Country Roads Magazine "Myths and Legends Issue" October 2021

The Great DeltaTours

BY BRINGING PEOPLE FACE TO FACE WITH THE FRAGILE GULF COAST, WE CAN TEACH THEM TO LOVE IT LIKE WE DO

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n one of the excursions hoffered by The Great Delta hTour Company, guests are taken dockside to the Bayou la Loutre in the coastal village of Ycloskey, where oyster fisherman Don Robin hosts a bayou-side chat. With oyster, shrimp, and crab boats passing as a backdrop, Robin tells of his Isleños heritage, and how his ancestors founded Ycloskey.

Then, he’ll grill up oysters straight from the boat. Over the last year, on some occasions guests will look up to the hole in the roof of the covered dock and ask what it is from. “Oh, that was Zeta,” he says, illustrating—through a rugged glimpse of sky where it shouldn’t be—a harsh reality of life here in the Louisiana Delta.

In the wake of recent Hurricane Ida, Louisiana’s seafood industries are picking up the pieces once again. Entire communities are only just now able to access livable conditions, as power is turned back on and sewage systems come back online.

Clean up won’t be finished for months— in some cases, years. Birds are emerging from parts of the Gulf soaked in oil. The already-alarming rate of coastal erosion has only been accelerated by the many recent storms. And it’s only the beginning of this year’s hurricane season.

This is life in coastal Louisiana. And for outsiders, it may be difficult to understand why the people who live here fight so hard to make it work—why we invest billions in seawalls and levees and pumps to make our cities livable, and why sometimes we have to live with holes in the roof.

By introducing visitors to people like Robin, or taking them into the verdant marshes right outside of the hurricane levees, or to see up-close the current wetland restoration projects of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority—The Great Delta Tour Company aims to share a little bit of what it’s like to call the fragile Gulf Coast home. “They see it first hand,

which I think is really impactful, for people to really experience what it’s like here, what we are dealing with—to walk in our shoes for a day,” explained founder Barbara Johnson.

Following Ida, Johnson said that she feels that the work of The Great Delta Tour Company is more important than ever. “We are on the front lines of climate change,” she said, of coastal Louisiana as a whole. “This is where it is happening.”

For people around the country who are concerned about environmental issues, she said, Louisiana is where they can see and experience the biggest impacts, where they can come to understand the stakes at hand. “In our tours, we tell the story of how the Mississippi River has impacted us: who we are, our culture, our people, our land. What are the challenges of living in this Delta system? How have these storms and this land loss affected our communities?”

More importantly, Johnson said, she wants to showcase how we in South Louisiana are leaders in conversations on climate adaptation. “We are building a whole new economic engine around water and environmental management here,” she said. “And we are masters of disaster.” By showing some of the major work being done to protect the communities and wetlands of this region, Johnson hopes to send visitors home with a renewed impression of Louisiana’s role in the future for our warming planet.

Ultimately, though, for any of this to matter, the tours have to show outsiders why we stay. Why we love it here. So, they also place them in the way of diving pelicans and stalking alligators, into the darkly beautiful wetlands we hold dear, and onto the Bayou la Loutre—with a fifth generation fisherman, cracking open a fresh oyster.

thegreatdeltatours.com.

—Jordan LaHaye Fontenot // O C T 2 1

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