Louisiana's Ghost Swamps

Louisiana's Ghost Swamps

A drive to the coast, and a requiem

Words by James Fox-Smith • Photos by Ben Depp

August afternoon. Driving to Pointe Aux Chênes, a hardscrabble fishing community strung out along a fortified chénier where Highway 665 runs out of dry land in Terrebonne Parish.

Heading southeast out of Bourg, the road follows a snaky little watercourse known either as the Saint Louis Canal or Bayou Pointe Aux Chênes depending on where you are, that uncoils in lazy loops before us while blue-black thunderclouds boil cinematically up out of the invisible Gulf beyond.

“Pointe aux Chênes," translates to “point with the oaks,” and as road and waterway roll on, the eponymous live oaks meander into the distance across the tussocky plain. Or their corpses do.

Leeville, Louisiana, June 18, 2021. A cemetery in Leeville, Louisiana now floods regularly when a south wind or storm brings higher water. Photo by Ben Depp.

Undone by saltwater intrusion, the live oaks that have marked the bayou’s course since early settlers arrived here to give French names to things, are dead—their gray, weathered limbs reaching sightlessly into the gathering storm.

Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, December 13, 2014. Oaks and cypress trees killed by salt water intrusion are known to locals as ghost trees. The roots of vegetation and trees are critical for holding soil in place. Most salt water intrusion is caused by canals cut by the oil industry. Photo by Ben Depp.

Between the bare trunks and along the bayou’s banks, the twisted wreckage of Hurricane Ida’s catastrophic visit rises in sad heaps: roofless houses, toppled camps, sunken boats, flattened trailers wrapped tight in creeping, relentless vine. Further out, beyond the procession of decapitated homes, miles of levees march alongside the bayou and its copycat road—a last line of demarcation between this ribbon of remaining land and the miles of open water beyond.

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. September 5, 2021. A wrecked boat and ghost trees in Cocodrie. Photo by Ben Depp.

“It’s like watching snow melt,” says my teenaged son, meditatively. The late-summer fishing trip is our first return to this spot in several (but not that many) years, and the transformation between the landscape of memory (raggedy but fecund, thrumming with activity), and these skeletal remains, is shocking.

Cameron Parish, Louisiana. August 25, 2021. An oak tree torn out of the ground by Hurricane Laura lays in the marsh north of the town of Cameron. Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Photo by Ben Depp.

Somehow, it’s still beautiful. Beyond the vanishing and the tumbled wreckage, these stark vistas of land and water, ruin and renewal, painted in the colors of that vast, late summer sky, feel at once desperate and elegiac. Here we are, driving down a road not two hours south of Baton Rouge and it feels like we’re tiptoeing along a tightrope anchored to the last remnant of a vanishing civilization: one that was blessed and doomed in equal measure.

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. February 11, 2015. Venice, nicknamed "The End of the World", is the southernmost town on the Mississippi river accessible by road. The town used to have miles of wetlands acting as a protective barrier for storms. These wetlands are almost all gone and Venice was almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Ben Depp.

It won’t be there much longer. Go and see, before it slips away for good.

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Wetlands near Bohemia Louisiana. Photo by Ben Depp.

To see more of Ben Depp's photography, visit Claire Elizabeth Gallery in New Orleans, bendepp.com or follow @deppphoto on Instagram. Learn more about saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion, as well as efforts being done to restore the coast, at mississippiriverdelta.org.