Mile 133.0 - RBD Bonnet Carre Point

133 RBD Bonnet Carre Point

As you round Bonnet Carre Point you enter a five mile section of relative calm before the frenzied industrial storm resumes at the Bonnet Carre Spillway, and Norco/Shell beyond it. There is some fleeting here, and a few small bankside industries, but they seem insignificant compared to the vastness of the sky, and the ambient depth created in this giant bend of the Lower Mississippi. The river spreads out almost a mile wide at low water (and up to two miles wide from levee to levee at flood stage). As it spreads it seems to achieve a delicate sensitivity with the atmosphere. The sky covers it all, but the river brings everything to life, and has a graceful presence, and elegantly flows through it all, like the bible says of God, “through everything seen, and through everything unseen.” Evening and morning skies playfully color themselves over the face of the waters with the chalky palette of the sub-tropical sky, salmon pinks, robin’s egg blues, soft oranges and purples, and creamy yellows -- all composed in subtle washes, broken only by flocks of pelicans, cormorants, egrets, anhingas and other water birds, and maybe flushed slightly by a breeze, or the waves of a distant passing freighter, and the dark green line of the treeline, and the dark red line of the muddy rip-rap below. All seems in harmony here, even the giant piles of fleeted barges somehow have found their place. Adding to the sacred ambience is a mile-wide Green Space created by the floodplain over the East Bank, an extensive bottomland hardwood forest which includes Bonnet Carre Island (described below).

But this deceptively calm and orderly stretch of river has a violent past, present and future. The peaceful past is broken by a series of catastrophic levee breaks both located within this especially vulnerable bend of the river, on the East bank at Bonnet Carre Crevasse, and on the West Bank at Hymelia Crevasse. The present peace is disrupted by the presence of three giant power plants, all located within the vicinity of Thirty Five Mile Point: Entergy Waterford, Entergy Little Gypsy and Entergy Montz. The future peace is cracked by the big unknown of potential flooding and rising sea levels. As the oceans rise, and the flood events become more pronounced (like the 2011 flood), and also hurricanes slam the coast with greater intensity and higher storm surges, they all cross paths here. All of these natural events collide here for the first time at this particular crossroads where the main channel of the biggest river in North America meets it first big open access to the Gulf of Mexico: via the Bonnet Carre Spillway and Lake Ponchartrain.