Product Description

Mike Tidwell knew nothing of the disappearing bayou country when he first visited the Cajun coast of Louisiana, but the evidence was all around him: the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, telephone poles in deep, standing water. Thanks to human hands, the storied Louisiana coast was eroding, subsiding, and joining the Gulf of Mexico—-making it the fastest disappearing landmass on Earth. Yet no one seemed to know how to talk about the problem. Tidwell, a celebrated travel and environmental writer, decided to begin the much-needed conversation, and this vivid, elegiac book is the result.

Tidwell introduces us to the surprisingly varied population of the area: the Cajun men and women who work the seasonal shrimp harvest, the Vietnamese fishermen, the Houma Indians driven to the farthest ends of the bayou by the first European settlers. He describes the food, the music, the culture, and the life of all those who live along the bayous. And under his keenly observant eye, the bayou itself becomes a compelling character—-reminding us of how much we stand to lose if we fail to address the problems facing this most vibrant of places.

Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a place and a way of life that are vanishing virtually before our eyes.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15489 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-09
• Released on: 2004-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This lyrically intense travelogue will provide historians of the not too distant future with a guide to a vanishing landscape and a lost culture. Tidwell (Mountains of Heaven) graphically recounts catching rides on shrimp boats and crab boats through the dark water swamps of southern Louisiana into the heart of Cajun country. Here, among the great blue heron, spoonbill, gar and gator, the reader meets bayou folk-from the honest and generous fishermen, who provide the author with room, board and transport for his work as a deck hand, to the disheveled backwoods healer who intrigues and tantalizes the writer with his shamanistic spells and incantations. It is these portraits of people on the edge of survival, living in a world where the land is sinking into the sea at a rate of 25 acres a day, that truly engage the reader. A variety of ecological factors have contributed to the subsidence of the Mississippi Delta. With good intentions to stop deadly floods, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a vast network of levees and dams along the river, preventing the annual devastating floods of the past. Unfortunately, this also ended the yearly buildup of silt, necessary for the reinforcement and continued existence of the fragile marshlands in the low country. The nutrient-rich, but light, sandy soil cannot withstand the ceaseless eroding forces of ocean tide and winds. The author's descriptive powers, especially of people, provide the reader with enduring snapshots of a water-bound way of life that is sinking into history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
An award-winning writer on travel and the environment regrets the devastation of Louisiana's Cajun coast.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Alarmed that insufficient attention is paid to the erosion of Louisiana's bayou country, reportedly disappearing by two dozen square miles per year, Tidwell talked his way aboard shrimp boats to have a look around. Welcomed with beer-and-gumbo hospitality, Tidwell pitched in with the work as he collected the shrimpers' life stories and thoughts about the vanishing bayou banks. Tidwell also accompanied geomorphologists who study the slow-rolling catastrophe caused by both natural subsidence and the levees of the Mississippi, which prevent alluvial replenishment of land. The Cajuns Tidwell befriended already know this, but, with shoulder-shrugging fatalism, they generally feel powerless to affect the political or environmental process. After all, the proposed solution, a gigantic diversion of Old Man River, would take about two centuries. And the shrimping's still good (temporarily, warns the author) as readers discover in Tidwell's muscular, boisterous descriptions of netting the crustaceans. This empathic portrait of Cajun culture rings with authenticity. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

This is a Hell of a book Cher
A very well read friend of mine in recommending this book said it is not only a wonderful book about Louisiana and its people, but maybe the best book he has ever read period. On such a recommendation I immediately ordered a copy.

And now I see why my friend loved the book. what's not to like.
The author highlights the serious coastal erosion problem we have in Louisiana by getting invovled with a lot of the people affected by the pending disaster. He visits them in their homes and rides with them on their oyster and shripmp boats.
One gets a real insight into the Cajun culture.

After reading the book I realized that I hadn't been down in the bayous for awhile. So, I made a point to get down there and reexperience the unique place that it is. Bayou Farewell is that kind of a book.

One thing, though, if you have been consdiering changing carreers to become a crabber, you might oughta read this book first. Crabbing is a rough way to go.

Before It's Too Late
Although I daily witness the results of over-engineering on the Upper Mississippi River as backwaters fill in, wetlands disappear, floods rise higher and faster, and various species take to higher ground (thanks to the devastation caused by maintaining a 9 foot channel), I was astonished by the opening pages of Tidwell's Bayou Farewell. He quotes a Louisian shrimper who claims, "Every twenty minutes or so, a football field of land turns to water in Louisiana."

Given recent scandals involving Army Corps of Enngineers book-cooks and their persistent efforts to spend enormous sums of taxpayer money to extend and add additional levies and locks and dams, Tidwell's book offers the most powerful foil in the form of well-researched facts and compelling life stories from those who live in the bayou.

If you care about this third largest river in the world, if you care about ecosystems and environment, read this book. I've sent copies to congress members and senators urging them to propose or at least support legislation halting coastal erosion and further engineering of the Mississippi.

This book will make you sad, and it will make you angry!
A beautiful and sad book about the disappearance of Louisiana's bayou country, and with it, the way of life of the people who live there, the Cajun, Houma and Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers who provide us with an amazin 30% of America's annual seafood harvest. Thanks to levees on the Mississippi, oil company canals, and other interference with nature, coastal Louisiana is losing land the size of Manhattan every year. The land is sinking, the barrier islands disappearing, and with them go protection against hurricanes, resting places for migratory birds, and a seafood-rich ecosystem.

That it is possible to halt the destruction of this habitat is known. The Atchafalaya River, Louisiana's second largest, still pours silt from its mouth to form new land, and small diversion projects are helping. But more and major diversions of the Mississippi, to allow it once again to build up the coast instead of dumping its silt over the continental shelf, must happen and happen quickly before it is too late.

Before, in the words of one shrimper, "Dere won't be no more nothin' left anymore, forever".