CHAPTER 7
Water Wars
Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we’d never existed!
—Robert Towne, Chinatown
Suches, Georgia — Troop 134 leaves Decatur early one Saturday morning for the North Georgia mountains and an opportunity for the Boy Scouts to boost their hiking rank. The kids need to prove their backpacking mettle to qualify for an upcoming trip along the Benton MacKaye Trail, as well as weeklong treks in Tennessee and New Mexico. My son Sammy, eleven, is in Alpha Crew. I volunteer to lead the fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds in Charlie Crew so I can get in a longer hike. But I have an ulterior motive, too.
The Chapman family isn’t big into Scouting. As a boy in DC, I joined so I could play basketball on Friday nights in the Catholic church basement where the troop met. I lasted about six months. Sammy and Naveed, my younger son, joined to be with buddies. We were all eager participants for about two years, earning merit badges, camping out, making silver turtles (tin-foil-wrapped dinners of potatoes and veggies), until we weren’t. My boys lost interest and so did I. One less activity, in between soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, sleepovers, cello lessons, camping trips, spelling bees, and birthday parties, to worry about.
The handful of boys in Charlie Crew muster in the parking lot below Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia, for the blue-blazed hike up a small knob before the switchback descent to State Route 180. Springer Mountain, the terminus of the Appalachian Trail, is only thirty trail miles to the south.
It’s early March, one of the most delightful times in the southern Appalachians, with sublime temperatures, roaring streams, and wild-flowers aplenty. An orgy of violets, trilliums, blue phlox, bloodroot, and rue anemones line the Jacks Knob Trail. All but one of the boys zip down the trail like frisky foals. “Tom” is a bit overweight, with bad ankles. He doesn’t seem to mind falling behind, and neither do I. As the crew leader, it’s my job to ensure that all boys arrive safely at Unicoi Gap, nine miles and many hills to the east. Tom proves an engaging talker who will probably make Eagle Scout.
Once we’re across the highway it’s all up to Hiawassee Ridge, then down to Chattahoochee Gap—and my ultimate goal. Here, just below the ridge, lies the source of the Southeast’s most critical, and controversial, river: the Chattahoochee.
No local stream has been so coveted, cussed, used, abused, politicked, and litigated. It is to the Southeast what the Colorado River is to the West. Mark Twain supposedly said, “Whiskey is for drinking—water is for fighting.” It’s little wonder that politicians and pundits (including hacks like me) label the struggles to share the Chattahoochee among Georgia, Alabama, and Florida as “the water wars.” The fight is so nasty, prolonged, and expensive—Georgia and Florida have spent tens of millions of dollars on lawsuits—that it has reached the US Supreme Court not once, but twice. Each time, Georgia prevailed, including in 2021. But when it comes to the Chattahoochee, and the river’s importance to Atlanta’s growth, southwest Georgia’s agriculture, and the Florida Panhandle’s ecology and its fishing industry, it ain’t ever over. That’s why we hacks coined another term for the decades-long water wars: “job security.”
I’m a bit giddy about finally eyeballing the source of so much Southeastern treasure and turmoil. For twenty years I traveled the length of the river, from the Poultry Capital of the World (Gainesville) to the Oyster Capital of the World (Apalachicola), where the river lets out into the Gulf of Mexico. I interviewed hundreds of farmers, oystermen, beekeepers, bankers, builders, politicians, utility executives, impassioned biologists, Peachtree Street attorneys, and more hydrologists than you can shake a dowser at along the river’s 434-mile run. I wrote thousands of inches dissecting case law, riparian law, and the law of the modern jungle, which dictates that He With The Most Money (i.e., Atlanta) usually wins. But in all that time I never saw the wellspring of all that fuss. So this is my pilgrimage to Lourdes, my hydrological hajj, my Chattahoochee Crusade.
A blue sign with a white W points to the source. I leave the Scouts and bound down the trail. Two hundred steps later I gaze wondrously at . . . a puddle. It barely ripples. No gurgling, frothy elixir geysering from the ground. No fountain of cascading rivulets presaging its society-shaking importance. Nothing but a piddly little pool in a dimpled patch of sand surrounded by mud and rock. Upon closer inspection I notice an almost imperceptible aspiration of water coming from the earth. The spring is as cool, fresh, and clean as could be. It’s also a complete letdown.
Muir offered a more starry-eyed appreciation of the Chattahoochee. He left North Carolina on September 21 and passed through “a most luxuriant forest” a few miles west of Brasstown Bald. He reached Blairsville (“a shapeless and insignificant village”), where he was kindly received by a farmer whose wife also chewed tobacco and “could spit farther & faster than any male I ever saw.”
Muir quickly descended the Appalachian chain, the “hills becoming small, sparsely covered in soil. . . . Every rain robs them of fertility, while the bottoms are of course correspondingly enriched.” At noon the next day, he summited the last mountain and was greeted by “a vast uniform expanse of dark pine woods, extending to the sea.” Muir followed behind “three poor but merry mountaineers” bouncing along in a rickety mule-drawn wagon. They talked of love, marriage, and the days-long camp meetings, a fixture of North Georgia religious life. Through it all, the older lady clutched a bouquet of French marigolds.
Muir, as usual, was ahead of his scientific time. He presciently divined that the intersection of the high mountains and lowland knobs afforded an unusually rich, and ecologically important, gateway to the South. “These mountains are high ways on which northern plants may extend their colonies southward,” Muir wrote in A Thousand-Mile Walk. “The plants of the North and of the South have many minor places of meeting along the way I have traveled; but it is here on the southern slope of the Alleghanies that the greatest number of hardy, enterprising representatives of the two climates are assembled.”
He identified more than eighty-five species of goldenrod, as well as St. John’s wort, fringed gentian, jack-in-the-pulpit, partridge pea, water oak, aster, and holly. He was particularly taken with muscadine grapes.
On the twenty-third, Muir reached “the comfortable, finely shaded little town of Gainesville” and the Chattahoochee—“the first truly southern stream I have met.” He was smitten. “The Chattahoochee River is richly embanked with massive, bossy, dark green water oaks,” he wrote, “and wreathed with a dense growth of muscadine grapevines, whose ornate foliage, so well adapted to bank embroidery, was enriched with other interweaving species of vines and brightly colored flowers. I was intoxicated with the beauty of these glorious river banks.”
Muir stayed with the son of an Indianapolis acquaintance who owned a hundred acres near the river. They spent a couple of days walking along the banks harvesting muscadines for jellies and wine. Muir also collected plants and flowers. His host warned repeatedly of rattlesnakes.
On September 25, he set out for Athens in search of an easily ford-able route across the Chattahoochee. He didn’t find one. Instead, he meandered southward and got lost in the tall grass and vines along the riverbanks. Frustrated, Muir plunged in. He half-waded and half-swam, with the aid of a stout walking stick, only to get swept downstream in the deceptively strong current. Muir grabbed a rock and pulled himself from the river. He spread his limbs, plants, and money out to dry.
“Debated with myself whether to proceed down the river valley until I could buy a boat, or lumber to make one, for a sail instead of a march through Georgia,” he wrote. “But I finally concluded that such a pleasure sail would be less profitable than a walk, and so sauntered on southward as soon as I was dry.”
He added, “Rattlesnakes abundant.”
Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover’s pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.
Sidney Lanier, Georgia’s most celebrated poet, wrote The Song of the Chattahoochee in 1877. The poem extols the many-splendored wonders found along its mostly north–south route—the chestnuts and oaks, the rushes and reeds—but its message is crystal clear. Further along in the poem a line reads, “The voices of Duty call.” Lanier knew a century and a half ago that the river’s true worth was as a moneymaker to slake the cotton fields, power the cotton mills, and uplift a defeated South. Later, the Chattahoochee would float the barges that carried the commodities, turn the turbines that electrified the factories, and fuel the sprawl that supersized Atlanta. How quaint, indeed, was Muir’s Chattahoochee rapture. A decade later, Lanier understood with cold-eyed certainty that the river was but a means to a more propitious end. And for that the state’s poobahs named a lake after him.
Upon leaving the hills of Habersham County, the Chattahoochee skirts Atlanta to the west and heads for Columbus. The river tumbles down the “fall line” of rocks and chutes separating the rolling Piedmont from the coastal plain. It now serves as the boundary between Georgia and Alabama. It beelines to Florida, where it joins the Flint River to form the Apalachicola River. Cotton, corn, and peanut fields give way to the swamp forests of the Florida Panhandle, wildlife-rich with Gulf sturgeon, American alligators, red-cockaded woodpeckers, frosted flatwoods salamanders, and purple bankclimber mussels. The freshwater river mixes with the salty Gulf near the port town of Apalachicola and creates a nutrient-rich cocktail that oysters and other aquatic creatures need to survive.
The steamboat Fanny was the first to ply the ’Hooch in 1828, beginning Columbus’s transformation into a cotton hub. The shallow and rocky fall line, though, kept most vessels from points farther north. Textile mills lined the river, turning towns like West Point into manufacturing juggernauts. Roads and rails built after World War I rendered steamboat travel obsolete. But hydroelectric power stations proliferated and introduced Reddy Kilowatt to the rural South. The US Army Corps of Engineers built four massive dams and reservoirs along the Chattahoochee, including Buford Dam and Lake Lanier, which filled up in 1957. Congress had decreed that Buford would serve three purposes: flood control, power generation, and navigation. The designation would come back to haunt Georgia a half century later.
Water wars are nastier in the arid West. No river is more contested than the Colorado, which runs through seven states and Mexico. Forty million people depend on the river’s steadily dwindling supply. The states agreed in 1922 to divvy up the Colorado, yet they’ve pretty much been fighting over an “equitable apportionment” ever since. The Green River, which starts in Wyoming and runs through Utah before reaching the Colorado, has long been targeted by Denver and other Front Range cities. The mighty Columbia River has churned controversy and rancor among Canada, Washington, Oregon, Native American tribes, farmers, dam-builders, and salmon-lovers for centuries. And then there’s Muir’s beloved Tuolumne River in Yosemite, which was dammed in 1923 to satisfy the municipal needs of a booming San Francisco 160 miles away.
“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” Muir wrote in The Yosemite.
Water wars really heat up, though, when the rain and snow stop falling. And, with an ever-warming climate, the battles rage with increasing fervor, even in the comparatively wet South.
The worst drought in a century hit Atlanta in 2007. Only thirty-two inches of rain fell; forty-eight is average. Lake Lanier, the region’s main water source, dropped eighteen feet. Boat ramps ended in mud. Long-submerged treetops were exposed. Then-Governor Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency. Watering lawns was prohibited. October was declared “Take a Shorter Shower Month.” Perdue even prayed publicly at the state capitol, asking “God to shower our state, our region, our nation with the blessings of water.” State officials worried that Lake Lanier would run dry in four months. “If Lake Lanier or the Chattahoochee below Buford Dam dried up, then the consequences were real,” wrote Chris Manganiello in Southern Water, Southern Power. “Modern life in the booming Sun Belt would grind to a halt.”
Like its rapidly growing confrères in Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix, Atlanta depends on a relatively shallow stream for its watery needs. And the Army Corps has long been pilloried in how it shares the Chattahoochee with homeowners, golf courses, Coca-Cola bottlers, peanut farmers, textile mills, barge captains, fishermen, nuclear power plants, and sturgeon. It didn’t help that Georgia, Florida, and Alabama did a piss-poor job of managing, let alone quantifying, how much water folks actually used. When the Buford Dam first opened its gates, Metro Atlanta tallied about a million residents. The population had quintupled by 2007. Water usage spiked 30 percent during the 1990s. Conservation was a four-letter word, a jobs-killer in a region where developers were kings and subdivisions were castles. Consider that during the height of the drought the Stone Mountain Park, in an Atlanta suburb, used millions of gallons of water to create a mountain of snow. (Public opprobrium temporarily halted the winter ritual.)
Georgia floundered around in search of more water. Desalinization projects off the coast were proposed. Sticking a very large straw into the Tennessee River, a mile above the Georgia border, gained the support of many legislators, though none in the Volunteer State, where the suggestion was ridiculed. (The mayor of Chattanooga sent a truckload of bottled water to the Georgia capitol to help slake the state’s unquenchable thirst.) So Georgia found itself right back where it always is in times of watery woe.
In court.
The “water wars” began in 1990, when Alabama sued the Army Corps to keep the feds from sharing too much water from Lakes Lanier and Allatoona, another reservoir, with upstart Atlanta. Florida and Georgia joined the litigation, which was tabled so the four warring parties could work out a deal. They couldn’t, so a slew of lawsuits—eight separate cases in six federal courts—challenged the Army Corps’ management of the reservoirs. While Florida and Alabama targeted Atlanta’s water use, in 2007 Georgia took aim at the federally endangered mussels and sturgeon in Florida that, by law, must receive an adequate amount of water, too. Governor Perdue filed an injunction demanding that the Army Corps sharply reduce the amount of water leaving Lanier because “certainly America does not believe that mussels and sturgeon . . . deserve more water than the humans, children, and babies in Atlanta.”
The rains returned the following year and the drought’s grip on Georgia loosened. The legal troubles, though, intensified. In 2009, a district court judge ruled that Congress never authorized Lake Lanier’s water for municipal purposes, i.e., Atlanta. In the decision that the judge himself labeled “draconian,” he ordered that the metropolitan region return to the water withdrawal levels of the 1970s—when Atlanta was still a Southern backwater. The judge, though, allowed an out: if the three states could agree on a water-sharing plan, he’d rescind his ruling. Georgia, and its gobsmacked business leaders, got religion real quick. A slew of water-boosting, judge-pleasing measures were enacted, including construction of new reservoirs, installation of low-flow toilets in Atlanta, and a moratorium on new wells in southwest Georgia. And then, in 2011, an appellate court overturned the judge’s decision, ruling that Congress intended all along for Lake Lanier to serve Metro Atlanta.
Florida and Alabama weren’t done fighting, however. The mighty oyster joined the fray.
Florida sued Georgia in 2013, claiming that the paltry amount of water flowing into the Sunshine State killed Apalachicola’s oyster industry. The bay once supplied 10 percent of the nation’s bivalve bounty, and I, for one, can attest to its sublimity. The case went straight to the US Supreme Court. A “special master,” Ralph Lancaster Jr. from Maine, was appointed. The trial in Portland started in fall 2016. I spent a few weeks in the courtroom, tweeting by day and partaking of clam chowder and roasted halibut at night. The ancient, curmudgeonly Lancaster ruled a few months later that, while the oyster had indeed suffered from low river flows, and that Georgia had been “irresponsible” with the river’s management, a cap on Georgia’s water use wouldn’t solve Florida’s problems.
Georgia, it seemed, had again prevailed. It hadn’t. The Supreme Court justices rejected Lancaster’s recommendation and pointedly wondered if a cap on Flint River water—used primarily for agriculture—would help save the oysters. Lancaster—who turned out to be a sweet old man—had died, so another special master was chosen. Paul Kelly Jr., a New Mexico appellate court judge steeped in Western water law, determined that the oyster’s demise wasn’t Georgia’s fault and that the Peach State’s water use “is not unreasonable or inequitable.” This time the Supreme Court agreed.
Case closed, right? Wrong. Florida is considering more legal action. And there’s still an outstanding lawsuit filed by Alabama. Like I said, job security.
Unlike Muir, I decided to travel the length of the Chattahoochee River and catch up with some old sources whose livelihoods depend upon its muddied munificence. Each represents one of the warring factions in the never-ending water saga: an Atlanta water engineer; a southwest Georgia farmer; and an Apalachicola oysterman. I’d already visited the source of the not-so-mighty river, tucked into a hillside in the lush Chattahoochee National Forest. Now it was time to head downstream.
First, though, I had to return the Boy Scouts to their parents without anybody getting bitten by a rattlesnake.
Sandy Springs, Georgia
In 1904, the Atlanta Water and Electric Power Company built the city’s first hydroelectric dam a dozen miles above town on the Chattahoochee. The then-narrower, faster-flowing river was tamed, and the bustling little city of ninety thousand residents received an electric, and economic, jolt that would help propel it to the forefront of Southern cities. Today, Morgan Falls Overlook Park sits high above the reservoir, with swinging benches and a canopy-shaded playground affording a lovely view of riverside mansions tucked into wooded hills. It’s an ideal spot to catch up with Katherine Zitsch. Katherine, officially, is the managing director of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District. Unofficially, she’s Atlanta’s water czarina. Her job is to stitch together the water supply, treatment, and conservation efforts of one hundred disparate cities and counties. It’s not an easy task, especially when neighboring states accuse you (or, more likely, Georgia’s elected officials) of natural-resource profligacy of Amazonian proportions. But Katherine boasts that water withdrawals across the region have dropped 10 percent since 2001, while the population has increased by 1.3 million people. The water district’s website says, pointedly, that Metro Atlanta’s “per capita water use is lower than in Tallahassee, Birmingham, and Montgomery”—neighboring burgs whose states have sued Georgia to get more Chattahoochee River water for themselves.
Katherine, an engineer, started the job in 2013. Florida sued Georgia later in the year.
“The first four years,” she says, deadpan, “were pretty hectic. I was hired to do happy water planning and then, suddenly, I was thrust into litigation.”
She got busy. Metro Atlanta had never really tabulated its water consumption before. Katherine’s data showed not only a reduction in water withdrawals, but also that the region cleaned and returned two-thirds of the water it used back into the Chattahoochee. Georgia’s lawyers hammered home the water-saving measures in reams of pre-trial filings and in the Maine courtroom. It worked. Judge Kelly lauded Metro Atlanta’s toilet-rebate, conservation-pricing, and leak-detection programs for slicing water usage.
The Supreme Court’s ruling notwithstanding, Katherine knows that Florida and Alabama aren’t going away. Southern governors, after all, get great political mileage beating up on rich, sprawling, liberal Atlanta.
“I feel like we’re the Hatfields and the McCoys, and we don’t really know what we’re fighting over,” Katherine says. “For Florida, it’s less about the economy—the big-picture economy—and more about a way of life. It’s about the oystermen who are certainly hurting. For Alabama, it’s more complicated. Alabama has a lot of water. For them, it seems, the water wars are about the economy and competition with Georgia.”
The water planning district is comprised of civil engineers, elected officials, chamber of commerce executives, and other civic-minded, pro-growth business types. They know in their bones that, without easy access to the Chattahoochee, the region withers and dies. So when Georgia, the day before Katherine and I talked, signed a deal guaranteeing unfettered access to drinking water from Lake Lanier in perpetuity, the hosannas flowed like wine. “A landmark victory,” claimed one official. “A milestone,” said another. Katherine was more blasé, expecting the deal to prompt more legal challenges. Indeed, in three days she would file an affidavit in Metro Atlanta’s water war against Alabama. Job security.
With the legal dominoes falling in line, Georgia clearly has the upper hand. Katherine looks forward to spending more time on non-litigious endeavors like protecting the Chattahoochee watershed and readying communities for climate change. Insulating the region against drought is of paramount importance. Katherine, the daughter of a civil engineer and an English teacher, has studied precipitation records dating back nine hundred years to glean climate trends perhaps useful for an ever-warming future.
“In that time, we had numerous seven-year droughts and one twenty-year drought,” she says. “It’s easy for us to think we know all the answers, but we don’t have any clue what happens in one hundred years. We have to make sure we’re ready for longer, deeper droughts than ever seen to date.”
She likes some of the ideas floating around. Another reservoir or two. Fill old rock quarries with water. Sewer lines instead of septic tanks. Raise the water level at Lake Lanier by two feet. Aquifer storage and recovery.
I ask Katherine what the Chattahoochee means to her. She looks down at the river.
“It’s amazing how far we’ve come since the 1970s and the Clean Water Act, and the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper filing a lawsuit to clean it up, and all the infrastructure we’ve put in place up and down the river since,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful resource. It’s amazing how many people are connected to the river. My kids paddleboard right below us here.”
She pauses, swaying slightly on her bench.
“We’re really sitting in a good place.”
Hopeful, Georgia
The soybeans are just now yellowing, so it’ll be at least a month until harvest. The sweet corn, tall and tassled, will come in sooner. The peanuts, plumped to perfection by the South Georgia sun and the steady drip-drip of irrigation, are ready to go. But they’ll have to wait.
“Everyone around here is behind on peanuts because it rained so much in September,” says Casey Cox. “But it’s that time of year.”
The best time—when all the hard work, luck, and prayer come together in a crop. Casey speaks in near-reverential terms about her farm, Longleaf Ridge, and the bounty it brings. She’s the sixth-generation Cox to farm this corner of southwest Georgia. Twenty-four-hundred acres of field and forest. Three miles of Flint River frontage. A house deep in the woods surrounded by longleaf and wire grass. And an Australian shepherd named Sabal who rides shotgun in Casey’s F-150.
“This is one of our favorite spots,” she says as we pull up to the river, Sabal relegated to the back seat in my honor.
The Flint’s running high; a sandbar favored by an eight-foot alligator nicknamed Grendel is all but submerged in the torrents of water. Low-hanging oaks, sycamores, and cypresses line the river. A fish jumps.
“The river is really important to us,” Casey continues. “It’s so deeply connected to our history and heritage that it feels like a member of the family. It’s a really incredible place to go and recharge—there’s such a sense of peace. One of the things my dad always says is that the river is part of his soul, and he’s instilled that deep spiritual connection to the river in me.”
The Flint, though, attracts no such reverence downstream. The crux of Florida’s last lawsuit targeted the Flint and the farmers who sucked dry the river and its tributaries, including the underground Floridan aquifer, during the 2012 drought. There wasn’t much water left by the time the Flint reached the Florida line. Georgia’s farmers, Florida contended, were “consuming exponentially more irrigation water from the Flint River Basin.”
Georgia, seeking to mollify the judge, slapped a moratorium on new wells dipping into the Floridan, an underground sea that stretches from Charleston to Miami. Some farmers, ever resourceful, extended their wells down into other, deeper aquifers. Georgia agricultural officials apparently didn’t get the message either: they ended up approving another 240 well permits.
At the time, Atlanta officials told me, off the record, they were furious at the profligate ways of their rural Georgia brethren. They were more than willing to throw farmers like the Coxes under the tractor if it meant keeping the urban spigots flowing.
“Agriculture is very complex and risky, and people don’t understand the context of the decisions we make—where we get our water, why we irrigate, how we use water,” Casey explains while trundling along the riverside trace in her pickup, ponytail bobbing beneath a baseball cap. “There’s a big misperception about what we do. Our industry is so critical to the state’s economy. If we did not have access to water, we wouldn’t be number one in peanut production or number two in cotton. We couldn’t grow a crop. Irrigation is the single most effective risk-management tool for farmers.”
Casey isn’t your typical farmer. For one, she’s a woman and there’s not another full-time farm boss like her in all of Mitchell County. For another, she’s deeply involved in her industry’s future, serving at one time or another on the National Peanut Board, the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District, and a stakeholders group of citizens and scientists trying to resolve the water wars. She’s also a diehard environmentalist planting longleaf pines, protecting endangered species, and conserving the ever-precious commodity that grows her crops.
Casey irrigates a thousand acres with a center-pivot system that draws water from the aquifer and dribbles it, in a circular fashion, over the land. Her daddy, Glenn, retrofitted the pivots a decade ago with evaporation-reducing nozzles. Her iPhone receives up-to-the-minute data from moisture sensors buried in the ground. She then programs the pivot where, and how much, to spray. Casey says she’s reduced water usage by 20 percent. “In the future,” she says, “we’ll come up with even more innovative ways to manage water.”
She’ll have to. The changing climate dictates whether the corn tassels, the peanuts shrivel, or the soybeans drown. Southwest Georgia receives a bountiful fifty-two inches of rain each year, on average—enough precipitation to make a High Plains farmer jealous. But the rain doesn’t always fall at just the right time. A warming world makes droughts longer and harsher. Hotter temperatures—South Georgia, by mid-century, can expect temperatures hotter than 105 degrees Fahrenheit for three months of the year—pressure farmers to tap the three underlying aquifers more frequently. And, increasingly, the rain comes in buckets, deluging the crop and then rolling uselessly off the land. Hurricane Michael dumped a half foot of rain on Longleaf Ridge. It hit with hundred-mile-an-hour winds and destroyed Casey’s sweet corn, farm office, grain bin, and 15 percent of her timber.
“But we were very blessed compared to some folks who lost so much more,” Casey says while passing the rebuilt office. “It was extremely traumatic for the community. Hurricane Michael was a wake-up call for all of us. Conditions in the future will only get worse with climate change. More severe weather, and temperatures, will drastically impact our farm.”
We cross the blacktop that runs through her property and pull up alongside a hundred-acre peanut field. Peanut wagons sit off to the side, ready to carry the crop to the buying point in Camilla. A cattle egret rises from a distant pond. Casey jumps from the truck and walks between rows, oblivious to the gnats swarming around her head. She kneels down, rips a plant from the ground, and shakes dirt from the pods.
“They look good,” she says. “Want to try one?”
I crack a few shells and put the rest in my pocket. Raw peanuts, like boiled peanuts, aren’t my thing. Give me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Or a PB&J and milk. Casey feeds a handful to Sabal, who slurps them down.
We get back in the truck, cross the road, and head for the river. We pass the soybeans and the corn and a fallow field of goldenrod rimmed with black-eyed Susans. Nothing, though, is as beautiful as the well-tended longleaf pine forest. The Coxes are faithful stewards of the iconic trees, which once stretched from Virginia to Texas. The pines are well spaced, towering over a healthy understory of wire grass and saw palmetto. They burn their longleaf forest every couple of years to maintain the unique ecosystem prized by gopher tortoises, red-cockaded woodpeckers, eastern indigo snakes, and other rare species. (Muir, also a longleaf aficionado, “sauntered in delightful freedom” through a stand outside Savannah.)
No sooner do we leave the forest than we’re enshrouded in dark swamp. Brambly bushes claw at the truck. The mud reaches axle high. We get stuck. We get out and wedge sticks and rocks in front of, and behind, the tires. Casey tries to rock the Ford free. No luck. She calls her dad to come and pull us out. It gives us more time to talk. I ask about the Supreme Court ruling.
“This will not be the end,” she says. “We’re just closing one chapter before the next one starts. We need to work together with the other states and the other stakeholders, including the oystermen, to come to a resolution. People try to pit us against the oystermen, but it’s much more complicated than that. Our whole life revolves around the natural environment, and so does theirs. We have so much common ground.”
Glenn arrives, hooks up the chains, and tries to pull the pickup out of the mud. No luck. He gets stuck, too. He calls the farm manager, who comes with his truck. Finally, we’re free. But I can’t help but ask Casey if getting bogged down in the mud is a metaphor for the never-ending water wars.
“It feels more like an endless slog,” she says.
Eastpoint, Florida
Shannon Hartsfield got his first oyster boat when he was sixteen, a flat-bottomed twenty-one-footer with a Johnson outboard. He’d tong the eastern edge of Apalachicola Bay, the more abundant side, using a wood-handled wire basket to rake across the shallow estuary with its just-right mix of fresh and salt water. It was the mid-eighties and he’d harvest seventy, eighty bushels a day.
“There was 180 oyster boats here then,” Shannon says from the back deck of an old oyster house turned restaurant and raw bar. “You used to be able to walk from boat deck to boat deck without stepping on water. Apalach had fourteen, fifteen shucking houses. Eastpoint had fifty-eight. And now we’re down to one.”
I called Shannon upon leaving Casey’s farm and asked where to meet. Lynn’s Quality Oysters, he says, and I immediately agreed. We drink cold beer and eat mahi-mahi fish dip with Saltines. St. George and Dog Islands shimmer across the bay in the afternoon sun. Lynn’s used to wholesale shucked oysters and truck them daily to Atlanta and other cities. Now, though, they sell mostly seafood and beer. Their oysters come from Texas. My family vacations each summer on St. George, and we always stop by Lynn’s on our way home.
Shannon says that only a few guys bother oystering the bay. The state limits a fisherman to two bushels per day. At fifty bucks a bag, it isn’t worth the time. (The state closed the bay to oystering a few weeks later.) Apalachicola without oysters is like Baltimore without crabs or Maine without lobsters. It’s a workingman’s town that, even after discovery by vacationing Northerners, retains its laid-back, end-of-the-road vibe. It has little of the touristy dreck associated with Seaside, Destin, or Panama City Beach.
Shannon is president of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association and the go-to spokesman whenever a governor, judge, or biologist does the oystermen wrong. He’s now helping Florida State University restore the bay’s health. “My goal is to see this bay back to where it’s productive so at least a couple hundred families can make a living off it,” says Shannon, who put down his tongs eight years ago.
The historic 2007 drought that curdled Atlanta and southwest Georgia wreaked havoc on Apalachicola. The Army Corps slashed the amount of water flowing over the Georgia–Florida line. The bay’s delicate ecology was thrown out of whack. Saltwater sat around too long without the downriver surges of freshwater that flush the bay. High salinity levels allowed parasites and other marine predators free rein to attack the oysters, with devastating consequences.
“Stuff started showing up in the bay we’d never seen before,” Shannon recalls. “We started seeing sea urchins and scallops and conch. We saw oyster drills [predatory snails] that drilled into the oyster shells. That’s when our bay really started struggling.”
The rains returned and the oystering did, too. But then an oil spill 250 miles away put the fear of God (as well as the greed of mere mortals) into the oystermen. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing eleven, and releasing more than three million barrels of oil into the Gulf. The oil slick threatened Apalachicola, though it never reached the bay. Fishermen from all across the Gulf descended in droves upon one of the few oyster grounds to remain open. Florida officials upped the amount of oystering time from five to seven days a week. Areas set aside for winter harvests were also opened up. Within a year, the number of commercial oyster boats doubled to four hundred.
“The bay looked like a city because there were so many oystermen on it,” Shannon told me in an interview at the time. “We freaked out. We thought the oil was coming. We put a lot of stress on our bay. We overworked it.”
And about killed it. Another drought seared southwest Georgia and northwest Florida in 2011 and 2012. Only about a third of the usual amount of water flowed from Georgia into the Apalachicola River—the lowest ever recorded. Oyster hauls dwindled to almost nothing. The Obama administration declared a fishery disaster in August 2013. The next day, Governor Rick Scott announced that Florida was suing Georgia for using too much water.
“But what does that accomplish?” Shannon wonders, another beer in hand. “We’ve been suing forever. Georgia can’t give what ain’t there.”
Commercial fishermen are a resilient bunch. Nobody just oysters. Shannon has taken a number of “land jobs” whenever the river dwindles and the bay turns salty. Construction. Work in a fastener factory. Deadhead logging for longleaf pine. He fished, too. Mullet. Pompano. Red snapper. He worked an oyster dredge off Louisiana. He always came back, though, to the East Bay. In 2009, after a car wreck, Shannon became president of the fishermen’s association—“the voice of the seafood industry”—lobbying in Tallahassee and beyond for a dying industry. He says there’s more than enough blame to go around.
“Georgia’s a rural state and Atlanta’s a really rich city. It can look at another source of fresh water, like the Tennessee River,” Shannon says, all tanned and chill in T-shirt and flip flops. “I don’t know if you can hold the farmers responsible because they had the opportunity to tap all those wells. But when we have low flows, they create problems by drawing up the aquifer. Georgia is growing. We know that. But there ought to be a moratorium on what they can withdraw, especially during a drought.”
Shannon says the Supreme Court’s decision was “a big loss for us.” He sees Congress as the last, best chance to force the Army Corps to keep a steady flow of water coming down the Apalachicola. Enough water, and rebuilt oyster beds, could save an industry, and a lifestyle.
“But another drought will devastate the bay completely,” Shannon admits.
And a warmer climate will mean more droughts.
Shannon isn’t so sure. “I see the weather change,” he says, “but who’s to say it won’t change the other way? I have faith in Mother Nature.”