By Maggie McGuane | April/May 2009 | Features

Louisiana's Last Shrimpers

Facing a tough economy, high fuel prices, and competition from overseas, shrimpers are watching their life's work disappear in their wakes 

It's 4:00 a.m. when Captain Mark Brockhoeft strides through the lobby of the Riverside Inn in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. There’s no doubt he’s my ride down the bayou: the muscular middle-aged fisherman wears white rubber boots, otherwise known as Cajun Reeboks, and a look of nominal amusement at hauling deadweight along on this, the second day of the inland shrimp season in Plaquemines Parish. For weeks now throughout Cajun country, people have been repairing nets, working on engines, and washing down boats in anticipation of the warm May winds and the state Fisheries Department’s announcement that the Gulf brown shrimp are mature and ready for harvest.

Minutes later we’re rattling down the Belle Chasse Highway in the cab of Captain Brockhoeft’s pickup toward his docked skiff. The captain long ago realized that there was no future in shrimping and got rid of his large trawler. “The bigger the boat, the bigger the problems,” he explains.

Now he supplements his income by guiding fly-fishing clients. Aside from the boots, he looks like a fit outdoorsman, with polarized sunglasses perched atop his head, and a snug-fitting black Under Armour T-shirt on. Still, shrimping is “in his blood,” and despite the pitiful payoff, he can’t quite give it up. The shrimp’s life cycle, and the shrimp trawling season, are the markers of time here in Cajun country.

By five we’re onboard, nets up and headed south. Quietly we wind our way through a maze of marsh grass and water, passing a handful of camps, the distinct clusters of houses rising from the water atop lanky stilt legs and over grids of sunken oil pipes. The early morning air is quiet and weighted heavily with moisture. A dead alligator floats belly up along a bank. Egrets and pelicans rise and fall above us. Millions of brown shrimp, having grown from larvae in the warm waters of the Gulf, await capture beneath us.

It isn’t hard to understand why the Acadians, violently expelled from the wilderness of Canada during le Grand Dérangement (or Great Upheaval) during the French and Indian War, settled easily into this untamed land. Their traditional way of life in the North, full of trapping, hunting, and fishing, was easily resumed after resettlement in the wetlands of southern Louisiana. Game was plentiful, the water teemed with life, and soggy passages were so seemingly impenetrable that further persecution was unlikely. The bayou provided year-round, and for almost two hundred years, Cajuns had little need to look elsewhere for income. Instead they earned their way “down the bayou” and ventured “up front” on rare occasions for supplies.

On the Water
There’s still a film of coffee and cream on my tongue when Brockhoeft reaches into the cooler and pulls out a huge bag of boiled crawfish for breakfast. I carefully pick out the tail meat, while he tilts up his chin, squeezes the heads into his mouth, and slurps the briny juice.

“You wanna hear some Cajuns on the radio?” he asks me.

“Yeah,” I tell him. He looks at me with one eyebrow raised, as if to say, “Are you sure?” then hesitates another second, and finally flips the switch on his two-way. The dense, still air, once pristine, suddenly fills with profanity and heavy laughter.

“We are dead in da water out here,” says one voice. “Dead in da f****** water.”

“No, no no,” says another. “You know what we are, we are Indians, we are a dying f****** breed is what we are. We out here ’cause all we know how to do is go out and catch shrimp, even if we goin’ broke doin’ it.”

We listen like this for some time, with the captain’s hand occasionally making gentle adjustments to the skiff’s steering wheel. Along the horizon are other boats scattered here and there—a few other small skiffs are visible through the marsh grass, while larger trawlers drift farther down toward the Gulf.

From time to time, the captain checks the nets, picking knots of swamp grass out of the loops and lowering them back down. This is not a TV episode of Deadliest Catch. There’s no frantic slipping along on an ice-covered deck, or yelling of orders down from the wheelhouse. All along the inland waters people are sipping on beers, chewing on boiled shrimp, waiting to hoist their nets. Perhaps it’s the laid-back pace of these fishermen that’s failed to capture the attention of America’s excitement-addicted public and thus explains the lack of fanfare as the last few shrimpers slip into oblivion.

The radio’s noise comes on and off with no warning, and just when I’ve grown accustomed again to the silence, a voice fills the air.

“You know what I seen dis mornin’? A big ol’ earthquake hit China. You tink it squashed any of dem shrimp farms over der?”

“It don’t matter,” responds another trawler. “Der’s so many, it don’t matter.”

“Yep, we’re de Indians now—a dying breed.”

Ninety percent of shrimp consumed in the United States is imported from Asia, where aquaculture farming is widespread. More than a few tourists in the French Quarter have enjoyed étouffée made with shrimp grown by a Thai farmer named Pakpao. The flood of farmed shrimp onto the market has led to a 40 percent decline in the price for caught shrimp—with adjustments made for inflation, the price of shrimp today is about the same as it was in the early 1960s. The same cannot be said for fuel, ice, and parts. But unlike mixed baby salad greens, or, say, grass-fed beef, the average consumer doesn’t care about the origin of his shrimp enough to pay a premium for it. This is too bad, as the flavor of a Gulf shrimp, netted at the peak of its life cycle and best enjoyed after the simplest preparation, evokes the faintest flavors of salt water and Gulf life. By comparison, a farmed shrimp feels soggy in the mouth and has a faintly sweet taste—or as one shrimper tells me, “dey taste like all the shrimp shit dey swimmin’ around in.”