The Oil Spill Blues

My father-in-law, TePaw, was a commercial fisherman and trapper that lived in a camp in the mouth of the Mississippi River.  Pass a Loutre, Plaquemines Parish, LA to be exact.  A 45-minute boat ride out of the Venice marina.  He fished crabs and catfish and trapped alligators, coons and nutria.  He hunted ducks and sometimes deer.  He lived off what the land and the Mighty Mississippi could provide.

TePaw died from an accidental fall while working on the roof of the camp in June 2004.  Our world was shattered.  We lost a historian, a student of nature, a Christian man, a loving father, husband, brother and grandfather, and a friend to countless many.  He always said he could never catch one fish at a time like the "sports" (sport fisherman).....but he was a fisher of men, never catching them one at a time either.

With his death, we could forsee the demise of a lifestyle that few only dream about and even fewer have the courage to live.  That September, Big Daddy went to the camp to help his mom with what would become the last alligator hunt (click for pictures).  In September 2005, Hurricane Katrina came and took away what was left.....the camp and the life Big Daddy knew as a kid......a life our children were able to know only briefly. 

Any hope we ever had of returning to the camp was blown away into the marsh and rozo canes.  In the last five years since Katrina, people have rebuilt.  I have always wondered what TePaw would have done had he lived to see Katrina.  Big Daddy says he would have built a camp from tar paper and cut holes for windows, bathed in Mississippi River water and slowly rebuilt his "empire". 

Now there's the oil spill.  I can't imagine what he would think now.  What would he be worried about?  The overtaking of the shrimp market by the Chinese imports?  The long term effect on alligator fertility and the price of hides?  The destruction of the coastline vegetation, causing sea water to back further into the river, creating more brackish water? 

We were destroyed when he died.  I wonder if he would have been destroyed by all this if he had lived.