The Lake No One Knows
The largest natural lake in Texas isn’t really natural. That’s just one of the murky misconceptions about Caddo Lake.
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The more I learned about the lake, the more it drew me back. With each trip, the three-hour drive from Dallas to Uncertain seemed to pass more quickly because I knew Caddo Lake was at the end. About three years ago, I noticed a For Sale sign on an old racing-green Karmann Ghia coupe parked under a shed by Fred’s house. Fred had bought it in 1971 for his wife, Loucille, but now he had to sell it because of his handicap—it sat so low to the ground that he could no longer climb in and out. The car still had its original paint, its original upholstery, its original engine, even the old AM radio. I still don’t know why I bought that car from Fred. Perhaps it was because of the bumper sticker that said “Greater Caddo Lake Association.” I rattled around Dallas in it for two years, a reminder of the green lake in the fumy concrete city.
One morning Fred decided to show me the Monster of Caddo Lake. It had been misting for hours, and a vaporous haze was clinging to the water surface. Vegetation closed in behind us as we motored through a slough thick with lilies. Deeper and deeper into the maze we progressed. More than once the motor snagged on the undergrowth, and Fred had to heave the outboard from the water and scrape off the viny loops. At last he gave up on the motor and began to paddle silently through a grove of fluted trunks resembling a floating Temple of Karnak.
Had Fred not pointed it out, I would not have noticed the gnarlish mass—a burl or perhaps an errant root protruding from a cypress tree just above the waterline. From the right angle, you could see the unmistakable contours of a face: two dark and liquid eyes, a bulbous nose, and a sinewy smile. Fred said he had shown the monster only to Loucille, and she had been horrified. “She thinks it’s pornographic,” he said. At first Fred had also thought of it as evil, but gradually he had come to see it as a benevolent creature, to think of it as a friend. We sat for a while, contemplating the face upon the tree. I wasn’t so sure I agreed with Fred, but I didn’t say so. By then, I had already begun to sense that on Caddo Lake, all was not as it seemed.
THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE ON CADDO LAKE like to brag that it is the only natural lake in Texas. While it is true that the lake was created by a natural phenomenon, the giant raft, to believe that Caddo Lake is natural today you would have to ignore a lot of evidence to the contrary—the boat lanes that would be impassable were they not regularly dredged, the striped bass that were introduced in the fifties, the oil wells on the Louisiana side. Most of all, you would have to overlook the concrete dam at the foot of the lake, without which Caddo Lake would drain away and revert to a hardwood forest.
Even so, “Keep Caddo Natural” has become the watchword on the lake. You see it on letterheads, on bumper stickers, and on the banner that is tacked to the wall at the monthly meetings of the Greater Caddo Lake Association, an organization dedicated to protecting the lake. The association’s current enemy is the Army Corps of Engineers, which has proposed an eighty-mile barge canal that would link northeast Texas to the Red River at Shreveport. The canal would cut right through the heart of Caddo Lake on the Texas side. All over this down-and-out part of the state, the project (called the Daingerfield Reach, after the town of Daingerfield at the western end of the canal) is heralded as economic salvation. The exception is on Caddo Lake, where the members of the Greater Caddo Lake Association are convinced that barge traffic would ruin the lake. They call the canal “the ditch. “
During the Civil War, Daingerfield was a boomtown, with sawmills, gristmills, foundries, and tanyards that turned out leather for Confederate boots, shoes, and saddles. Today many of its genteel nineteenth-century brick buildings are empty. Unemployment in Morris County is 15.4 percent—the eighth highest of the state’s 254 counties. In this part of Texas, the agrarian economy died thirty years ago, a victim of foreign competition, rising labor costs, cheaper land in West Texas, and synthetic fibers.
The Daingerfield Reach is one segment of the mammoth Red River Waterway Project approved in 1968 by Congress. Originally the idea was to dig a navigable canal from the Red River north to Shreveport, then along the Twelvemile Bayou through Caddo Lake and up to Lake O’ the Pines. With the lower section of the waterway due to be completed in two years, the Corps is now reexamining the wisdom of constructing the upper stretch.
Economics is the question: Would the project benefit enough people to justify the $650 million it is expected to cost? In 1989 the Corps queried fifty companies within a fifty-mile radius of the canal route. Twenty-eight said they would be interested in using the canal, with savings of as much as $28 million a year. The single biggest beneficiary most likely would be Lone Star Steel, a company that makes oil-field casings and tubings. In the early eighties, Lone Star employed six thousand workers. When the price of oil collapsed, the work force shrank to about one thousand. The canal would give the company a tremendous boost. Lone Star could ship about two million tons on the canal each year at an estimated savings of $2 to $7 a ton compared with train or truck transport. Canal backers across East Texas are also counting on economic spin-offs: construction jobs, business relocations, tourist dollars. One study optimistically predicted 40,000 new jobs. The city of Jefferson sees the canal as a potential bonanza, with tourist barges, riverboat gambling, and a revival of the glorious steamboat days.
But would the canal harm Caddo Lake? Nearly everyone around the lake insists it will. The sight of barges plowing through the water will be just plain ugly, they say. The wake from the barges will rock smaller boats and destroy the serenity that Caddo Lake is known for. Beyond aesthetics, there is fear of an environmental disaster. A trough through the middle of the lake, even one that is only nine feet deep, could divert flowing water from other areas of the lake, leaving the rest of the lake a swamp. Residents also fear that an accidental barge spill could dump more toxins in the lake. For all these fears, the Corps is trying to come up with answers. Studies won’t be done for another two years. In the meantime, a serious rift has arisen between the boosters and the lake dwellers. “The people on the lake aren’t environmentalists. They don’t want the canal interfering with their retirement plans,” says Duke DeWare, a Jefferson attorney. “They’re crazy,” one Caddo Lake resident says of the canal supporters. “They want to build a superhighway to nowhere.”
ONCE YOU HAVE BEEN SEDUCED BY CADDO LAKE, it becomes a picture postcard of the mind, fixed with bewitching images of cypress and coon-tail moss and water hyacinth. For me, there was no single flash of realization that Fred Dahmer’s vision of Caddo Lake did not tell the whole story. The awareness came about in a gradual way, through a series of ordinary telephone calls last spring to the district office of the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
I had called to find out the results of the latest testing of the water and sediments in the lake. A Corps hydrologist named Dave Johnson had been taking samples from the lake for about a year. Johnson told me that he had thought the tests would show the presence of PCBs, or traces of oil com- pounds from the drills on the Louisiana side, or evidence of pesticides used by farmers upstream. The lab analyses revealed none of these. Instead, they indicated extremely high amounts of organic carbons. While there is no way to say with scientific certainty where the carbons come from, Johnson has a strong suspicion that some is from human waste.
If Johnson is right, then the very people who are most intent upon saving the lake may be doing the most damage. There is no sewage treatment plant at Caddo Lake. Practically all of the cabins, restaurants, and businesses use septic tanks to dispose of their wastes. Septic tanks should be emptied every few years, but lots of people don’t want to spend the money. “You could smell it—the smell of sewage,” said a hydrologist about a lake sample he collected near some homes. “You can look at the color, texture, and odor of the sediments and make assumptions about what it is.”
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