LIFE

Rheta Johnson: Of sinker cypress and causes

Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Rheta Grimsley Johnson

THE ATCHAFALAYA SWAMP, La. –

The bridge is closed that leads over Bayou Mercier to Greg Guirard's cypress cabin, creating a circuitous detour and an even quieter-than-usual space on the edge of the swamp. I don't mind the detour.

Any excuse is a good one to visit Greg, and no road too long. He is a friend, a treasured pen pal and one of the most interesting men I know. He has taught English in Costa Rica, Lafayette and Belize; crawfished in the swamp; raised a family; written nine books; and made movies, countless photographs and furniture.

Greg is on a first-name basis with documentary filmmakers, musicians and movie stars. But his best friends, the ones he most admires, still make their living in the swamp.

At his isolated roost he has a cat named Mackerel, a resident alligator, a crawfish pond. And Greg Guirard has causes. Good ones.

His home place, which belonged first to his grandfather, is a bosky oasis of work boats and outboard motors and old tractors and big logs. Someone who works, and works hard, lives here.

The prevailing color of Greg's swampy Walden is green — even in wintertime — punctuated by ripe oranges hanging heavy in the trees in the grove by the small cabin he built himself. The haphazard beauty is breathtaking.

Today I have with me another old friend who is building a house and wants to look at Greg's barns filled with "sinker logs" — cypress resurrected from the swamp bottom. The wood has been, for a century, buried in the Atchafalaya mud. Piece by piece, season by season, Greg has salvaged it. At 78, he is tall and youthful, a man who needs no gym membership.

My contractor friend, who knows her way around a lumberyard, is awestruck. I can see it in her face as they talk. Greg has made another cypress convert.

Cypress is not a renewable resource, and Greg preaches that. He is an active part of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, a small but feisty and effective nonprofit organization that in all ways fights to protect the swamp. It opposes the harvesting of what's left of Louisiana's cypress for lumber or mulch — or wood pellets to be shipped to foreign shores.

Makes no sense, but Louisiana politicians for years have winked at the decimation of its most valuable natural resource. "Short-sighted" doesn't cover it.

When in the light of the storage barn you inspect that beautiful and impervious wood, you understand at least one of Greg's passions. No two pieces are exactly alike. And he knows them all intimately, the way a cat knows its own body. You can tell he hates to part with any of the wood, the burls or the pretty waxed planks or the aptly nicknamed "pecky." Yet selling it is his livelihood.

When his grandfather gave him the land on which he built his cozy cabin, most of it was a sugarcane field. Greg began personally planting oaks and cypress, as many as 50,000 trees. It has taken over three decades, but now there's no more room to plant a tree in the former field.

This low and teeming land one day will be, he believes, "an enchanted forest" for his children and grandchildren. Now, that's a cause worth embracing.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson's most recent book is "Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts." Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@

aol.com.