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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Too many organic carbons are bad for the lake: They act as nutrients for the duckweed and lilies, which choke the lake even as they enhance its beauty. Phosphates, most likely from washing machines and dishwashers, spur the growth of vegetation. It does not help that the western end of the lake is extremely shallow—in some places only a couple of feet deep. Sunlight encourages photosynthesis, so the entire lake has become densely clogged with luxuriant underwater plants. They trap sediments, making the lake even shallower. As the plants decompose, they create more sediment and they use up the oxygen that fish need to survive. Low levels of oxygen have probably been the cause of mass fish kills on Caddo Lake for the past four years. The last one occurred in August. “The water was covered with fish,” said Walter Martin, the owner of Paradise Marine in Uncertain. “You could see them by the thousands. The stench was unbelievable.”
POLLUTION IS NOT THE ONLY PROBLEM AT CADDO LAKE. The dam that forms the lake threatens the cypress trees. I learned this one spring afternoon on a boat with Jacques Bagur, a consultant to the Corps. We were in an open clearing, admiring a cluster of cypresses growing out of the water. The trees were maybe forty feet high, with enormously wide buttresses that flared like a dancer’s swirling skirt. Jacques guessed they might be 150 or 200 years old. Then he mentioned, almost offhandedly, that he thought the trees were not healthy. They were surrounded by water and looked as though they thrived in that setting, but Jacques knew otherwise. Cypress trees need standing water to germinate but grow best on dry land. Their seed covering is so tough and leathery that it has to be submerged to soften up and release its contents. But seedlings can’t withstand prolonged submergence. Cypress trees flourish at the water’s edge because of the normal riverine cycles of ebb and flow. Inundate them with water, and they will die.
There is no secret about all this. In 1984 the Corps studied the bald cypresses on Caddo Lake and concluded that the trees were sick. The stands that Jacques and I were admiring probably took root and began to grow when they were actually at the edge of the bayou channel, before the lake existed. They do not grow well in standing water. This is why their buttresses are so wide—to give them stability. This is also why they are relatively short and why their branches are gray and spindly. If you would cut open their trunks, you would probably find that they were hollow. In another fifty years, most of these trees will have toppled over and there will probably not be any cypresses standing in the lake at all—only along the shoreline.
The irony of the dam is that it preserves Caddo Lake, but it also might kill it. Before Caddo Lake existed, floods used to sweep through what was then the Big Cypress Bayou and raise the water level by fifteen feet or more, scouring the channel and washing away the vegetation. Now, because of the dam, the water level is static. None of the sediments get flushed out. Already the channels are so shallow and smothered with vegetation that the boat lanes have to be continually dredged, and boaters can barely stray off the traveled paths without getting tangled in undergrowth. “If you don’t do some type of control, the aquatic plants will take over,” says Maryetta Smith, a biologist at the Vicksburg Corps office.
But what kind of control? The best solution would be to mimic the cycles of nature by alternately flooding and emptying the lake. The floods would flush out the sediments; lowering the water level would kill off the vegetation. But if you lower the lake, suddenly the people with lakeside cabins can’t get their boats out of their docks. And if you flood it, the same people will have water lapping at their doorsteps. This is the last thing people at Caddo Lake want.
ALTHOUGH HE HAS LIVED NEAR THE LAKE almost all his life, it wasn’t until 1970 that Fred Dahmer realized what it meant to him. That summer he and Loucille bought a new Volkswagen van. On June 13 they set out from their home in Marshall on a trip to Missouri with two of their daughters. From Uncertain they drove north into Arkansas and had lunch at a cafe. In the afternoon they came to a roadside park with picnic tables ringing a circular driveway. Restless, Fred hopped out of the van and jumped up and down a few times, then prodded his daughters into jogging around the driveway. The daughters dropped out after a couple of laps, but Fred sprinted around twice more before getting back in the van. He recalls heading uphill on a two-lane road. He did not even see the car coming from the other direction, trying to make a blind pass. At the crest the two cars collided head-on.
Fred never ran again. An infection in his smashed left hip led to an artificial hip joint, which also became infected. Finally, the doctors removed the artificial socket altogether—he keeps it in a brown paper sack beside the phone. The result is that Fred can’t put weight on his left leg. He walks only with the help of two crutches with scalloped braces that fit around his forearms. But in an unexpected way, the accident changed his life. “I was self-centered and stingy,” he says. “I cared more about money.”
He took early retirement and went to live full-time at the lake. For years Loucille insisted on staying at their home in Marshall. (“I hate the lake,” she once told me.) Fred got by on TV dinners and canned soup, was elected mayor of Uncertain in 1978, and became a defender of the lake, opposing any project he thought would endanger it. He was against the Ferrell’s Bridge Dam (which created Lake O’ the Pines), a dam on the Little Cypress Bayou that was never built, Shreveport’s failed attempt to operate a drinking-water pumping plant on the eastern shore, and an aborted plan for a hydroelectric plant at the dam. “You have to keep fighting,” he says, “or they’ll destroy the lake.”
Although getting into the boat is a torturous ordeal, Fred still goes out on the lake. He hobbles down to the water with a clumsy, laborious gait, then leans on a crutch while lowering himself to the edge of the boat. He swings his right leg inside and then reaches down with both hands to lift his left leg over. But when he lays the crutches down, starts the engine, and glides away from shore, his handicap disappears.
Fred has trouble articulating what it is that gives him a special feeling about Caddo Lake. He knows that others more pressed for time do not perceive the lake the way he does. He says of the Corps of Engineers, “They fly overhead in their helicopters and see a complex maze of waterways. They zip along, and the water sprays off the sides of their boat. But they don’t really see the lake. They’re going too fast.”
But does Fred Dahmer really see the lake? He is like a Zen master; what he sees is an idealized internal vision of Caddo Lake. Fred understands something fundamental about nature, about how a human being inhabits and finds meaning in a beautiful place. He does not see that the immediate threat to Caddo Lake may not be the Daingerfield Reach but the shortsightedness of those who live at the water’s edge. Without a plan of rescue, the lake will eventually become a bed of muck. What Fred is trying to preserve is less a lake than a museum.
On one of my last trips to Caddo Lake, Fred took me to a place not five minutes from his house, a spot I’d never seen before. Off a main channel, we passed through a line of trees and entered a long, oval-shaped clearing flanked on all sides by cypress. This, Fred said, was his cathedral. What he meant was suddenly apparent: We were within a space shaped like the nave of a Gothic church. An arc of cypress at the far end composed a sort of apse, the rows of trees on either side were the columns of the nave, and the afternoon sun filtering through chinks in the moss was the clerestory light. When we reached the center, Fred cut the engine.
About a decade ago, he said, he had helped found a Lutheran church in Marshall. The church had hired a young minister, then fired him when he began showing up at services with cowboy boots under his robe. Fred quit the church and had not been back since. On the lake, he found a deeper everlastingness. “I believe that anybody who looks at the lake as I do—at the trees up close, the birds and the animals—will see the lake as I do,” he said. “You can commune with any god or deity or entity that rules this universe.” But how many more generations will be able to worship at Caddo Lake? I wondered, but I didn’t ask. Inside the cypress chamber, now deep in evening shadow, Fred’s voice echoed as though we were surrounded by stone.
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