Culture
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BASTION OF OUR
TRADITIONAL FISHING
S I D E O F W A L M A R T // 5 1 A N
INDUSTRY ENDURES
EGGFULL OF ARTISTS
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P O C K E TS O F A R T // 5 0
FRANKLIN’S
REFLECTING ON
NEW POCKET PARK
R O C KW E L L O U TW
Images courtesy of Louisiana's Cajun Bayou Tourism.
said Terrebonne, who now services only one big shrimping boat. “If we depended on the fishermen, we couldn’t make it. Shrimp cost less than they did thirty years ago, but everything else, fuel, materials, ice, nets, that’s all gone up.” In recent years, with an increase of cheap importAGAINST ALL ODDS, HAND-WOVEN FISHING NETS SURVIVE IN GOLDEN MEADOW ed seafood from places like Vietnam and China, the cost of operating a big boat offshore for By Beth D’Addono weeks is no longer offset by the price of the catch. This has combined with the significant tolls that very morning for the past seventy years or so, ed to be spread out to dry in the sun to prevent rotting, pollution, wetland loss, and disasters like hurricanes or Lawrence “Chine” (pronounced “Chiney”) to nets made with synthetic materials happened in the the BP Oil Spill have wrought on the Louisiana seafood Terrebonne has gotten up and gone to work, early twentieth century when nylon was invented and industry, which—though still the nation’s second-larghfirst for his father’s net-making business, applied in industrial settings. As new fibers were devel- est seafood supplier—has been in survival mode for the then for his own: Chine’s Cajun Net Shop, which he’s oped, netmakers like Terrebonne switched to polyeth- past several years. Though he still famously handmakes shrimp nets, had since 1966. In 2021, he and his three employees— ylene or spectra, materials which now arrive in bales all men over the age of fifty-eight—still meet daily in his from mostly Chinese factories. These nets need to be Terrebonne’s main business now is in what he calls “goshop to quietly continue this centuries-old tradition. dipped into a chemical that preserves them, a hulking rilla nets,” which he started making in 1989 to keep his business afloat. These are used in the oilfield to drag Terrebonne, eighty-one, was born and reared in Gold- vat that Eldon Cheramie oversees behind the building. en Meadow, a small fishing village tucked into Bayou The massive shop, formerly a supermarket, is lined the ocean floor for debris after a platform is decommisLafourche that is home to just a few thousand people, with benches, and just about every surface is covered sioned and pulled out of production. “They have to be mostly of Cajun descent. He learned the art of stitching with spools of plastic and nylon fiber and bright teal sure they leave the bottom clean,” he said. “That’s what shrimp trawling nets from cotton webbing when he was nets of varying shapes and sizes. Bins of fasteners and keeps us open. First, they pull the big heavy net to pick nine years old, back when he remembers boats tied up TEDs—the “turtle excluder devices” required in each up the heavy stuff, then they pull a regular net to verify in the bayou for miles. “When I started there were fifty, net—line one wall. A bundle of five-foot-long zippers sits that the bottom is clean enough for shrimping.” Made with strong nylon fiber, the heavily cabled nets sixty big shrimp boats that would go out and stay out for ready to be sewn into the bigger nets, making it easier for are massive. “When we started making them we took weeks,” he said. the fisherman to release their catch. The evolution from natural cotton nets, which needThe business has changed mightily over the years, one of the first ones out and stretched it to test how
NET WORTH
Chine’s Cajun Net Shop
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