Bayou Oystermen Brace for Oil

Morning broke bold and bright over the broad wetlands of Louisiana's Grand Bayou, where Byron Encalade stood on a 24-foot flatboat gliding over narrow channels of brackish water, past plywood cabins with clapboard siding, corrugated tin roofs and names like Wahoo, Dixie and Amazing Grace.

Reaching into a wire bin, he pulled out a charcoal colored oyster the size of his fist, raised in the fertile delta after Hurricane Katrina roared through five years ago, ripping up the fragile estuary and leaving oystermen like Byron to start over from scratch.

"This is what we've been waiting for since Katrina," he said. "Now it's all about to be destroyed."

He tossed the oyster back in the bin, gazed out across the bayou and shook his head. "Goin' down the drain."

A month after BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig began gushing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the cusp of its toxic blanket of doom has begun to wash on shore, swallowing up marsh grass by its fibrous roots and threatening to poison the marine life upon which thousands of families like Byron's depend.

The Gulf provides about 70 percent of all the oysters and shrimp produced in the United States, along with hundreds of millions of pounds each year of red snapper, grouper, bluefin tuna and other fish.

With more than 6 million gallons of crude oil in the water, though, and at least 210,000 more gallons gushing in each day, federal and state authorities have closed the rich fishing grounds from the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola Bay.

Shrimpers, fishermen and oystermen like Byron have been idled for what could be a very long time.

"After Katrina, 40 percent of our fishermen exited the business," said Robin Barnes, senior vice president for Seedco Financial, a New Orleans community lending organization that serves more than 500 regional watermen. "Unless this is a short-term problem, a lot of these guys will not survive the closing of the whole season."

Byron, 55, can't remember life before oysters.

"I've been doing this since I was a kid. You start oystering on the bayou when you're old enough to get on the boat and pick 'em up," he explained. "I helped my grandfather build a 40-foot boat in his backyard."

There's a lifetime of experience in every catch he hauls in, lessons stored away about currents and tides and shifting shoals, when to dredge up the oysters, when to just leave them be.

"We don't know how to do anything but shrimp, catch oysters and trap," said Byron's friend and fellow waterman, Maurice Phillips. "That's all we know how to do."

It's hardly a way to get rich.

An oyster boat burns a lot of gas. And it's a good day's work for a crew of three to fill 50 burlap sacks, each one fetching $28 at current prices dockside.

It's a living, though, and, here on the bayou, it's more: it's a way of life.

"We'll take 'em, open 'em up, put some butter and some cheese and some other special sauces on them, barbecue sauce, lemon, and man alive, they are good," said Byron. "I love 'em grilled. I eat 'em raw when I'm on the boat. But I've got to have my Louisiana hot sauce. I got my hot sauce, I can eat 'em all day long."

Putting food on the plate in the weeks ahead could be a challenge in these parts - especially to those whose livelihood depends on oysters and the clean water they need to survive.

"They good to catch right now. This oil come inside, it's going to kill them all," warned Phillips. "We hope that some way, somehow, the good lord will open up a way to provide," he said, dark eyes sweeping the vast marshlands in search of hope. "I tell you what."