I am seated on a soft living room couch in the home of Harold Areno, a gentle Cajun pipefitter who is carefully holding before me, from his adjacent chair, a large photo album. He draws his hand back and forth over the plastic covers on the black and white photos. He turns the pages slowly, searching for one. Seventy-seven and a former deacon in the Lighthouse Tabernacle Pentecostal Church, he’s dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans. He speaks in a slow baritone, his eyes on the page, often concluding a line of thought with a light chuckle as if to say, “It’s all right.”
He points. There it is. His mother, father, himself, and nine siblings standing in two rows, squinting into the sun on the bank of Bayou d’Inde. It is 1950. Harold names his brothers and sisters. He tells how his mother used to catch gar by coaxing the fish to the side of the boat with bait, patting their sides, then lifting them by the gills into the boat. He turns to the next page of his album slowly. Now a photo of his father and his siblings, all born and raised just across Bayou d’Inde, a term meaning “bayou of the Indians.” Now, in different constellations, the family is picnicking, now clowning, now swimming, now dropping a watermelon off a boat to play with in the water and later eat.
But it’s not just his family he wants me to see. As if introducing friendly neighbors, he points behind the family to something else. Standing proud in the water, behind the faces in the photograph, are commanding bald cypress trees, large triangular trunks rising from the water, once the glorious queens of the forested wetlands of southern Louisiana and still the official state tree. Green moss hangs from outstretched lower branches, tree after tree, like lace shawls in a dance hall. “They were so tall the sun hardly hit the marsh,” Harold says in a quiet voice. Reaching 150 feet high, these trees can live 600 years, and some have been known to live 1,700 years. Harold’s father built fishing boats out of cypress, some flat-bottomed dugout pirogues traditional to Cajun culture. He would bring logs to a nearby mill, saw them in his shop, and build them into boats, which he rented to fishermen. For $30 a month, he also tended a humpback bridge, which could be swung sideways by turning a wheel to make way for boat traffic, and otherwise he fished and farmed.
“Throw a Cajun in a swamp,” Harold chuckles, his eyebrows lifting for emphasis, “and he can make a livin’.”
But that was before.
From the edge of his yard, Harold points to the bayou’s brackish water. Piercing its surface here and there are lifeless gray trunks, some bent over like defeated soldiers, as far as the eye can see. It’s a tree graveyard. Harold’s arm falls to his side, limp.
Bayou d’Inde winds a few miles from the spot where Lee Sherman had leaned over the tar buggy, opened the valve, and let the toxic waste spew out into public waters. From that spot, the waterway led in one direction toward the Arenos, and in the other it narrowed into the Calcasieu Ship Channel, widened into intertidal mudflats dotted with salt meadow cord grass, and poured ponderously south, thirty miles into the Gulf of Mexico, from which comes nearly half the seafood on the American dinner table. From the tar buggy dumpings in the PPG marsh, there was a very large “downstream.” By following Lee’s deeds to the Arenos, I hoped to discover a different vantage point on the Great Paradox.
Going on three generations, the Arenos have fished, caught game, and raised gardens on land around and beneath their immaculate tan wooden home with green shutters, neatly trimmed lawn, and driveway edged in lilies and hibiscus, a white truck in the driveway. Facing the water is a porch, along one side of which hangs an enormous American flag. The Arenos’ home is one of only two on Bayou d’Inde Pass Road for about a mile. The house next door, once Harold’s sister’s, had long lain vacant. Other families, too, have moved out, leaving a long stretch of scrub pine between the narrow tar road and the bayou.
“We didn’t know what we had until it was gone,” Harold says. He had grown up on one side of the bayou and raised a family on the other, “within hollerin’ distance” of his birthplace. But in addition to losing his youth, his trees, and many in his family, Harold has lost a way of life. “We had forty acres,” he tells me, the photo album now resting closed in his lap. “On two of them we grew butter beans, corn, and vegetables. We could catch frogs at night and fish in the daytime—gar, bass.” There were other fish too, he says: crocker, menhaden, stripped mullet, and red fish, which all had once fed the great snowy egrets, white and brown pelicans, gulls, herons, spoonbills, terns, and killdeer—birds that had once thrived in the bayou. “The frogs would sing and carry on all night long. You could drink the water then.”
Harold and his nine siblings settled across the family’s forty acres of land along the bayou. “We didn’t go to the store but once a month to get sugar, vanilla, and such. We had chickens, hogs, cows, and a garden. We lived off the bayou. We ate bullfrogs for Sunday dinner, and catfish chowder any time. We’d add the sugar and vanilla to the cream from our cows to make our own ice cream.”
“My mama was a French lady,” Harold declares. “She spoke French, played The Watermelon Man on her accordion, and cooked three meals a day for twelve on a wooden stove. She was big woman, about 220 pounds,” Harold says. “She’d kill the chicken, put the meat in a pot of gumbo, and use the guts for bait on a line to catch catfish. We didn’t waste nothing.”
Like many in southwest Louisiana, the Arenos were descended from French Catholic Acadians—or Cajuns, as they came to be called. The British harshly expelled the Cajuns from New Brunswick, Canada, in 1765, in the wake of a victorious war against France. British ships deposited them in various coastal states. Eventually seven boatloads of Cajuns arrived in New Orleans Harbor, many of whom then migrated to the swamplands of southwest Louisiana, mingling with and partly displacing the Atakapa Indians. His parents had little schooling, as Harold recounts, because French was banned from schools, and French speakers were discouraged from attending. Harold himself only got through the eighth grade.
Like Harold, Annette Areno remembers the bayou from before. A beautiful woman in her seventies, she has golden-gray ringlets drawn high on her head. She wears glasses, a pink blouse, and long floral-patterned skirt. A warm, spirited woman, she speaks in a soft, deliberate way. She listens to Harold’s stories, supplementing and amending them, carrying the seriousness of them in her tone of voice, but freely offering her own observations and thoughts about the bayou, comparing it to her grandfather’s farm where she grew up in Kinder, Louisiana. She has recently won a lifetime achievement award as custodian at nearby Sulphur High School. “I clean up after teenagers,” she says with a playful roll of her eyes.
“I remember sitting under the cypress for shade in the heat of the summer. The moss hanging on it was green then. Frogs could breathe and they could find all kinds of minnows. Then industry came in. It began to stink so bad you had to leave the windows down on hot nights. It killed the cypress and grass from here clear out to the Gulf. And you still can’t eat the fish or drink the water.”
Harold adds, “Floating bits of rubber would clog the water pump on your motorboat. We were downstream from Firestone.”
The Arenos’ forty-six-year-old son, Derwin, arrives at the door. A lively, brown-haired pipefitter—like his dad—who works at a nearby petrochemical plant, he is dropping by on his day off with takeout from Popeye’s—chicken, rice and beans, coleslaw, sweet rolls. Annette makes coffee and puts out lunch for all of us, apologizing for not cooking herself.
After prayer, Derwin joins in on what seems like a well-worn family conversation. “I was born in 1962, and growing up here, all I ever remember seeing was dead cypress trees and a stinky, nasty smell from the water. Now wherever I go, I can smell whether the water and air are good or bad. It’s like a special instinct. The water here is clearer today on the surface, but you don’t want to stir the mud on the bottom. And these days, at night, the winds from the east smell of something burning, always at night.”
“I haven’t heard a bullfrog in this bayou for years,” Harold adds, “I heard one holler about three years ago, from inside one of them drains, but he didn’t holler long. I don’t know if someone caught him or if he died.” Harold describes how during a “fish kill” the fish flopped about on the surface of the water and on the banks “trying to breathe.”
Then he turns to turtles, and I gradually realize we are going through a terrible inventory. “We noticed the eyes of the turtles had turned white. They would sit still on a log and never jump off to catch and eat something. They’d gone blind and starved to death.” Harold and Annette alternate speaking of various marine creatures with intimacy and resolute calm, as if to lay each to its proper rest.
“My dad found his cows, tipped over, lying down,” Harold continues. “They had drunk the water. And the chickens. First, they’d walk around, their wings hung down. Then they’d lie down dead. And his herd of goats and sheep, all dead.” He gives a mirthless baritone chuckle that seems to say, “What can you do?”
I feel as if I’ve come upon the scene of a slow-motion crime. Lee Sherman’s tar buggy was only one part of it. Other companies and the state government were another. Continuing with a flash of indignation, Harold says, “My nephew used to raise hogs. And you know a hog can stand almost anything. Because of the bad water, my nephew had to cook the slop he fed them. But the hogs got out of the pen and went to drink the bayou water and died. The health unit came down on my nephew for not keeping his hogs away from the bad water, but they didn’t do nothing about the bad water.”
In their braided tale—Harold’s, Annette’s, and Derwin’s—I feel both resignation and defiance. As they talk they glance toward the window at the bayou beyond, downward toward their plates, and occasionally to me to see how I am absorbing their words. There is no insisting on response, only a shaking of heads as if to say, “All this should never have happened.” They have been kept waiting for years for word on a lawsuit, a wait that has nearly worn them down and spent their anger.
But there is more. Animals and fish are not all they have lost. I brace myself.
Shifting in his chair and coughing slightly, Harold continues, “My brother-in-law J.D. was the first. He came down with a brain tumor and died at forty-seven. Then my sister next door, Lily May, had breast cancer that went into her bones. My mom died of lung and bladder cancer. And others up the bayou: Edward May and Lambert both died with cancer. Julia and Wendell, live two miles from here, they got it. My sister grew up here but moved over to Houston River and she’s fighting cancer. And my other brother-in-law, he had prostate cancer that went in the bone.” (Both Annette and Harold are cancer survivors.)
“The only one that didn’t get cancer was my daddy,” Harold says, “and he never worked in the plants. Everybody else—all us kids and our spouses that lived on these forty acres—come down with cancer.”
In Harold’s immediate family, all those who got cancer, except for Annette and Harold, died of it. No one in earlier generations—like that of Harold’s grandfather—suffered from or died of cancer. And, as Pentecostals, no one in the family smoked or drank liquor.
At a loss for words, I ask obtusely, “So is the water cleaner now?”
“Oh no,” Derwin says. “After a hard rain, the bayou rises and pollution from the plants gets mixed in with it, and you can smell something bad. Nowadays there’s talk of cleaning it up, but I don’t know how they can.”
The three turn to talk of how one gauges the safety of fish these days, and very different philosophies emerge. Harold won’t eat fish out of Bayou d’Inde—that in itself spells danger. “On TV they try to play down any danger,” he cautions. “After the BP [British Petroleum] spill, they said the shrimp were fine to eat. But is anybody checking them? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t eat them.”
Then to his parents’ amazement, Derwin tells how he judges safety by the look, smell, and digestibility of a fish. “I don’t worry if the shrimp smells good and tastes good and feels good after you eat them.” Harold cautions, “But still, they could be dangerous. We used to eat fish all the time, but only every now and again now, and never from this bayou. As for fishing, I do catch and release.”
“I caught and cooked me some of them reds,” Derwin continues, “because them redfish migrate to here all the way from the Gulf. Just because they’re here now doesn’t mean they spawned and grew up here. The reds don’t stay here like gar. So a while back I figured, well, I’m okay. I took them, I cleaned them. I tried smelling them before cooking them to see if I could maybe smell any kind of little funny smell that didn’t smell like normal fish. They seemed like they was kind of normal. But I didn’t have any of that gar way down by the Gulf to compare them to. I cooked them on the pit, barbequed them, and then I ate them. I was trying to pinpoint any kind of funny taste but I was like, ‘man, it tasted good.’ I ate them.”
Annette looks at her son with loving concern. To Derwin, the criterion is the fish’s breeding habitat; redfish are safe, gar is not. Harold agrees with Annette: “No fish from the bayou is safe.” But if he were to eat it, Harold adds, he’d eat the safe part of the fish. “I asked the man from Fish and Game where he took the flesh from the fish when he tested it. He told me, ‘I take the fat tissue of that fish and I also take the dark part of the flesh. Your chemicals lie in the fat tissue and in the dark part of that fish.’ So then I said, ‘I’m glad I talked to you. If I eat that fish I ain’t going to eat the belly or the dark part.’”
The Napkin Map
A while back, Mike Tritico, the marine biologist and longtime friend of the Arenos, had drawn me a map on a napkin. In the middle was a dot, representing the Arenos’ home on Bayou d’Inde. A mile and a half east of it was Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG), where Lee Sherman and Harold Areno had both worked. I was later to travel by boat with Harold and Mike around the Lake Charles estuary to the very bank where Lee had secretly dumped the tar buggy of toxic waste into public water. Tall, broom-like silver green cord grass grew along the bank, hiding Lee’s terrible secret through its very appearance of normality.
Now owned by another company and renamed Axiall, PPG is a chlorinated hydrocarbon manufacturing facility. Four miles east of the Arenos’ home stand the Conoco docks—the site of a 1994 leak of over 1.5 million tons of ethylene dichloride (EDC), one of the largest chemical spills in North America. Four miles north from the Arenos’ home is Entergy’s coal-fired, electricity-generating Nelson Station. Two miles to the north is Willows Springs, a black settlement on which in 1982 a hazardous waste management firm, Brown and Ferris International, dumped waste in open landfills, sickening the local citizens. Also to the north is Sasol, the mighty South Africa–based energy and chemical company, now building the first U.S. gas-to-liquids plant and the largest new industrial facility expansion in the United States. Beyond that, three hundred miles to the southeast, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig had exploded in 2010 in the worst marine oil spill in world history. Bayou d’Inde was at the epicenter, I realized, of an entire petrochemical empire—and of the Great Paradox.
Most of what polluted the bayou sank to the bottom of it—mercury, heavy metals, ethylene dichloride (EDC), and chlorinated dioxins. So at first the danger lay mainly there. But when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers twice dredged the nearby ship channel to ease the passage of commercial ships, “they scooped the toxic sludge from the bottom and pasted it on the banks right and left, without marking where they put it,” Harold tells me. So now the Arenos can’t trust the banks either. That was a decision of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government, I noted.
What about stricter regulation of the polluters? I ask, wondering if the Arenos had voted for political candidates who pushed for cleaning the mess up or, like Lee Sherman, had not.
“Stricter regulation would be good,” Harold replies. “We’re not against industry,” Annette clarifies. “We were happy when industry came. It brought jobs. We were glad for Harold to get one. But for decades now, they’ve done nothing to clean up the bayou or compensate us to move.”
Like other friends and family, the Arenos are Republican and had voted in the presidential election of 2012 for Mitt Romney. “He’s a big business guy, of course,” Harold explains. “If he were here he’d be having friendly visits with the CEOs of the companies around here. He wouldn’t be cleaning up the mess.”
But Harold and Annette speak with a mildness of manner, a flatness of voice, that makes me sense I am inquiring into an area of life in which they’d mostly given up interest. “We vote for candidates that put the Bible where it belongs,” Harold adds. “We try to be right-living, clean-living people, and we’d like our leaders to live that way and believe in that, too.” Before settling on Romney in the 2012 election, they had favored the former senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. The Arenos disapprove of “greedy corporations” stepping on the little guy. “Oil interests tried to suppress the development of the electric car,” Annette adds. Agreeing, Harold says: “Republicans stand for big business. They won’t help us with the problems we’ve got here.”
But Republicans put God and family on their side and “we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father’s business,” Annette says. Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees. They felt God had blessed them with this courage to face their ordeals, and they thanked Him for that. “I don’t know what people do if they don’t know Him,” Annette adds. For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hadn’t helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had.
For governor of Louisiana, the Arenos had twice voted for Bobby Jindal on grounds of faith and family values. Jindal wasn’t for cleaning up the environment, however. In remarks to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, he had said that emissions regulations and environmental protections were a way President Obama was “holding our economy hostage to their radical ideas.” In 2014 Jindal had also given $1.6 billion to industry as “incentives” to invest in Louisiana—$394 per citizen of Louisiana—while simultaneously cutting about the same amount out of the state budget and laying off 30,000 public sector workers—among them nurses, nurse’s aides, medical technicians, public school teachers, and safety inspectors.
People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three concerns—taxes, faith, and honor. Lee Sherman was eager to lower his taxes, the Arenos to protect their Christian faith. Added to these basic motives were certain personal wishes: Lee, who had borne the guilt of polluting public waters and been cheated by a dishonest official at a tax office, wanted to feel vindicated. The tax office was corrupt, and taxes themselves were connected to dishonesty, he felt. One didn’t know where they went or for what. The Arenos shared Lee’s concern, but added another personal wish. Given their extended ordeal and the importance of God and the church in getting through it, they felt a powerful drive to place themselves in spiritually guided hands. For both Lee and the Arenos, at issue in politics was trust. It was hard enough to trust people close at hand, and very hard to trust those far away; to locally rooted people, Washington, D.C., felt very far away. Like everyone I was to talk with, both also felt like victims of a frightening loss—or was it theft?—of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor.
The politicians who most won their trust offered no help on cleaning the place up. And those who offered help, well, who were they? What were they pushing? That was the dilemma. Both Lee and the Arenos had voted for Republican congressman David Vitter, who voted in 2011 to eliminate the entire Environmental Protection Agency. He also voted against a National Endowment for the Oceans, which would protect oceans, coastal areas, and Great Lakes ecosystems. He battled the EPA on its report of a relationship of formaldehyde exposure to cancer, and won a score of 0 on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.
As for threats to coastal Louisiana from climate change, no one they voted for thought it was real. Republican governor Jindal had called climate change a “Trojan horse” from which would emerge a new horde of government regulators. Lee Sherman thought the idea of climate change was “a bunch of hooey.” It was a big state idea. It evoked liberal fear, not conservative suspicion and bravado. But Harold and Annette and Mike Tritico bent over their Bibles, from time to time in the Arenos’ living room, to study the book of Revelation, chapter 11, verse 18. There it was written that God would bring ruin to those who ruin the earth. In the book of Mark, chapter 13, verse 19, they also found “For there will be greater anguish in those days than at any time since God created the world. And it will never be so great again.” Through these passages, the three brought their faith to bear on the issue of climate change and, given his training in marine biology, Mike brought science to it. Together they worked out that climate change was, indeed, a man-made disaster-in-waiting that called for strong countermeasures. In the climate of opinion around them, they were brave to do so. But their concern raised the question: how could repairs be made? On that, the Bible gave them clearer answers than politics did.
The Rememberers
“They don’t even want ‘No Fishing or Swimming’ signs up around here,” Derwin observes. “Some time ago signs was put up, but someone took ’em down. Who did that? I don’t know. But it seems like whoever they were, they don’t want people to know—or if they knew, they don’t want [them] to remember—that it’s polluted around here. On TV you see these ads for Shell Oil with beautiful egrets flying across a green marsh, music playing. You wonder what they’re trying to make us forget,” he says. We are on to dessert and coffee and there is a nodding of heads around the table.
The Arenos didn’t simply remember the good old days of a clean Bayou d’Inde. They remembered against the great forgetting of industry and state government. This larger institutional forgetting altered the private act of mourning. And not just that. It altered the Arenos’ very identity. They had not left Bayou d’Inde. They were stayers. They didn’t want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t afford to. The polluting companies had given them no money to enable them to move. And the value of their house had now fallen, for who would want to live on Bayou d’Inde Pass Road, even in a home as beautifully kept up as theirs? The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left.
The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many who have suffered from this illness of heart have been forced to leave a beloved home that is itself still there. But Harold and Annette Areno live at home in an environment no longer there.
I meet other rememberers too. One man recalls forests of towering bald cypress, clear-cut in the 1920s. Plaques issued by the U.S. Forest Service now memorialize these trees in the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area. Some federal worker must have come up with the bright idea to call these venerable trees “Louisiana Purchase Trees”—trees alive during the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Other trees were named for being alive during the 1812 inauguration of Louisiana as a state. Those who cared about the state could now care about the trees. They were state ancestors. Paul Ringo, a member of a nonprofit environmental group called Riverkeepers, didn’t need such an idea to keep memory alive. Living in a cabin off the grid on the edge of the Sabine River, whose waters were inked by an upstream paper mill, Paul hears the nightly gurgle and roar of the Sabine. He tracks pollutants in it and escorts bands of “prayer warriors” who pray over the river. In truth, he himself is such a warrior. He holds sacred the memory of the Atakapa Indians, who once inhabited the river basin, and has helped discouraged descendants in negotiations with the state. “The Sabine River is a public river,” Paul Ringo told me on a visit I paid him, “But if you can’t drink in the river, and you can’t swim in the river, or fish in the river, or baptize your young in the river, then it’s not your river. It’s the paper mill’s river.” Like the Arenos, Paul Ringo is a rememberer.
But such thinking is not much shared around town on two accounts. First, new business was coming to town, bringing with it a euphoric celebration of new jobs, new money, and new products. Talk was of “economic progress,” and nostalgia would get in its way. “Don’t you believe in economic progress?” people could ask. Also, as a cause, environmental protection had fallen into the hands, people felt, of left-leaning government expansionists and do-nothing local officials.
With one avenue of nostalgia blocked, the State Tourist Bureau has busily promoted another through Lake Charles’s seventy-five annual festivals, fairs, and special events: Mardi Gras, a gala event second only to that in New Orleans, Cajun-Zydeco Music, and Lake Charles Contraband Days—two weeks of joyous celebration of the pirates of old. Then there is the Crawfish Festival in Breaux Bridge, the Frog Festival in Rayne, and the Giant Omelet Celebration in Abbeville. They put fun into memory.
Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers who felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it from childhood. They knew it and respected it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted—often legally—this same wilderness. They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them. The general talk around town was that the choice was between the environment and jobs. On Fox News, in the local paper, in talk with friends, that was the refrain: too much nostalgia for croaking frogs and clean rivers might seem like just that—too much nostalgia. The basic feeling around town was that one shouldn’t get too hung up on the environment, feel too nostalgic for cleaner times, or be too retro; that wasn’t what residents were “supposed to feel.” That’s because a fracking boom was on, and many new industries were on their way to Lake Charles to process the natural gas it freed from the cracked earth.
So ironically, strangely, embarrassingly, the memory of Southern environmental glory fell, in part, to respectful clerks in federal offices and to northern environmentalists. With their memorial plaques, the federally financed U.S. Forest Service was inviting residents to remember the history of their own ancient trees. The New York–based Riverkeepers Alliance, started by Washington, D.C.–born environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reminded a local citizenry what could be lost if citizens didn’t watch out. The Arenos welcomed these northern environmentalists as natural allies in their own difficult struggle, as did Mike Schaff, who had faced a great loss of his own.
The Arenos were rememberers facing a strange “structural amnesia,” as the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution—the kin system. Dominant within that system were men. So memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power.
The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic future. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer.
Coming Down on the Little Guy
Harold adds an important idea to that of Evans-Pritchard. “The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden’ll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they’ll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.” It isn’t just that the power structure rigs collective memory. It rigs the enforcement of rules too. The higher up the ladder of power, the more likely one was to get off; the lower down, the less likely. Environmental regulation was like that.
If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God. He remembers how it was. He knows what was lost. If the federal government was committed to a multicultural America that dimmed the position of the Christian church, it was getting in the way of that church, diminishing the importance of God, and it was God who had enabled them to survive their terrible ordeal.
To Derwin—who, having brought lunch to his parents, is packing up to go—the solution to Bayou d’Inde lies far beyond power, politics, or science. A devoted believer in the rapture, as are his parents, Derwin describes the approach of the “End Times.” Quoting from the book of Revelation, he says, “The earth will burn with fervent heat.” Fire purifies, so the planet will be purified 1,000 years from now, and until then, the devil is on the rampage, Derwin says. In the Garden of Eden, “there wasn’t anything hurting your environment. We’ll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself. And that will happen pretty shortly, so it don’t matter how much man destroys.”
Harold and Annette look forward to the rapture too, but they want man to repair the earth before it comes. They’ve already waited long enough and nearly despair of politics. A commission to study the pollution, “partnering” with industry, had been meeting occasionally for decades. Newcomers to Lake Charles were not privy to this history of pollution, and the Tourist Bureau had no interest in reviving the memory of it. Buried with the memory of the damage, too, was a general appreciation of the extraordinary fortitude that had been called upon in Harold and Annette Areno over so many years. At least the Lord remembered what they’d endured and remembered the courage it took to endure it.
As I take leave of the Arenos, I ask them about the lawsuit they have filed against the polluters of Bayou d’Inde. Fifty-three plaintiffs, residents on the bayou and workers in nearby companies, had sued twenty-two companies. “We’re still waiting,” Harold answers. Nothing could fully make up for the loss of trees, birds, and fish from their beloved bayou, but the Arenos are hoping mightily that the lawsuit will at least provide money to move, for despite their attachment to the place, their distrust of the water, the banks, the air makes them feel like refugees in their own home. If they win the suit, it will be a moral victory, a remembered fact. A lawyer who worked in the firm that filed their suit (the lead lawyer had passed away) tells me with a sigh that it is common corporate strategy, with the cooperation of the state agencies, to string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due. Still, much time has passed.
Among the plaintiffs in this suit, I am astonished to learn, is a man I have already met—Lee Sherman. Lee and the Arenos had played different roles in the pollution of Bayou d’Inde, but each recognized the other as a victim. They’d become good friends. In 2012, all three were watching speeches by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He wouldn’t help the country clean up dirty rivers, they thought, but as an opponent to the right to abortion, he was for “saving all those babies”—and that seemed to them the more important moral issue on which they would be ultimately judged.
Harold walks me to my car. I get in, open my window, and fasten my seat belt. “We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”