Les Derniers Chênes – Under the Scope

In Augusts, early in the morning on a day in the last few weeks before elementary school began once again, we’d pack an ice chest with luncheon meat, bread, pops, and chips, and then all seven of us would squeeze into the ironclad Chevrolet sedan with the pointy fenders, no air conditioning, and only AM radio.  As we headed south on LA 1, the road was a series of concrete slabs that expanded and bulged under the hot sun of late summer, causing a rhythm of bumps that turned our car into a bouncing lowrider.  The road was so narrow at this stretch that the occasional edging of the tires into the white clamshells of the road shoulder would raise a cloud of white calcium dust that would cling to our mucus membranes for several days–maybe weeks.  But shells came from the sea, and that reminded us that the Gulf and the beaches at Fourchon and Grand Isle lay ahead.

In a few miles, we’d see families with their crab net poles setting up trotlines in the roadside canals.  On the right were dozens of fishing camps elevated on creosote posts, each one hosting a mound of oyster shells for some future use.  On the left was the bayou, where big steel-hull Floridians and smaller wooden Lafitte skiffs plied their trail to the trawling grounds, occasionally sharing the bayou’s width with tugboats and oil field barges.  Beyond the bayou on the left were groves of oak trees growing atop the bayou banks, spoil mounds of dredged canals, and what were said to be shell middens built by the early Indigenous.

When the oak groves became sparse, the smell of saltiness and seafood was everywhere.  The old and narrow Leeville bridge stood in the distance, tall enough to allow small boats to pass underneath but too tall to justify its frightening wooden approaches.  Over the wooden railing, you could see the white crosses of small cemeteries rising between the pumpjacks and well caps.  Across the bridge, back at ground level, the earth was a plain of green so vast and continuous that you believed the Gulf was a million miles away.  But in the distance, long lines of oak trees running perfectly straight marked the watery horizon and our destination as we closed in on it.

That was the 1960s.  The Leeville bridge is taller now and not made of wood.  The road is still concrete, but now it’s elevated above water that 60 years ago was the vast green plain of marshland.  There’s no marker of the watery horizon because now water is all around.  In fact, with the exception of a couple lines of broken and decaying trees near Grand Isle, the dozens of coastal oak tree ridges are all treeless and barren.  Those ridges are called “cheniers.”

The Louisiana Gulf Coast is riddled with cheniers.  They’ve been forming since prehistoric times as river and bayou sediments spilled into the Gulf were beaten back by Gulf waves.  Each ridge at one point in time was the local shoreline.  As more sediment was spilled gulfward, new shorelines were also built gulfward, becoming over time a series of ridges high enough above the salty sea to support the growth of live oaks.  There’s a chenier plain along the coast in southwest Louisiana, and there’s an infamous plain east of Fourchon that people in PoV country cross each time visit to Grand Isle.  That infamy is the Great 1893 Hurricane that destroyed Chênière Caminada, which was the largest coastal fishing village in Louisiana history.

The word “chenier” has an interesting usage outside of local visitors and history.  It was written into the scientific literature by geologists in 1935, adopted from the native French speakers in southern Louisiana who had been using the word to describe such ridges of oak trees along the coast.  Imagine my surprise when thumbing through a recent issue of the journal Marine Geology (no, not something I do as a hobby) and finding an article titled “Cheniers in China.”  “What?!” I exclaimed, awakening the librarians from their cataloguing reverie.  Here was a local French word being used as a technical term–and used far away across the world!  Ça ne peut pas être!

When you get to thinking about it, however, the Mississippi River and all its prehistoric deltas are not the only streams that spill sediments into the waves of a larger body of water.  Get on Google Earth and trace rivers to their coastal plain (yes, something I do as a hobby).  At the coast, look in either land direction to search for nearby sets of ridges on the shore of an adjacent sea or ocean.  You’ll find chênières on Australia’s Cape York Peninsula as its rivers empty into the Gulf of Carpentaria.  You’ll find cheniers on the Mediterranean Sea just west of the mouth of the Nile, on the Atlantic Ocean just south of the mouth of the Amazon, and in a complex and ornate deltaic plain as the meandering Danube empties into the Black Sea.

It’s amazing to me that one of our ancestral French words in coastal Louisiana persists as a scientific term used around the world.  It’s like finding a Popeyes in Shanghai–another tasty exported gift from the people of southern Louisiana.  Like other coastal land, however, Louisiana cheniers are at risk of getting overtaken by sea level rise, saltwater incursion, and subsidence.  Let’s hope our land protection and restoration efforts prove as resilient as the word itself.