A flood of memories

This spring’s flooding brought back memories of my late father’s swamp timber business, which was sunk in 1973, the last time the Mississippi River was diverted through the Morganza Spillway.

The 1973 swamp flood inflicted loss and required acceptance and hard work to overcome, and this year’s flood has given me a deeper appreciation of my father’s humbling struggle and resolve.

My dad, William Allen Farrar, was a working man. Like many Louisiana citizens, he understood the need to sacrifice so many Cajun country homes and businesses to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans from catastrophe.

Looking back, 1973 seems similar to today in many ways: spiking gas prices, falling wages, a foreign war and a national recession. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway floodgates this year to a remarkably similar backdrop of current events.

Although our family home was on the high ground in Opelousas, my father’s pulpwood business was in Krotz Springs, right across a country road from the Atchafalaya River levee. As little boys, my brothers and I would dash across the North Levee Highway (a.k.a. “the road to Melville”) or ride our Honda QA-50 mini-motorbike up and down the levee as typical misadventures.

There was a time when we could swim in the river, but once the spillway was opened up, the sheer velocity of the swollen Atchafalaya could snatch you away and pull you under if you dared to get wet above your ankles.

However, over the levee and across the road, Dad’s “wood yard” was a free range of possibilities for a kid.

That’s where he kept his big-boy toys: a yellow bulldozer, a white knuckle boom loader, and his big red cable loader for pushing, grabbing or lifting logs into place. I was only allowed to “operate” the bulldozer from time to time (when Mom wasn’t around). I still remember the magic feeling of my father picking me up with his knuckle boom loader, which looked to me like a giant robot arm mounted on a mini-crane.

The Atchafalaya Timber Co. had a sturdy, 15-foot-high wooden sign made by my father’s lumberjack hands. Anyone on the North Levee Highway, off of Highway 190, could see the etched sign marking where local swamp loggers should turn into the dusty one-acre white-shelled yard. That’s where they’d roll up on the industrial scale, kill the truck engine and walk into Dad’s office to buy a soda from the Coke machine, right next to the big round scale dial. He’d write down the weight, minus the truck and trailer’s poundage, in a long ledger book to show each logger what he had brought in.

Two or three times a month, Dad hauled a payload of pulpwood to the Georgia Pacific paper mill just north of Baton Rouge. GP had built the Krotz Springs weight scale, and my father operated the yard with this “giant” weigh station long enough to fit a truck hauling a logging trailer. Sometimes my brothers and I managed to pull together enough leverage to hoist open the scale’s metal hatch door and slip down the ladder. Under the wood yard, the truck scale hid a dark underground “cavern” that was only lit by the streak of daylight from the open hatch above. There we found crickets, frogs and the occasional snake, all of which liked the subterranean shade and the musty pool of water used by the liquid displacement scale.

But it was the muddy waters of the Mississippi River—funneled west, away from Baton Rouge, through the Morganza Spillway—that swelled the Atchafalaya River and all of the other waterways of the basin for months in 1973. Even after the floodwaters finished filtering through the spillway and down to the Gulf, the soil of the basin woodlands stayed too moist and soupy for timber trucks to get into the swampy woods. The long wait for the ground to dry was too great for a father of three (soon to be four), so my dad, the family man, had to give up his logging business altogether. He eventually secured a job on an offshore oil platform to finish out his working life.

These are the pragmatic adjustments and tradeoffs southerners traditionally make literally to stay afloat and rebuild their lives. There’s a yin-yang cycle of understanding in Louisiana that the rich delta soil comes from the natural flooding process and that the power of the mighty Mississippi River cannot be denied a place to go. It is certainly part of the South’s scar tissue to weave a new route … to find a way to boot-strap a path back to solid ground.

At some point, my late father took down the big Atchafalaya Timber Co. sign he had made and hung it on a wall inside our garage. In all honesty, it didn’t look as impressive next to the family lawnmower and bicycles as it once had to a small boy along the North Levee Highway in Krotz Springs. But I wish now that I had my father’s handmade sign to hang on the wooden fence around my backyard in Baton Rouge. It would be a good reminder of where I came from, and where a part of me still lives.

And when it comes to the planned flood of 2011, while there may be some souls who point fingers of blame, the vast majority of folks from the basin will be too busy getting their lives back in order like they always do. Right there is where you see the renewable spirit of the Louisiana residents living just to the west of us, who take the brunt of the water’s force whenever the river runs high.