Sometimes we go home.

It is perhaps an unlikely place. Not on any tourist map and not much of an official record to show when viewed through conventional history. Rather it is an impressive, if not dramatic, collision of engineering, labor power, and nature. It sits on the edge of what is unnervingly known as Cancer Alley. It is where THE river is regulated.

Built on the heels of the 1927 flood, The Bonnet Carre spillway was constructed to let floodwaters from the Mississippi flow into Lake Pontchartrain and eventually out to the Gulf. Maybe five or six years ago the Army Corp of Engineers closed the spillway and it has only been opened about a dozen times across one hundred years.

I like it here. It is only rivaled by some of the magnificent deltas of Mozambique; a place that also holds the feel of home anywhere outside of New Orleans. Like so much of River Road, the spillway animates the contradictions we necessarily confront. A place where industry intrudes on nature to produce a striking aesthetic. A place where uncomfortable truths of the past can be quietly obscured by the arresting power of a chemical plant, a sugar cane field, or by the undeniable beauty of a 300-year-old oak canopy. A place where a fragile bargain with the land has always existed, balancing the soul of everyday life with the cross currents of floods, storms, dislocation, and a colonial economy.

What I most often notice, however, is something as simple as a vehicle crossing the spillway with water at its wheels; the sound of machinery interrupting the soft tone of the river; and the curious almost city-like energy within rural environs. Indeed, landscape, memory, and a certain restful incongruence seem central to my understanding of the world. Or, at least this small, remarkable corner of it. And, if place didn’t have meaning, we would never go there.