SPRING BREAK '010!!!!!!!!!

My spring break would probably be considered by most to be more natural than the typical spring breaker’s experience. I went on the Bayou Spring Break trip down into deep Cajun country to study coastal degradation and do our best to contribute to the solutions with the little time we had. However, even this trip was fraught with intrusions and interactions with the synthetic world. On the first day we took a power boat out to a sand ridge built from sand dredged to make the port deeper. We planted marsh grasses to try to keep the sand from eroding and measured the progress of experimental plants on the top of the ridge. Even on this new tiny island we found, shoes, bottles, light bulbs and all sorts of other evidence of human interference washed in from the rising water. The next day we went to LUMCON (Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium) to observe what was being done by the state’s universities to deal with the crisis. The consortium is set up in a state of the art building raised above the marsh. The land had been filled repeatedly and then cemented with enormous pilings driven at least a hundred feet into the marsh to keep it sturdy. The day after that was all about the interaction between synthetic and natural, unintentional and negative in this particular case. We spent the day on Grand Isle contorting ourselves to squeeze under vines and through brush to reach litter that had been washed in by hurricanes. We found stovetops, Styrofoam, and beer bottles so old none of us had ever seen anything shaped like them before. After we finally finished we went to soak our scratches and bug bites in the ocean and the sun. From our post on the sand we could see rock barriers built to protect the beach and an oil rig a few miles off shore. Despite our best efforts to immerse ourselves in nature over break, as it turned out we immersed ourselves more in the clash and attempted reconciliation of this delicate ecosystem and the people and processes that live and prosper on it.