GOLDEN MEADOW, La. - The men still bark orders in a French patois here while at work along the banks of Bayou Lafourche, a watery main street whose lazy currents the color of smoky topaz flow south to other Cajun towns and the Gulf of Mexico.
The route enjoys a history of beguiling newcomers with its curious swamp-life customs, pirate tales and exuberant seafood offerings, which were already well-documented in 1941 when writers for the government's Work Projects Administration set out to create travel guides for all the states. The writers' project has been republished online and is attracting new attention.
Here, about an hour south of New Orleans, the writers followed Bayou Lafourche (pronounced la-FOOSH) to the gulf along a "graveled and shell roadbed" that is now Louisiana Highway 1, fully paved. They gushed about "boom fishing centers," newly discovered oil and the seemingly endless bounty of the Gulf of Mexico, the area's economic lifeblood, in Golden Meadow (population, 2,500; altitude, two feet).
"This part of the state is a lush land of great fecundity," an unnamed writer enthused.
There was little hint of what was to come. Golden Meadow is sinking fast along with the rest of the southeastern Louisiana coast into the gulf, still its lifeblood but now also its nemesis.
"From year to year we can see the land that used to be there is not there anymore," said Elphege Brunet Jr., whose family lives and works up and down the bayou. "I'm almost 77 and I've seen it change before my eyes."
Coastal erosion is eating away at the culture, the livelihood and, quite tangibly, the land itself at the ravenous rate of 12 square miles to more than 20 square miles a year.
Whole communities have already washed away. Old timers speak wistfully about Sea Breeze and Manilla Village, settlements built on stilts in the marshes. These sorts of insular, out-of-the-way places were common in Cajun country even though they might not have appeared on Louisiana's road maps. Now they never will.
"It's the fastest disappearing land mass on Earth," said Kerry St. Pé, a marine biologist who is director of the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which works to help save the coast.
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/us/25louisiana.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
