acknowledgement that the razing of these ecosystems would diminish the world we live in.  The truth is that the ancient cypress grove saved by Dahmer’s father is there.  It is real, and it is healthy (at least for now). 

In 2008, the private company that owned the spared forest sold the land, and it became part of the state-owned Joyce Wildlife Management Area. The sale, we thought, had been a wise environmental act and would allow the trees to mature into even older growth within the swamp’s ecosystem. But Dahmer clearly saw our view of the sale as naïve: “I think it’s the dumbest thing in the world,” he said.  And then went on to point out something we knew but failed to apply to the reality before us: that sea level rise and salt water intrusion, which had already doomed cypress swamps ten miles away, would eventually take its toll on this forest, as well. “If global warming is true,” he reminded us, “in thirty years it’s gonna be open water, and the shores of Lake Pontchartrain will be lapping up to the sidewalks of Ponchatoula.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue. Subscribe to our print edition here.