By John Hazlett
About 50 miles northwest of New Orleans lies a large tract of swamps and wetlands, about 27,000 acres, now collected together within the state-owned Joyce Wildlife Management Area. Viewed from the sky, the land that surrounds the WMA looks, aptly, like a tornado laid on its side, the narrowing funnel running down the land-bridge that separates Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas, the broader top stretching between the towns of Ponchatoula on the west and Madisonville on the east. Through this frustratingly inaccessible tract run the Tickfaw and Tangipahoa Rivers and their many tributaries—Stinking Bayou, Middle Bayou, Mays Bayou, Cow Bayou, Black Bayou, Bedicoe Creek—and a host of defunct timber canals—Mire Canal, Long Canal—and, more recently, a couple of petroleum exploration canals, most notably Oil Well Canal, which takes a straight diagonal cut from the southeast suburbs of Ponchatoula through the cypress-tupelo swamp, dead-ending in an abandoned oil exploration area, dating back to the 1960s.
In the middle of the tract, like a pearl in the moist heart of an oyster, lies a 100-acre plot that contains the last stand of un-cut primary growth cypress forest on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. My friend Chris Staudinger and I happily stumbled across some information on this site while researching the timber industry in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin earlier this year. Amanda Cantrell’s 2008 article in the Ponchatoula Times told the story of John Jacob Dahmer, who, in 1956, had helped to save these giant trees from the maw of the timber industry. The article was tantalizingly vague about the exact location of the pearl, but as frequent explorers of Louisiana swamps, Chris and I could not resist the challenge or the lure. The existence of the hidden grove triggered a feeling that is familiar to all nature geeks—the thrill of witnessing a natural phenomenon that very few others have had a chance to see.
This grove of gigantic bald cypress trees, about as rare now as the ivory-billed woodpecker, contained specimens ranging from 600 to 1000 years in age. It was hidden in the deep swamp, and some of the trees were so large, according to the Times writer, that an old photo showed “as many as 10 Ponchatoula loggers circling the massive trunk … with hands barely touching.” Both Chris and I are used to second and third growth cypress that have grown up in the aftermath of the clear-cutting of forests in the Pontchartrain Basin between 1870 and 1920. Even an occasional fungus-hollowed giant cypress, left alone by the loggers, can be found along the paddling routes we frequent as swamp guides. But not an entire grove of the ancients! Almost all of the trees we are used to on the western shore, some fifteen miles away from the grove, are mere cubs, most of them younger than eighty. Even their relative youthfulness is tainted, since most are dying because of soil subsidence, the result of clear cutting, and the digging of pull-boat canals to remove the felled trees, which allowed silvicidal salt water to move in from the brackish lake. In short, the rapacious logging techniques employed during the heyday of Southeast Louisiana’s timber orgy ensured that the state’s forests would be a non-renewable resource. Once extracted and sold to enrich a very few families, the denuded landscape was abandoned to an inevitable degradation process. The cypress on the western shore today are like children wasting away from a horrific flesh-eating disease.
So Chris and I yearned to see what the forest looked like before its destruction had taken place, to see the landscape described by one of our literary heroes, Paul Keddy. “Louisiana,” he had written, “once had more than 1.6 million acres of cypress forest. Some of these trees were 120 feet high and from 25 to 40 feet in circumference … One large tree felled in … 1931 was more than 1,000 years old and 91 inches in diameter at the base. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, this tree had already been 300 years old.” We were hooked. Ancient timber forests! Colossal trees! Thousands of acres of them. Shutting out the sky with their russet canopies hovering some seventy, eighty, a hundred feet over the forest floors.
We felt like big game hunters, hungry to wrap our arms around one of the really big ones. But we needed help. Ernest Hemingway, after all, didn’t undertake his African safaris without assistance. He had to depend on P.H. Percival, the famous guide, to help him find his biggest “trophies.” Chris and I needed our own P.H. Percival, someone with access to and knowledge of the big cypresses that lurked hidden in the Louisiana swamps.
We found our man in John Jay Dahmer, the son of the man who had successfully prevented the logging company from clearing that last 100-acre tract of cypress forest. Dahmer, now in his late 70s, couldn’t have been a better guide. He’d grown up hunting, fishing, and trapping in these swamps. He’d owned his own swamp tour business. He’d been a crop duster, and a beleaguered parish politician, and he’d witnessed the drastic changes the land has undergone over the course of his long life. Who better to show us what we wanted so eagerly to see? So when he agreed to Chris’s request for help in gaining access to the ancient cypresses, we were overjoyed.
On the appointed day, we loaded two kayaks on the rack of my pickup and drove 50 miles to meet Dahmer in the parking lot of Delatte’s Country Market on Highway 22, outside of Ponchatoula. The man was immediately likeable, in a low-key way. He was clearly used to dealing with people, having served, before retiring, as Tangipahoa Parish Clerk of Court for over a decade. A camouflaged baseball hat was perched on top of his head, with the words “Happy, Happy, Happy” printed on the crown. He wore a hunting jacket, which he doffed soon after we arrived, khaki pants, and a long sleeved, heavy cotton tee-shirt, with a hanky perched in the breast pocket. His face was clean shaven and he peered at us through a pair of oversized aviator style bifocals, which magnified his eyes and gave him a slightly owlish look. After brief introductions, he explained where we’d be going. As he talked it was easy to see that he possessed a kind of proprietary relation to the wilderness, but he apparently deemed us worthy. So off we went. Dahmer drove his Chevy Silverado ahead of us, pulling a trailered 16-foot jon boat with a longtail Go-Devil motor, and led us down Thibodeaux and Roy Lavigne Roads to the locked private gate and shelled dirt lane that terminated at the northern end of Oil Well Canal, one portal into the nearly inaccessible Joyce Wildlife Management Area.
The trip down Oil Well was every bit as enchanting as we had hoped. Unlike many Louisianans with a Go-Devil, Dahmer kept his motor throttled low, so we passed through the cypress and tupelo trees, mostly denuded of their foliage in the mid December chill, with a good view of the swamp lands on both sides of the canal. The two kayaks were on a tow-line behind the jon boat, bouncing lightly over the gentle wake. We putted along, veering around floating logs, and ducking under low hanging branches. Common salvinia floated on the canal surface, and a few stands of water hyacinth were scattered along its sides, but the previous month had seen a few freezes, and these invasive plants were minimal. Occasionally we’d pass long strips of sawgrass on the banks. Visible here and there in the forest itself were strong spikes of vibrant green saw palmetto and the aptly named arrowhead plant.
Photo by author. Chris Staudinger seated. John Jay Dahmer standing.
Dahmer, as it turned out, provided not only a key to the locked gate into the swamp, but also a wealth of information about its history. We peppered him with questions and he expatiated on all of them. The west side of the canal, he explained, differed from the east, since it contained the remains of a road that the oil company had built into the heart of the wilderness to provide access to an unsuccessful exploratory drilling site. The canal, in fact, unlike most canals in Louisiana, was merely the source of the soil the company needed to raise the road above the swamp. When the well turned out to be dry, the petroleum people had pulled out, allowing the road to dissolve back into the swamp floor. Hunting clubs, men with whom Dahmer had grown up, moved into the area afterwards and burned the bridges that the road crossed in order to prevent others from driving their vehicles into the heart of the swamp. The burnt out remains of the old wooden structures made it clear that the locals didn’t want outsiders motoring into what they considered their private domain.
Also on the west side, and coming into it at a perpendicular angle, were the remains of an old railway, which had been used to haul the cypress logs out of the swamp to the millworks on Highway 51. When the timber men finally finished their work, they pulled up and sold the rails, but the traces of the line could still be seen. Dahmer himself had ridden along on one the last trainloads of timber, and remembers looking out at the flattened forest as they crossed the swamp on their way to the mill. Another abandoned rail-line, the Mainline Rail, runs from the same highway on the east and terminates near the drilling site.
The east side of the canal, by contrast, was pure cypress-tupelo swamp, mostly flooded, and the trees looked remarkably robust, a stark contrast to the moribund cypress that Chris and I knew so well on the western shores of the lake.
Photo by author. Oil exploration road and bridge burned down by hunting clubs
Today, environmentalists are concerned with the enormous damage that the oil and gas industries have wreaked on the state, especially their profligate slicing up of our wetlands with canals that gave them access to the resources hidden beneath the swamps and marshes. These canals, roughly 10,000 miles of them, were trenched out when the state still subscribed to the belief that swamps were useless wastelands, and that the voracious extraction of their resources was a beneficent act of environmental stewardship. So the state was generous in its dealings with anyone with a proposal for their disposal. It sold the lands to private individuals and corporations for a pittance and only stipulated that once the canals had ceased being useful, they were to be filled in and the wetlands restored. Of course, this was never done, and the canals became the major arteries by which the Gulf of Mexico’s saline waters infiltrated the land, destroying the vegetation that held the swamps and marshes together and bringing about the loss of nearly 2000 square miles of land as the coast literally dissolved into the Gulf.
But before the oil companies came in after the 1920s, many canals had already been cut into the swamps by trappers and loggers. The latter clear cut the forests surrounding the Pontchartrain Basin between 1870 and 1920, leaving the land vulnerable and barren. Nowhere is this more dramatically apparent than on the North and West Shores of Lake Pontchartrain. A satellite view of those areas reveals just how thoroughly the logging canals scarred and denuded the swamp lands. From the air one can see the radial spokes of the pull-boat canals, used to drag cypress trees out of the swamp to the Galva and Long Canals—the area’s primary logging waterways. Where once grew lush cypress and tupelo forests, there are now only grassy marshes. The cypress wasn’t replanted by the timber companies, and when others tried replanting later, the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain, seeping into the swamp via the pull-boat canals, prevented their successful re-establishment and growth.
Google Maps aerial view showing timber canals and pull-boat logging canals
Dahmer was telling us about all of this and more as we idled our way up the canal, and we were so engrossed with the stories of the land and his life, that we slid right by the old cypress grove without seeing it. We’d gone another half mile before he shut down the motor.
“I think we went by the grove,” he said. “Should we turn around or go all the way to the end of the canal, and then catch it on our way back?” Chris and I both opted for the long tour, and so on we cruised until we reached the end, or at least the point at which further progress was blocked by sawgrass and other vegetation that crowded over the narrowing canal. Chris and I hauled ourselves over the sides of the jon boat and wandered back into the undergrowth. The Fish and Wildlife Service had apparently tried to replant cypress in this area, for we saw dozens of plastic pipes, out of which cypress saplings reared their young branches. The pipes, Dahmer told us, protected the saplings from hungry nutria, another invasive species, with a body of a beaver, the tail of a rat, and long yellow teeth. Other than that, we couldn’t see much, though we knew that just over the browning vegetation was the open marshy area of the defunct oil drilling site.
Back in the jon boat, we headed toward the launch site, straining our eyes to see the big trees on the east side of the canal. The tension aroused by our expectations was nearly palpable. Then it happened. Dahmer pointed to one of the trees. “There’s one of the originals,” he said, “and this here is where the grove starts.” We stared, looking hard at the trunk to which he pointed and trying to find it as majestic as the towering cypresses in our imaginations. It was tall and it was big. But perhaps the expectations we had of these trees were too tall for any tree to meet. They were certainly more of a hurdle than any of the trees in our immediate view could surmount.
But we weren’t to be so easily daunted. Perhaps the real colossuses were just a ways back in the densely forested swamp. Chris donned his heavy wading suit; I opted for my fast-dry hiking pants and Crocs. And over the side of the jon boat we stepped again and began to slog our way back into the trees in search of the Real Grove—one that matched the Grove inside our heads. We didn’t get too far—perhaps 50 yards or so—before the depth of the swamp water and the difficulty of traversing it stopped us. I stepped into a hole that quickly swallowed one of my legs. Trying to extract my trapped Croc, I fell backwards on my butt, and would have flopped onto my back if Chris hadn’t caught me. It made me wish I had had the sense to don my own wading suit. But we managed to meander around a good deal within that 50-yard limit. Chris actually did a bit of tree hugging. I took the photos, pleased, at least, that his arms failed to encircle an entire trunk.
Photo by author. Chris Staudinger standing inside split trunk of Old Cypress
There were lots of big trees, but I’d guess that the largest of them could be embraced by three, or maybe four, men with their arms stretched around the trunk, nowhere near the 10-man trees described by Keddy, or even some of those I’d seen in lots of other places in the state. Still, they were probably close to four feet in diameter. Good, strong, towering trees. But, just a tad underwhelming—a sadly diminished version of the trees in our heads to which they were being compared.
I think that Dahmer must have sensed something of our mental state when we got back to the jon boat. At 79, he retains something of the youngster in his psychological make-up, and I couldn’t help but notice that he was as eager for us to be impressed by the trees as we were to be impressed. So we all acted as though we’d just witnessed the Eighth Wonder of the World, and to ensure our admiration of his forest, Dahmer let us know that there were other remnants of the old logging days out in the swamp, well worth seeing. “Take a look back there in the woods,” he offered. “Somewhere out there are a couple of abandoned winching trucks that timber men used to drag those cypress logs out to the railroad.” And sure enough, with a little searching, Chris and I managed to see two of the rusted out hulks way back among trees. As the appointed photographer on the expedition, I volunteered to board one of the trailing kayaks and paddle my way out to the trucks to get a closer look and to take a few snapshots. It’d be poignant to see the skeletons of these old logging dinosaurs, sinking slowly into the swamp vegetation and muck.
It took me a while to reach the trucks with the kayak, and while I was out there, acting like I knew what I was doing with a new and unfamiliar camera, I suddenly saw, off to my right about 75 yards, the heads of Dahmer and Chris floating serenely and silently over the vegetation and disappearing directly into the forest. What slough had they discovered that allowed the jon boat to penetrate into the mysterious depths of the darkening woods? I certainly hadn’t seen it. And it was an odd sight, the heads of the two men moving in a smooth straight line behind the tall plants through an area of the swamp that I would have thought impassable in the jon boat. Ah well, I considered, it’ll be interesting to see what they discover.
So I finished my photo shoot with the abandoned late-1940s winch trucks, and paddled back out to the canal. And there I waited. And waited. Feeling just a little abandoned myself, I finally tied the second kayak to my own and headed across the canal to an opening on the west side that led, eventually, to an area of the swamp between the forest and Highway 51. This is a large swath of land whose vegetation has been killed off by what locals call the “poop slough,” a large area of wastewater run-off or “secondarily treated municipal effluent” from the town of Hammond. But that’s another story.
Photo by author. Abandoned winch truck used to haul timber from the swamp
Satisfied that I’d gone as far as I could, I paddled back to Oil Well Canal, and Chris and Dahmer finally emerged from the dense vegetation of their magical disappearing act. On the drive home later, Chris explained that Dahmer had gotten temporarily lost wandering in the unmarked flooded areas of the swamp, and that they had, in their confusion, been motoring in the wrong direction until Chris, sensing the situation, consulted their GPS location on his cell phone. But I never received a full account of what they had seen or where, exactly, they had gone. When I pondered the day later that night, in the hazy state between wakefulness and sleeping, my mind began to falter and dark thoughts crept in. Had Dahmer deemed me unworthy of the true giants? Had he given Chris a vision that I, somehow, did not merit? Was I a latter day Moses, barred from entering the Promised Land, while Chris, 40 years younger and less tainted by his sins, was ushered into the sanctum sanctorum of the forest to worship at the altar of the ancient cypresses? Such were my paranoid thoughts as I drifted into a deep sleep, no doubt engendered by the long and arduous journey we had undertaken. But when I awoke the next morning, with the sun streaming through my bedroom window, such notions evaporated as the paranoid delusions they so clearly were.
Meanwhile, after Chris and Dahmer met me back in the canal, we re-tethered the kayaks to the jon-boat and headed back to the landing. The journey had given us much to ponder and we felt buoyed, in spite of the environmental disasters that threaten all of us, by the beauty of these healthy cypress trees and the vibrant swamp in which they stood, such a contrast to the dying swamps we knew on the western shores of the lake. But Dahmer himself is no dreamy optimist. When we waxed effusive on the swamp-scape, he turned pensive. “Yes, it looks good doesn’t it,” he said, “but current projections of sea level rise and land subsidence tell us another story. In thirty years, if we don’t do something now, the shores of Lake Pontchartrain will be lapping the sidewalks of Ponchatoula, and all of this will be under water.”
Was disappointment, then, the appropriate response to the actual cypress forest we’d visited? I don’t think so, though by this point in our adventure we saw the swamp as a living palimpsest: the giant ghosts of the old forests, thousands of years old, described by Keddy and vividly etched in our imaginations; the actual trees, hundreds of years old, still soaring upwards as we stood in its midst; and now another vision, this one apocalyptic—of a future in which this same forest would be washed away by the rising tide. But the hard fact of the forest we could see with our own eyes, the old cypress grove saved by Dahmer’s father, possessed its own truth. It is real, and its significance and interest lies not so much in its physical appearance as in the narrative of its rescue from the saws, chains, and winches of the timber company owners who laid waste to so much of the precious wetlands and swamps of Southeast Louisiana. They did so, arguing disingenuously that the logging was necessary to maintain the livelihoods of the timber workers and their families, when in fact the period of clear cut logging was relatively short-lived, and the low-wage logging workers soon moved on to other jobs. The real reason for the logging was simpler and less altruistic: the timber company owners made enormous sums of money from the rape of the wilderness, and they clearly cared little for the long-term wellbeing of their workers or the environment in which we all have to live. They took from the land, they gave little back, and they left destruction in their wake. In the face of corporate greed, John Jacob Dahmer made an important, even if somewhat futile, symbolic and romantic gesture. It was a gesture pregnant with meaning—an acknowledgement by one human being, and all those whom he convinced to follow his lead, that the decimation of the Louisiana swamps would inevitably diminish the world we live in.
John Hazlett is the author of My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics (1998). He has published essays on travel, first-person narratives, and American literature, as well as book, theater, and film reviews. He lives in New Orleans and works as a guide for Louisiana Lost Lands Environmental Tours, a swamp and wetlands educational organization.
Another account of the journey described in this article was published in Country Roads' February 2019 issue.