Poems About Boothville, Louisiana

Boothville: The End of Highway 23 at the Edge of the Delta

Highway 23 runs south from New Orleans through the east bank of Plaquemines Parish, past Braithwaite and Phoenix and Happy Jack and Buras, past the oil refineries and the shrimping docks and the communities that string themselves along the levee road like beads on a single thread. It keeps going south past everything until the land starts to thin, until the marsh is closer on both sides than the road is wide, until you arrive at Boothville and understand that you have come to la fin du chemin, the end of the road, in the most literal sense the phrase can hold.

Boothville is one of the southernmost inhabited places in Louisiana. South of here is Venice, and south of Venice is the Head of Passes where the Mississippi River divides into its final distributaries before it gives up everything it has carried from Minnesota and Montana and Iowa and releases it into the Gulf of Mexico. You do not arrive at Boothville by accident. The highway brought you here deliberately, carrying you through the whole long corridor of the lower delta before setting you down at the place where the land runs out.

What you find at that end is not emptiness. It is the oil and gas infrastructure that has defined this part of Plaquemines Parish for decades, the drill rigs and service docks and the workers who live in communities like Boothville because the work is here. It is the shrimping and oystering families who have worked this water for generations, who know the oyster beds of the lower delta and the passes where the shrimp run in season. And above all of it is the sky, which is bigger here than anywhere else in Louisiana because the land is so low that there is nothing left to interrupt the horizon.

Life in Boothville: Shrimp Boats, Oyster Beds, Oil Fields, and the Families Who Stayed

The working life of Boothville runs on two tracks that have always shared the same ground: the extraction economy of the oil and gas industry, and the harvest economy of the fishing families who have worked the lower delta since before the refineries were built. The oil industry came in the mid-twentieth century and changed the economic character of the lower corridor permanently, bringing workers and infrastructure and the particular kind of community that forms around industrial employment in a remote place. But the fishing families were already here. Les bateaux crevettiers, the shrimp boats, had been working these passes for generations before the first drill rig was towed into the Gulf, and they continued working after the oil industry arrived, the two economies running parallel through the same community, using the same docks and the same fuel and the same small-town infrastructure.

The oyster beds of the lower Plaquemines Parish waters are among the most productive in Louisiana, fed by the brackish mix of river water and Gulf water that the delta creates at the Head of Passes. Families who have worked those beds for three and four generations carry the specific geographic knowledge of where the reefs are, how the salinity shifts seasonally, which passes are safe in which weather. That knowledge is not written down anywhere useful. It lives in the people who hold it, and those people live in places like Boothville because that is where the work is.

The Mississippi delta is still building land here, even as it loses it elsewhere along the Louisiana coast. The river carries sediment from the whole interior of North America and deposits it at the mouth, and the alluvial ground at the Head of Passes is some of the newest land in Louisiana. That is a fact that holds two truths at once: the delta is dynamic and living, still extending itself into the Gulf; and the communities built on that land are always at the edge of what the river and the storm season will allow.

Katrina came over the east bank levees and the communities of lower Plaquemines Parish took water from both directions: the storm surge from the Gulf side and the river water from the overtopped levees. Boothville and the communities near Venice were among the hardest hit in the entire metro area. Families lost houses that had stood for decades. Some left for higher ground in Baton Rouge or New Orleans and did not come back. The ones who came back came back because this is where their lives had been built: the oyster beds they knew, the oil field work that was available, the community of people who understood without explanation what it meant to live at the end of the road on the lower Mississippi.

Featured Poem: Boothville

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the road that ends at Boothville, the sky that opens up over the delta flats when the land is low enough to let it, the shrimping and oystering families and the oil field workers who chose the last place on the map and stayed. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same knowledge holds: the water defines the life, the horizon is the whole truth, and the people who stay at the difficult edges of the map are the people who carry what cannot be carried anywhere else.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold the whole meaning of this place: The road ends here. / The people didn't. It is not a consolation. It is a fact about the specific kind of endurance that a community develops when it has chosen the edge of the map and decided to hold it. The families of Boothville did not stay at the end of Highway 23 because they had no options. They stayed because this place holds something that cannot be found further up the road: the knowledge of the lower delta, the oyster beds, the sky that opens up when there is nothing left to block it.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and Endurance at the Edge of the Map

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is the center of everything and the question of what endures is never far from the surface. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the small communities of coastal Louisiana, from the bayou parishes to the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor and the Highway 23 communities that run south until the land gives out. Boothville fits directly into the concerns of that work.

The Gulf Coast tradition that Parfait writes from is one of staying in the hardest places: not because the living is easy, but because the place itself carries an irreplaceable inheritance of knowledge and community and working water. The shrimping families of Boothville and the oystering families of the lower delta share the same inheritance as the fishing families of Dulac: generations of work on water that is always both livelihood and threat, the accumulated knowledge of where the reef is and when the passes are safe and what the sky means when it does what it is doing right now. That knowledge does not transfer to a zip code further up the map. It lives in the people who hold it, and those people live in places like Boothville because this is the only place where it is true.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: the Gulf Coast poetry of endurance and staying, written from inside the communities that most American poetry has never thought to mention, from a poet in Dulac, Louisiana who knows what it means to choose the difficult edge and hold it.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Boothville holds you: Highway 23 running out of road at the edge of the delta, the shrimp boats and oyster families and oil field workers who chose the last place on the map, the sky that opens up when the land is low enough to let it. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to the difficult edge holds: the water defines the life, the horizon is the whole truth, and the people who stay at the end of the road are holding something that cannot survive elsewhere.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the lower delta, the end of Highway 23, and the Gulf South communities that endure.

Find more poems about east bank Plaquemines Parish at Ironton, Happy Jack, Naomi, Phoenix, and Jesuit Bend. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Boothville, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish at the end of Highway 23, where the shrimp boats and oyster families and oil field workers chose the last place on the map and held it, and the sky is bigger than anywhere else because the land is low enough to let it be. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.