This book wouldn't have been possible without the encouragement, keen eye, and meticulous advice of Lee Boudreaux, who signed it up and was my editor at Random House during the rough-draft stage. Lee moved on to Ecco/HarperCollins but left the book in the extremely capable hands of Laura Ford. To have two exceptional (and patient) editors on the same book is a stroke of considerable luck, and to them I am deeply grateful. And thanks to my agent, Tim Seldes, for keeping track of the details for a project long in progress, and to Honi Werner, artist extraordinaire, for her striking jacket design.
Not all books have goals, but I did have one here: to attempt to tell a fun story about a serious subject, the decimation of Louisiana's wetlands, which have been under siege from a variety of mostly man-made forces over the past several decades. Taken as a whole, the Louisiana estuary is one of the great ecosystems on earth, an easy rival to the Florida Everglades—a renowned and magnificent place that I've also had the pleasure of exploring and writing about. But though I lived in South Florida for four interesting years, I grew up in the bayous of South Louisiana, and the bayous, no matter where I physically reside, remain my spiritual home and the engine of my imagination. So while the characters of Crawfish Mountain are fictitious (and hopefully as funny as they sometimes are fractious), their regard or disregard for the wetlands and the debates that ensue are taken from contemporary headlines, and from my own long research into the subject. Regarding the latter, I owe a debt to America's Wetland Foundation, an environmental advocacy group, and its terrific website (www.americaswetland.com). Readers seeking to understand why unchecked coastal erosion and subsidence isn't simply a Louisiana problem but a looming national crisis would do well to peruse America's Wetland's enlightening reports. Similarly, I want to thank my friend Kerry St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, for his assist with estuary terminology and his elucidation on the formation of cheniers on the Louisiana coastal plain. Kerry and his crew happen to be on the leading edge of wetland restoration efforts down there.
I've periodically reported on the Oil Patch for various newspapers, but with my knowledge about some matters rusty, I turned to my old podnah Del Leggett, with Newpark Drilling Fluids in Houston, to get up to speed on formulas and applications of drilling muds. And my friend John Pearce, a hospitable oil and gas lawyer in New Orleans, gave me a primer on oil and gas pipelines. Still, while trying in these pages for basic authenticity in subplots involving oil industry machinations, I acknowledge that I took considerable literary license so as to not bog down the narrative, or the ordinary reader, in arcane details.
Early drafts of a book can be ugly things, and only true friends of a certain temperament volunteer to read and honestly critique them for you. So I want to thank Elizabeth Seay, a former Wall Street Journal colleague, and Terry Tannen, a Hollywood story doctor by way of Georgia, for their time and their smart and indispensable advice. In this digital age, early drafts can also disappear due to computer malfunctions, as this one did. Thankfully, my daughter Sara, in an act of daughterly generosity, painstakingly retyped and scanned the pages back into my laptop, working from a well-worn printout. Lastly, thanks to my wife, Lisa, and my youngest daughter, Becca, for their indulgence and understanding when I disappeared for long periods into the zone of obsession that is an antisocial but, alas, necessary part of the writing process.