An outsized wilderness lives on in mythic dreams and salvaged hope

By Mark Jenkins

Greg Guirard

Land of dead giants: cypress stumps and second growth in the Atchafalaya Basin

Greg and I paddle in silent unison, gliding the canoe, matched in motivation and intent. Having seen it all before, Greg sits in the stern, big-shouldered as a bear, his thick paws on the heavy, hand-hewn paddle. I kneel in the bow, my paddle small and light. We pull ourselves past the massive cypress stumps. Some are 30 feet in circumference, bulged out at the base as if a bomb had gone off inside. Most rise 12 feet above the surface of the swamp, then stop, vanish, whatever they once were gone forever.

Dangling by a cord from a limb is a half-submerged cage. We come alongside and Greg pulls up the trap with one hand. It's a handmade crawfish trap—a large tube fashioned from chicken wire. It's empty.

"Settin' on the ground," Greg says. "Can't catch a thing that way. That's how low the water is in the Basin. Crawfish might not even run this year."

Greg Guirard is a part-time crawfisherman—but then, he's Cajun, so he's a part-time everything: crawfisherman, logger, writer, photographer, film consultant, philosopher. He grew up alongside the West Atchafalaya Levee, between the hamlets of Catahoula and Henderson, crawfishing, hunting whitetail, catching fat catfish. He has spent almost all of his 63 years in the swamp. Several times he tried to live elsewhere—in Belize, in Costa Rica, in Virginia—but the swamp called him back.

Greg drops the cage.

"'Nother couple years like this," he says, "and I don't know what'll happen. I don't want to even say what'll happen."

He takes up his paddle and puts his solid frame into the stroke. The bow of the canoe bounces and we go on across the dark water through the forest of dark stumps.

For many years Greg taught English at University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. Back then he was married and was raising four children, and he raised cattle on the levee and ran crawfish traps, but even with a modest paycheck from teaching it wasn't enough. He loved literature and loved teaching it but left the university in 1973 after he found himself $30,000 dollars in debt, and a few years later went back to making a living from the swamp.

One of his students had given him a camera, and he began taking pictures when he was out working on the water. The camera was like a fishing rod: You never knew quite what you were going to get. Sometimes you just brought it along on a whim and caught something you would never have imagined, something that became a part of you just as if you'd swallowed it. Other times you went out explicitly and worked at it all day and still came home bone-tired and empty-handed. Greg took pictures of the moss-draped trees and the stilt-legged birds and the hazel water, of hunters with their dogs and fishermen with their nets, of raccoon pelts nailed to barns, of butterflies and boats. And he took pictures of stumps. In 1983 he completed the first of four self-published books, Seasons of Light in the Atchafalaya Basin, in which his photographs are accompanied by two stories by William Faulkner.

Alas, every story is a circumfluent, involuted Faulkner story; we just lack the burning craft to tell it like he did.

As it happens, a friend of mine from Mississippi recently lent me Greg's book, and I found myself yearning for the mythic bayou pictured in its pages. Being one who believes every day might too easily be my last, I dialed directory assistance for Catahoula, Louisiana, and got Greg Guirard's phone number. I simply called him up with a question that I eventually got around to after we talked through photography and Faulkner and fishing.

"So, has anyone paddled across the Atchafalaya?"

"You mean 'cross the whole thing? One side to the other, levee to levee?"

"I guess."

"Not in my lifetime, far's I know. Everybody has a motorboat. They only use the pee-rogue to check nets in the thick places."

But he'd said he'd ask around and call me back.

A few days later the phone rang.

"Nobody," he said. "Maybe not for almost a hundred years. Little two-horse motorboats came to the bayou way back, around 1910, and that was that."

"You want to do it?"

Greg didn't know me from Adam. I was a Northerner's voice on the phone.

"You ever been down here?"

"Nope."

"You ever pee-rogued?"

"Nope."

"Canoe works better anyway. I'll cook up some jambalaya."