Cajun Cowboys
Written by Nathan Rizzuti
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeee!” Jack hollers, tearing out his scuba regulator and throwing his red-lens dive goggles twenty feet above the lake. “All solid! No rot!”
The end of a 40-foot cypress log, older than the continental United States, peeks the massive tip of its barnacled head above the surface of Lost Lake.
Hamilton squats low on the rocking boat deck and runs a hand through his hair. He walks over to me, knocks a hand into my chest, “What the fuck did I tell you? That’s a fuckin’ tree down there. Pre-cut.” Hamilton burns down what must be his thirtieth cigarette of the day and flicks the butt into the lake.
He reels Jack in by the thick blue rope he has clipped to his dive jacket, spits out his respirator and, grinning widely, declares: “Center the pontoon n’ roll with it, Eagle.”
“That’s the thing about treasure huntin’,” Hamilton says with a smirk. “Everybody thinks you’re crazy ‘till you find something.”
It’s a mid-October morning in New Orleans’ Irish Channel, the Gulf air is humid and chilly. Call it clammy. You can hear the old custodian at Parasols Bar hosing off last night's stale wine, urine, and vomit from the pavement, a ritual that happens every day around 6 a.m.
The low, angry gurgle of an exhaust leak appears outside of the single shotgun house I’ve been crashing at, a sound indicating Jack’s one-hair-shy-of-totaled GMC Sierra still lives.
I lie in bed and claw at the soles of my feet until they’re red and stinging. I grab a pen and some shoes and stumble out the door and into the truck.
Jack reaches out a tattooed hand to shake mine. One pair of bloodshot eyes glances at the other, and we take off down Constance Street.
We stop for coffee at a spot people won’t ever shut up about because Jennifer Coolidge likes to go there. I spotted her there once with a pet coyote. I ask Jack if he liked The White Lotus. He says that he’s only ever tried to smoke Blue Lotus, regretted every second of it, and almost leaped neck-first off a fourth-story balcony.
The silence we sit in is welcomed.
I knew Jack well before that morning. We had met about a year and a half prior. It was September 2023 at an open mic night called The Neutral Ground in Exile.
The Neutral Ground is, was, and is again, a bona fide New Orleans cultural petri dish – for better and for worse. It’s a coffee bar, music venue, and gathering place that’s been around since the 1970s, serving as a launching pad for a number of New Orleans musicians, writers, and poets.
The time frame of the open mic – Sundays from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. – catered to a certain type, mainly those, myself included, who couldn’t give less of a shit about what they had going on Monday morning. But there was also something about gathering at sunset on a Sunday that carried a weight beyond just an outlet for creativity. It hit you like a wake-up call, a sharp reminder that another week had come and gone.
Maybe I’m just hypersensitive to Sundays, having grown up so Protestant. But like Kristofferson once wrote of that Sunday feel: “And it echoed through the canyons, Like the disappearin' dreams of yesterday.”
They had a near-perfect thing going at a spot over on Daneel Street near Tulane University. A building with an old, rough-wood interior, coffee-icon stained glass windows, and instruments nailed recklessly to the walls. The owners leased the space until the landlords jacked the rent so high that an alcohol-free, Wi-Fi-less, non-artisanal coffee house running on pastry sale donations and a collective desire to spread positivity and strange art had no choice but to close down.
The Daneel Street location closed in the Spring of 2023, the final open mic going from 6 p.m. until well after sunup. But by the end of the summer, the Neutral Ground had returned, somewhat, as an almost-once-a-week open mic at a rented swing dance studio on Toledano Street.
The event became known as the Neutral Ground in Exile.
The Neutral Ground is one of those places that’s more than welcoming to any creative or semi-creative bastard to creep through its doors. The typical patronage on any given Sunday is ex-Dead Heads, astrology evangelists, pining undergrads, and plenty of men pushing 30 who can barely hold an acoustic guitar, let alone play one.
Jack contrasted the typical Neutral Ground clientele. His tattoos yielded a familiar color, style, and font. Prison ink? Most noteworthy were the large block letters etched across his knuckles: “LIVE WILD.”
His white rubber shrimp boots were deteriorating, his coveralls were encrusted in mud and clay, and his blue bandana was noticeably damp. This wasn't a Bywater/Holy Cross punk you’d find sucking down whippets behind St. Roch Tavern on a Monday night; those kids might attempt to dress similarly, but always fail to do so convincingly; you can always tell a costume when you see one.
I found myself at the open mic to test out a song I’d been working on, one about two of my pet gnats that tragically drowned themselves in a day’s old cup of coffee I’d left sitting out on my desk. I noticed I signed up below someone named “Jack Shit.” I was scheduled to play at 9:15 p.m., Jack Shit at 9:30 p.m.
At around 9:34 p.m. Jack Shit pulled out his iPhone and explained he intended to read a thing or two. He grinned, looking down, and asked the crowd to be kind, as he still planned, one day, perhaps, to learn how to read.
“This first one is called Losers,” he said…
“Losers, man, losers. Beautiful losers.
They can’t pay rent on time
And the car has no insurance.
Greasy hair, 100-yard stares
And no hunger for affluence…
The buttons aren’t always even
And the cuffs are stained and shredded
The fathers are often out of touch
And mothers often unwedded…”
The verses proceeded to roll. All whispered conversations died out. He had a hold of the right crowd.
Jack continued to recite. He spoke about those of us who use the bar as a confessional, those of us who can’t hold our tongues with a pair of 12” vice grips, and those of us haunted by the ghosts of friends who left this world too early. He concluded…
‘They’re losers, man, beautiful fucking losers
They’re a mess and falling apart
But never have I met such understanding souls
Or seen more beautiful art
than from the brush of those
who can’t hold a conversation quite right
or hold a job
or sleep at night…
If you stick around long enough to see the wave crash down
You’ll hear a moment of peace
When the world is no longer too loud…
When the downtrodden are suddenly full
of the most wonderful human insight
Where all the dirt and grease
Suddenly starts to shine…’
Not as delicate as Yeats or Auden or whoever-the-fuck poetry stiff necks might build an altar to. But every person in that room seemed to recognize that this was not the type of writing that you can purchase from Columbia University.
Jack read additional poems that commanded a similar silence for about 10 more minutes. His subject matter ranged from heartbreak over a good bowl of risotto, to why lover's bed sheets lose softness over time, to a perverse load of nonsense about a sexual encounter between a fish and a frog, and to a surprisingly beautiful piece about how he’d really like to watch the founder of TikTok bleed out.
A fine set worth the price of admission. But I wanted to approach him about a specific phrase he used: “Beautiful Losers.”
I couldn’t let it go. I knew he had stolen those words from country singer Lucinda Williams, who used them to describe the deceased musician Blaze Foley. Some might know him as the Duct Tape Messiah.
Foley is the type of songwriter for anyone in need of the occasional 192-proof shot of the strongest, bleakest country music you can pour into your eardrums. And I haven’t learned much in this life, but I have learned that I like coming across Foley fans almost as much as I like avoiding fans of Neil Young.
I caught up with Jack outside the open mic. He held an open pack of Marlboro Red 72s. I asked to borrow one, and he handed one over, thanking me for playing a Prine song during my set.
Then, I accused him of plagiarism. He laughed, explaining he’s been into Foley since he was a teenager and likes to borrow as much of his work as possible.
Eventually, I asked how he made a living. He looked up and away as if struggling to decide if the question was worthy of a response. He looked down to his boots and said, “Today I was divin’ for cypress.”
We leave the coffee shop by 6:45 a.m. I open the passenger door of Jack's truck. Between three and ten wrenches fall to the curb, along with a half-empty bottle of MD 20/20, blue raspberry.
“Where to now?” I ask.
“To see Hamilton,” Jack says.
“He lives on the boat?” I reply.
“Near the boat,” Jack says. “You’ll see…Ham is…He’s interesting. Nobody knows too much about him, and he prefers it that way. He’s a good guy, though, a real good guy. And a helluva captain, even though he is afraid of the water.”
Ignoring all red lights and road signage along the way, we tear across the Crescent City Connection, a massive twin steel truss cantilever bridge that stretches across the Mississippi River, connecting New Orleans and the West Bank.
The big grapefruit-colored sun rises like it might be the last time it intends to do so. Even with the sun, though, you can’t yet see the Mississippi; it’s wrapped in a thick blanket of sunlit fog. Jack turns on a small portable speaker and starts playing Pops Staples's version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken.
We head South on Barataria, and the commercial and natural landscape starts to shift, Chick-Fil-A's, self-serve bulk lentil shops, Presbyterian private schools, disc golf courses, and a stench of chlorine from a nauseating number of inground pools turns into drive-thru daiquiri spots, gun ranges, reptile-only taxidermy outfits, red-brick Southern Baptist churches, Sno-Ball stands, RV parks advertising year-long leases.
I ask Jack how things have changed since his childhood. He says nothing, just gives a look that seems to say, all of it—god damnit. We turn onto a rural highway and eventually pull into the Time Clock gas station. Inside, there’s a line of customers that wraps around the aisles, but the only person behind the counter is a newborn baby, asleep and drooling in its car seat.
Finally, a middle-aged woman walks out from the back. She recognizes Jack immediately, but she speaks to him as if he were Lazarus resurrected. “Jeeesus Chrassst,” she says from behind a wall of plexiglass. “Loook who’s back.”
“How you doin’, baby?” Jack replies.
“Tryna’ stir up trouble best I can,” she says, winking one sparkling brown eye and grinning to reveal three pearly white teeth.
“Same,” he says, pausing to greet a few fishermen waiting in line for breakfast.
He returns to the counter. The cashier has out a log of his preferred chewing tobacco, Copenhagen Mint Longcut, and a carton of Marlboro Red 72s on the counter.
We stock up on dip, smokes, alligator sausage, boudin, Blue Full Throttle energy drinks, and boat fuel.
The smell of swamp thickens, and my throat begins to swell with vapors of Spanish Moss, Stinkhorn Mushroom, and petrochemical runoff.
We drive into the swamp, eventually turning onto a gravel road, again onto a half-gravel road. Fields of tall grass grow on either side of the path, white with dew drops that sparkle like an ocean of diamonds.
Further down the path, you see walls of semi-truck containers stacked up like a fortress, at least 30 feet in the air. Inside them are the hollowed and rusted-out remains of old cars, dune buggies, speedboats, and farming equipment. It’s some hybrid between a junkyard, loading dock, sawmill, and mechanical clinic. Further back behind this sits a fleet of shrimp boats and barges, exhaust stacks looming a good hundred feet in the air. And beneath that, old man river, yellow and steaming.
At the head of all this sits a chapel. The sunlight pokes through technicolor stained-glass windows, creating bright rectangles. It’s no mega-church. I’m sure Jesse Duplantis wouldn’t come within 100 miles of this place, but you can feel the Lord’s power, wrath, or whatever it is, in the atmosphere.
To enforce the reverence of the moment, Jack turns on Doc Watson’s flatpicking gospel classic, Precious Lord Take My Hand.
‘When my way grows drear
Precious Lord, linger near
When my light is almost gone…
Hear my cry, hear my call
Hold my hand, lest I fall
Take my hand, precious Lord
Lead me home…’
Jack points to the house of worship. “That’s where Hamilton lives…A parsonage, of a kind.”
Across the road is a field of weeds. In the middle sits a single trailer home. Top to bottom, it's covered in Christmas lights, and around it sits a congregation of blowup Halloween decorations.
Jack pulls into the church parking lot and explains that there used to be a full, thriving trailer park, a place where he spent a good deal of his early years. Many of his friends grew up there, and they’d often attend youth group at the church on Wednesday nights. But Hurricane Ida – which ravaged Southeast Louisiana in 2021– washed the entire park away, aside from that one unit.
Jack disappears into the church.
A few minutes later, two wheezing Bullmastiffs tumble out the front doors. Behind them is Hamilton, and I understand why Jack refers to him as “Electric Jesus,” at least the Jesus part. Maybe it’s something about living in the Lord’s house that does it, but there’s a messianic look about him.
Hamilton is long. Long hair, long limbs, long nose, and long fingers. Skinny, too, negative three percent body fat. His plain button-up shirt drapes loosely over a simple white tank top. He’d really make the ideal Jesus for a Cajun Easter pageant.
Hamilton places an unlit cigarette in his mouth, shoots me a skeptical look, and pulls Jack aside. They pour over a map and speak mostly in gestures to indicate girth, length, and weight.
Captain Hamilton sails the survey vessel down the Intercoastal Waterway. Photo credit: Jack Lucas.
We drive to the dock to load our cargo. As we complete our stevedore duties, Hamilton pulls out a coffee filter and wipes a thin green film off the interior side of the boat’s windows. As he does so, he begins a diatribe about Mardi Gras on the Hattiesburg Dragway Strip. He declares that Shrove Tuesday at the Hub City Dragway makes Shrove Tuesday in the Marigny look like bingo night at the hospice center.
His face turns serious as he tells me, “I used to be into drag cars and all that shit before I got into logs.”
Our transport is a 26-foot V Bottom Hydrographic Survey Vessel with aluminum tread plate siding and a striking burnt orange wood deck. The vessel sits low to the water, which still clings to a thin layer of mist that whispers up the sides of the boat.
It’s almost 8 a.m., and my thick flannel, which had seemed wise for the weather at 6 a.m., is already heavy with sweat.
As Hamilton starts the engine, I look about a hundred yards down the river. There’s a line of about a dozen swamp fan boats – the type of tours that Midwestern businessmen take their ex-wives and chubby kids who all pinch and scrape each other over who gets to feed a dying alligator a few marshmallows. I’ve been; they’re plenty of fun.
Jack pulls out a cracked tan case, opening it to reveal a small black .38 special with electrical tape wrapped around the handle. The first fan boat fires up, releasing a shriek and gust of air that shoots ripples down the river.
“Swamp tours. Fuck them guys,” Jack says looking down and placing three or four Buffalo Bore bullets into the chamber. He aims the short barrel at the bushes across the river, almost in the direction of the fan boats, but doesn’t squeeze.
Hamilton and Jack’s boat with the winch system attached to the front. Photo credit: Jack Lucas.
Cypress – taxodium distichum – goes by many names: bald cypress, red cypress, swamp cypress, gulf cypress. But if you hack away at a living cypress tree on state property, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry can, and will, serve you up to a 5-year prison sentence and a fine of up to $5,000.
There’s even a famous Cajun TV personality, Shelby the Swamp Man, who was locked up for felling a neighbor's cypress tree back in 2014; the charges were botanical homicide and felony theft.
Hamilton explains that although he knows plenty of spots where you can go for young growth cypress, and that there’s a black market for it centralized in Northern Florida, only a jackass goes after immature cypress wood. “The young stuff ain’t good, and the good stuff ain't young,” Hamilton says.
Hamilton and Jack go for the wood that’s been dead a long time – sinker cypress, also commonly called deadhead logs.
Sinker cypress is a term for mature cypress logs that were cut or felled anywhere between one hundred to five hundred years ago. A handful of factors determine a log’s value, but a large, mature stick can fetch a price upwards of $20,000.
The history of cypress goes hand-in-hand with the history of Louisiana and the Cajun folks who’ve long inhabited it. The first organized cypress logging efforts came by way of the French settlers from Nova Scotia (who were eventually known as Cajuns.) They recognized the usefulness of cypress for its lightweight, durable, and rot-resistant qualities.
Cajun cypress hunters became known as Swampers. Swampers would travel in teams of two into the deltas, bayous, and rivers to cut and pull loads of cypress wood, an occupation dating back to the early 1700s.
These trees were wonders. The tallest reaching upwards of 125 feet, with trunks that would swell to 40-foot circumferences. Along the sides of the trees, what looked like termite nests, were the knees, hundreds of brown knobs that jutted between 3 inches and 5 feet above the water.
In shallow, low-river conditions, they’d use beasts of burden like oxen, mules, and horses to pull the hewn logs. Low river conditions, though, were rare, only accounting for a small portion of the year. Most of the time, they couldn’t access cypress by foot and hoof.
Instead, they used pirogues, a type of long, thin canoe made from a dug-out cypress log. Pirogues were invented by native tribes, such as the Atakapa, Choctaw, Houma, Natchez, and Tunicawho used them to travel the shallow swamps for hunting and fishing.
During high river conditions, Swampers traveled on pirogues and harvested up to 500 cypress logs at a time, driving a thick spike into the side, and hitching them together into rafts. But the green logs were heavy, so heavy that they’d often have to lighten the load by cutting some off and letting them sink to the bottom. That’s where you get the term sinker cypress.
By the mid-18th century, loggers solved the weight problem through a practice known as girdling. Months before harvesting, Swampers would take a preliminary trip out to the swamps to cut a thick ring around the base of trees to drain the sap, significantly reducing the weight and yielding bigger harvests.
Although girdling resulted in bigger harvests, that wasn’t what drove the species nearly to extinction. At its height, there were upwards of 10 million acres of cypress forest in Louisiana.
It wasn’t until the 1878 Timber and Stone Act authorized the sale of agriculturally bare land for $2.50 an acre, that the stage was set for a full-scale onslaught of the Louisiana swampland after the invention of the pull boat in 1891. Thus began the Louisiana Lumber Boom.
Massive logging operations consumed Southeast Louisiana, and from 1900 to 1920, Louisiana was the third most logged state in the Union, behind Washington and Michigan. Similar to the prospecting communities that sprung up in the Western United States, logging companies built what were called skidder towns, makeshift communities to house the workers and their families as they descended upon the state to take advantage of the promise of $1.50 per 11-hour work day.
Two recovered sinker cypress logs, one 40 ft and one 70 ft. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
Cypress towns appeared in South Louisiana, pine towns in the North. Fleets of pullboats with squads of workers tore through swampland, digging over 35,000 canals, creating a systematized deforestation effort. This included building levees and drainage ditches to force water levels lower, which made it easier to cut and drag logs with greater speed and volume.
The workers who went out and felled and stripped off the tree limbs became known as “flatheads.” They’d go out in crews of up to 60 at a time, each group overseen by a log boss. They’d fell, de-limb, then transport the logs. In the hardest-to-reach areas, mule skinners would come in to hitch the logs to their draft animals and they’d take them through the swamp or remove them by attaching large metal tongs, called chain dogs, and cranking them out with thick steel winch cables.
It was a merciless feast on the swampland, the largest companies consuming between 60-100 acres of trees per day. And the most productive mills could process 250,000 feet of lumber per 10-hour day.
Over the years, the man made alterations warped ecological conditions, making it impossible for new cypress to grow. Wiping out the forests, they eroded the coastline. And, although they built short-term solutions to lower water levels, after they left, the dissipated coastal barrier led to higher water levels than ever before. An adolescent cypress can’t stay submerged for over 45 straight days, or it’ll suffocate. Now, estimates are that 80% of Louisiana swampland has water levels that make it impossible for cypress seedlings to mature.
The cypress frenzy lasted a few short decades, reaching a high water mark around 1920, when foresters processed an annual total of 4.3 billion board feet of Cypress.
Those observing the ecological carnage back in the late 1910s and early 1920s prophesied of cypress extinction, some claiming it would happen in as short a period as five years. By 1924, the largest lumber company in Harvey, Louisiana, F.B. Williams Cypress Company (later known as the Louisiana Red Cypress Lumber Company,) was liquidated and pawned. The massive enterprise disappeared seemingly overnight, leaving a wasteland of vacant skidder towns behind. The virgin cypress forests, which had taken over a millennium to mature, had been nearly strangled to death - 8 to 10 million acres of Louisiana cypress forest dwindled to around 22,000.
A fresh cut cypress board. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
You can still see how these operations altered the topography of the Louisiana wetlands. The canals the cypress loggers dug remain, and if you look at a map, you can see them, like scars, stretching out like thin spokes.
What saved the cypress from complete annihilation? Loggers gave up in the early 20th century, partly because of the Great Depression, mostly due to scarcity. The logging industry simply became unprofitable.
Although cypress was designated the Louisiana State tree in 1963, its protection wasn't enforced legally until much later.
So for the entirety of the 1900s, the cypress was vulnerable. The industrial taste for it returned in the early 2000s. Companies began logging cypress for garden mulch, which was found at major department stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe's.
It was only in 2021 that harvesting cypress on public land became illegal in Louisiana. Governor John Bell Edwards passed a proclamation banning cypress harvests on over 1 million acres of Louisiana State-owned land. But estimates show that about 80% of cypress remains on privately owned land, where people can do whatever they please with it.
In terms of value, there’s an immense difference between virgin cypress and second-growth cypress. It’s almost a different species.
Hamilton shares this oral history lesson as he steers the boat with his feet along the Intracoastal Canal. He takes out his phone and shows me images of the network of canals that shoot through the surrounding swampland like a pinwheel.
Cypress has a compelling history, but I still didn’t quite grasp why anyone would go through the effort to retrieve it. It was dead and sunk, so why not leave it to rest?
“Because it’s a natural fuckin’ miracle. They call the stuff Wood Eternal for a reason,” says Hamilton.
“It’s been under there, some of it hundreds of years underwater,” he says. “This swamp water’s got low oxygen, naturally, which slows decomposition. Then the wood, that’s got cypressene oil that protects the core, makes it rot resistant to bugs, bacteria, and fungus. You get some fungus in there, n’at’s how you get those holes or voids; we call ‘em peck marks. But that just adds to the beauty ‘cuz it’s still all solid – that’s good wood, prime value stuff ‘cuz that’s some of the rarest and prettiest.”
His long hair is blowing lightly in the wind as he delivers the love letter.
“Honestly, the longer it lies down there, the better it becomes. The wood absorbs the minerals and sediments around it, so whatever color that stuff gives off, the wood becomes that color – greys, golds, oranges, reds, greens,” he says. “That’s why it’s used mostly for high-end modeling for mansions, yachts, patios – interior and exterior. I know people tryna spend $50,000 commissioning cypress pieces. Like I said, man, natural fuckin’ wonder…”
We roll through the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW), one of the most heavily trafficked bodies of water in the country – an aquatic Route 66. Stretching from Appalachia Bay, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas, the traffic ranges from recreational yachts and fishing trawlers to massive barges carrying everything from coal to apocalyptic vat chemicals.
Hamilton points out one large, teal-colored barge as we cruise along the waterway, which is about 300 feet long. He says that he’s seen that exact one many times before.
“Benzene barge,” he says, laughing and flicking his cigarette butt. “That explodes; it's got a five-mile kill radius.”
We make our way along the riverfront, which is decorated with dilapidated fishing docks, shacks, tents, wharfs, and the occasional multimillion-dollar manor.
Jack sits tending to his 35mm camera, looking at everything as if he’d seen it a thousand times before.
He puts down the camera and jiggles the boat’s speaker wire. Carolina Slim crackles through the speakers:
'My pillow was an alligator and a boa constrictor was in my den.
I lived on the water and I didn't have to pay no rent.
And I don't owe nobody a damn red cent.
When the great Titanic in the river sank.'
Jack explains to me that, “there’s a saying in our industry that goes ‘it’s cool to kill divers’… I mean, you can say no to a job. But you’re a pussy if you do.”
Although Jack’s past might be one that circumnavigates things like the law and the law’s officers, he recently took on a full-time job as a professional diver and was sent through the lower 48 states, doing anything from underwater welding to sand pumping to nuclear restoration.
“Up ‘til now, I’ve lived without health insurance. Now that I got it, I can really start testing the limits,” he says as he pulls out a serrated knife and slices the top off an empty Brisk Iced Tea bottle to create a makeshift spitter.
Of the many ways one can die on a dive job, Jack says, the most common is differential pressure, which divers call Delta P. It happens when divers work around drains, sluices, weirs, pumps, and valves. For example, when you open a valve, it can cause water to flow with extremely high pressure into an area with low pressure. The water can generate an incredibly strong force, up to 1,000 pounds of pressure, which sucks a diver into an inches-wide opening and traps them there. Once suction occurs, it’s impossible to escape, and divers have been killed by differential pressure in waters as shallow as three meters.
Jack lines his lower lip full of chewing tobacco and explains the danger used to guarantee higher-paying jobs. Now, with robot-operated vehicles, automation, and artificial intelligence, the higher-paying dive jobs have disappeared, leaving the largely unregulated dangerous tasks up for grabs at a reduced rate.
As far as I can tell, AI and robotics have yet to infiltrate the sinker cypress game and likely won’t for some time. And while cypress dives can be less risky than some of Jack’s typical dive work, it’s no risk-free meal ticket.
Out of his range of dive work, Jack expresses how cypress is far and away his favorite, even if things can get screwy on occasion.
As we travel slowly down the GIWW, Hamilton keeps his eyes glued to the sonar screen and GPS as if searching for a lost loved one. Suddenly, without a word, he snags Jack’s arm. They speak in hushed tones, and Jack nods.
“It’s gotta be,” Jack says. “We’ll come back around for it.”
I squint to see what’s going on on his screens. First is a sonar, which is dark brown around the edges with a thick light brown strip in the middle, which displays crude imagery of the riverbed directly beneath the boat. Sometimes, a very thin line will appear on or near the light brown strip. This needle-like image indicates a potential tree.
Jack prepares to dive under to check for a cypress log. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
The second screen is the GPS, which is littered with symbols: yellow triangles, green fir trees, American flags, and globes. Hamilton presses a button, and a yellow star appears at our current location. Then, a small three-digit number representing a waypoint pops up underneath it.
“I built this system,” Hamilton explains. “Each symbol represents a potential log. Triangles are worth checking out. Yellow stars – most likely cypress. American flags – sure bets. And the planets…the planets. Guaran-fuckin-teed logs.”
“Sometimes you see something, crab traps, oil drums, other shit wood,” he continues. “But at this point, I‘m good at spotting a good log when I see one.”
For reference, I pull out my phone and take a picture of the map.
“The fuck are you doing?” Hamilton snaps, taking his hands off the wheel. He looks at me, then at Jack, then back at me. “Delete that right the fuck now or I’ll drown you. I swear to god. And if you get out, I’ll saw your arms off and throw you back in.”
Jack’s face shows that although my mistake is genuine, it was nonetheless severe.
Hamilton continues, flinging threats and describing how I’m as good as crab bait if I don’t scrub every single image of the map and chuck my phone as far as I can into the canal. Playing mediator, Jack explains, “It’s good, Ham. He’s alright. I’ll make sure he gets rid’em.”
‘He fuckin’ better,” Hamilton says, returning to the wheel. “I can’t have everybody blowing up my spots again.”
I explain five different ways that I didn’t realize and meant no ill intent.
Still speaking as if he isn’t quite sure if I deserve to live, Hamilton explains, “I’ve been at this over two decades. Those images get out I’m fucked. I don’t play around with this shit.”
He watches as I delete the photos from my phone. Not that I felt a true threat of dismemberment, but it was clear that physical harm wasn’t totally out of the cards if I refused to comply.
We float in silence for a few more minutes before Hamilton speaks again. “I didn’t mean to be a dick back there. You just – you just don’t understand. I showed someone a map at a bar a few months ago. I handed ‘em my phone. Turn my back for one second. They screenshot it. Next thing I know, people were out here digging around for my logs a few days later.”
In the case of the map thieves, Jack explained that they had to pay the perpetrators a courtesy visit. He looks at the gun with a smile.
But the territorialism of the cypress game is understandable. Over half the work of getting a log is tedious surveying, slowly scanning the riverbed for potential hits. Then, the waiting is punctuated by short, suspenseful underwater wrestling matches as you yank a multi-ton object from its bed of three hundred years.
Hamilton explains that there aren’t many cypress hunters for a reason. Many of them are families who own large tracts of land, and they’ll sonar their property and keep the locations of their cypress logs under tight wraps.
Jack and Hamilton are the closest things you have to modern-day swampers. They’re over a decade apart in age, but they share the same obsessive urges to pursue what German theologian Martin Luther would describe as a calling.
That calling, for Hamilton, is cypress. The search for it, and the possibilities of what you can do with it.
For Jack, it's writing and poetry. As we cut across Lake Lery into Lost Lake, I ask Jack about how he feels about his writing.
“Most days? Like shit and I hate myself,” Jack says. “Y’know. I was born with a shovel in my hand…Not a pen. I want to be consistent with it. Not that I can’t be now. But sometimes, ya know… I guess, maybe, if it were easy, anyone’d be doing it…”
He explains that diving professionally means traveling long, lonesome hours behind the wheel from job to job. Over the hum and grind of worn-down wheel bearings, his drives breed plenty of time for self-loathing, introspection, observation, and kicking around words as they churn in his head.
Jack continues to speak of his dreams as if they’re some sort of burden or tumor you can’t quite get rid of - that maybe if he could find the right scalpel to remove them, he might be able to sleep with a bit more peace and drink with a bit less sullen determination.
“And I’d still like to learn to play the guitar,” he says, stretching his fingers. “I’ve tried n’ failed about a dozen times.”
“My incapacity to do so is why I got these,” he says looking down at his knuckle tattoos. “A few years back, when my dad and I still had the car shop, I was trying to pick it up again but couldn’t move my hands right, I’d jacked ‘em up so bad workin’ on cars, fights, and gettin’ thrown from horses. I was sitting there hating the fact I couldn’t move my fingers right. But that day I went out and got these, cuz’ I wanted to be proud of the reasons why they’re broken.”
Although he describes his writing career as slow and largely a struggle, he recently published a collection of poems, The Mule Years, a book born of a particularly rough stretch of his life.
For reasons Jack decided to withhold, earlier in the year, he left town with a price on his head and a target on his back. Overnight, he had to pack up and leave his home, the business he built, and the friends he made, and any momentum on his artistic pursuit.
He lived out of his truck and took on dive jobs around the country, wherever work appeared. A few months in, a job offer came for a two-week work on the West Bank. In need of cash and throwing aside any survival instinct, he tempted fate and took the job, deciding to travel directly from the dive site to his hotel.
One night, he got drunk on boxed wine, stormed a Best Buy, and spent the last he had on a small HP DeskJet printer, some ink, and six reams of paper. He set up a makeshift print shop in his hotel, where he spent most of the night berating and threatening his printer, repeatedly stabbing it with a switchblade, and then pleading with, attempting to get it to print on both the front and back in the right direction. He sat in the hotel lobby trying to draft those he deemed tech-savvy, get them to visit his room and help him get the printer in order.
After a battle that lasted until sunup, he managed to come out with the first ten copies of The Mule Years. From there, the printing press roared until he had close to 100 copies. He managed to sell the first hundred to acquaintances, in local bookstores, coffee houses and a couple of truck stops. He lived off that money for the next two months, as the dive jobs were sporadic.
I ask if he had any writing on cypress.
“Plenty,” he says. “One of the only subjects worth writing about. That and how much I hate TikTok.”
He pulls his phone out and reads one from his book, the section Greyhound Poetry…
“that sweet saltwater smell
it’s a yellow snowball stand with red ants on the blacktop
a po’boy place with bars on the windows
convenience store boudin
and gas station tackle shops
boat trailers taking more parking places
than the trucks pulling them somehow
its trees
covered in moss, mardi gras beads
and fishing line and lures alike
what kind of orchard blooms bass bait?
cypress of course
it’s swarms of mosquitos
and ten bucks on pump #2
Louisiana, my love
I will miss you”
Hamilton throttles the boat up to full speed as we hiss across the lake toward the map marker he’s had his eye on on the far side of the lake.
Jack fiddles again with the boat's sound system, and Tyler Childer’s Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven, plays at a painful but necessary volume.
Hamilton points to a small waterway and explains that it leads to Petit Lake. He says once he came across a man washed up in the shallows and being eaten alive by mosquitos. He was unconscious, covered in blood, next to a small crashed speedboat. After bringing him on board and lulling him to consciousness, the man begins to shriek and proclaim he was out there with his girlfriend and can’t find her. Hamilton called in a police boat and helped with the immediate search, but the girlfriend was nowhere to be found.
“Did they ever find her?” I ask.
“Never thought to follow up on ‘em,” he says, as if that sort of thing is as common as seeing two fornicating nutrias. “But she sure as hell didn’t just go out for a swim.”
Hamilton slows the boat down,
“Alright,” he says.
Immediately, the energy on board shifts from lounging and casual to cautious and procedural.
Jack whips to the back of the boat and pulls out two plastic ice tea bottles with about thirty feet of black twine wrapped around them. Tied to the end is a five-pound fishin’ sinker. They place these in the water as markers to indicate either end of the tree. Hamilton navigates the boat in circles, and we close in on where the GPS indicates the tree is located.
“Toss it,” Hamilton yells.
Jack launches a plastic bottle into the lake.
“Other side, Hamilton shouts, “y’dumbass,” saying the last part to himself.
“Asshole,” Jack shouts back.
“Anchor,” Hamilton says from the cabin, and Jack flings a Blue 20 lb fluke anchor off the back of the boat.
Jack strips down and pulls out his diving suit. With his jaw half clamped around the regulator, he tells me how he found this Henderson neoprene wetsuit at Goodwill for 15 bucks. Over the wetsuit goes a pair of light green Dickies coveralls. Finally, a pair of tattered black Converse boots.
“Converse are the best damn dive boots money can buy,” Jack says.
Jack stands on the edge of the pontoon, preparing for a dive. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
They assemble the tank and regulator hoses, screwing them onto the yoke valve. Jack places the scuba jacket that holds an 80-cubic-foot aluminum oxygen tank. Once it’s on, Jack puts on the goggles and places the yoke regulator in his mouth.
They open the valve to check for pressure and it lets out a hiss. Hamilton places a clip onto Jack’s wetsuit, with a long blue rope attached to it. The rope is there to communicate with Jack underwater. If for any reason Jack needs to come up, Hamilton gives it three tough yanks.
Jack breathes in, testing for successful oxygen flow, gives one look at the lake, and disappears.
“Forgot to check the air gauge, shit.” says Hamilton casually.
A steady stream of bubbles breaks the surface. Hamilton points to them and interprets their movements for me.
“He’s on it. He’s got one down there. Decent size, too,” Hamilton says. He points to how they move back and forth in a diagonal line, indicating Jack's feeling along the bottom. “He’s feeling how suctioned she is in the muck.”
After just about five minutes, a sliver of bark breaks the surface.
Hamilton looks away in disgust and mutters a year's quota of obscenities. The log is decently sized, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, and looks to be a good twenty feet in length. But I don’t understand why Hamilton’s acting like he just got into a fender bender with his parole officer.
Then I hear him call out to Jack, who just ascended, “Pine!”
“Probably some old bullhead,” Hamilton says.” You see how that came up so easy. So buoyant? Useless.”
A long journey for a piece of punk-ass pine.
Hamilton grabs Jack’s dive jacket as he helps him back onto the deck.Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
Hamilton decides to go back and look at the log we passed in the GIWW, on the ride pointing out how many crab traps you can pass to make a mile. “America, man. We’ll use anything but the metric system. Rather measure in crab traps.”
Jack sits silently in his wetsuit, filling his water bottle with a steady stream of that signature Copenhagen-brown saliva. He removes it to dry off, revealing a full back tattoo of Persuis holding Medusa's severed head.
He told me that he traded for it. He gave his friend a custom paint job. In return, he got the full back piece.
Below the image is a quote, “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to the light.”
“Comes from my stint in the Marine Corps,” Jack says when prompted to explain himself. “Drill instructor screamed it at me 100,000 times during basic training while tossing sand and mud in my eyes. I wanted to kill the bastard, at first. Quote grew on me, though, not that I’ve found much by way of light.”
After a beating by the sun we make it back to the GIWW.
Hamilton’s convinced we’re sitting on something big. But there’s an issue: The log is on a busy, sharp riverbend, where dangerous boat traffic can roll through with little time to react.
One misstep at the wrong moment, a divers rope gets tangled in the rig or trapped around debris below, or under the log, and they could get hit by the hull of the boat or swallowed up by its propellers.
Hamilton shoots the boat up and down the river, looking for any major barges. Then he checks an online chart, a real-time tracker of all vessels on the GIWW. It’s mostly reliable, he says. But plenty of boats might not pop up.
From the map, you can see a barge downriver, a good 30 minutes out. They debate whether it’s worth the risk and decide it is.
Jack suits up. They circle the area, toss the bottles, drop the anchor, and hang a flag – a red flag with a large diagonal white stripe across, the international signal for “Diver Down.” Jack zips up the wet suit, clips on the oxygen jacket, bites the regulator, and goes under.
I look across the river. In big bold letters, a sign reads, “DO NOT ANCHOR.”
As Hamilton feeds Jack – who is going under about 20 feet – more rope, he explains that a couple of months back, they found a log right before nightfall, right around the same area. It blocked out half the sonar screen, but Jack went down and found it. He dug a hole underneath one end of the tree and managed to thread a big rope through. They tried for an hour to pull it out with the boat but it wouldn’t move an inch.
They returned to the shipyard and enlisted the help of a local tugboat crew. The night had set in, it was cold and dark. Barge traffic was heavy, leaving only a few minutes between each passing vessel.
Before the tugboat arrived, Jack attached the rope again and weighted it to the bottom of the channel with steel shackles so it wouldn’t catch a boat propeller. When the tug arrived they handed the rope off and via radio tried telling them to pull the log slow and steady. But the engines screamed and the tug captain cranked the speed up as fast as possible. The line snapped louder than a gunshot.
The barge was ten minutes out, and the bottle marker had disappeared. The tree was 30 feet down, and they’d lost its estimated coordinates. Everyone was ready to abandon the cause, but Jack convinced Hamilton to give him one more shot to go down, locate the tree. Going off memory, Jack threw a tea bottle where he thought looked right, and they anchored the boat. Jack jumped in with a fresh rope, tied a bowline around the log, and came up in under five minutes. The deckhands stood above, staring at the water slack jawed as Jack handled the tree below. With minutes to spare, Hamilton handed the rope off to the tug captain, but this time he eased into it. The tug fought the tree pulling it low, nearly underwater. Then the boat jumped like it had bronco blood. The tree had broken free.
They evaded the barge just barely - with a 72-foot tree in tow.
Hamilton cuts the rope they use to tie buoys to the front end of the recovered cypress log. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
Jack disappears underwater for a few minutes. A different type of bubble begins to rise; these are smaller and come up much more quickly.
“He’s releasing pressure,” Hamilton says.
Jack emerges, spitting out his regulator and panting, says. “It’s down there. It’s a nice one. But she’s wedged.”
Hamilton scans the boat and grabs a 4-foot piece of bent pipe and hands it to Jack.
“Hurry,” Hamilton says, checking a maritime tracker app.
Like the first dive, you can see Jack’s regulator bubbles moving along in a linear pattern, signifying he’s traveling along a long object.
A few minutes later, we hear a loud thud. Jack hits his head on the bottom of the boat, then comes around the side and surfaces. The pipe Hamilton gave him is three times as bent as before, and he’s breathing hard. “It’s buried under a tonna mud,” Jack manages to get out. “I think I can get it.”
He chomps back on the regulator and descends. The water starts getting choppier. Recreational and fishing boats pass, and men with beer guts the size of small hot air balloons glare at us.
“Normally if anybody asks,” Hamilton says, “We just say we’re searching for an anchor.”
The face of a 200-foot barge comes around the corner of the GIWW. Its name, Kirby 2837, spray painted on the side.
It’s somewhere around a hundred yards away, but storms forward at a determined pace.
“Shhhhhhhit. Shit” Hamilton says, gripping the rope tighter, following every movement.
Hamilton gives it three tough yanks, the boat begins to rock along with the choppy water. “He better hurry his ass up, or short will be the way that leads to hell’s light, or whatever Shakespeare said. That thing’ll turn him into ground chuck.”
The boat encroaches 50 yards. Hamilton yanks one more time, the bubbles disappear, the rope goes slack. Soon enough, Jack’s head breaks the surface. We pull him on board. And reel the anchor and shoot off toward the bank.
Jack lays down on the boat deck, squinting into the sun.
“Damnit, Ham,” He says panting in between sentences. “That’s a good’n down there. Pre-cut. The bark on it feels different too. But it’s so lodged. I don’t even know if I moved it.”
“That’s too close,” Hamilton says, cranking the engine to a roar. “Some of these logs fight, y’know. Just have to go back out again. You got it a little bit, though; the air was comin’ up.”
They check the radar to determine if it's worth going back under now, but a large shrimp and flounder boat is passing through, so Hamilton vetoes the idea even though Jack is gunning to go back under.
Hamilton marks the sonar. He points to the visible rut where Jack was digging below with the iron bar. They decide to plan a night trip soon, when it’s less busy.
On the way back, Hamilton explains that, ideally, a cypress outfit runs best with a two-man cypress crew, even for big, ornery logs. “Keep it simple.” He says. “One captain. One diver. No dumbasses.”
Even without the threat of overhead barges and in perfectly mild conditions, if you fail to pay attention for a few seconds at the wrong time, the rope can get caught in a winch, and if those on deck don’t see it, the diver can get cranked right up into the hydraulics. Extra hands means extra risk that someone might assume their responsibility isn’t their responsibility.
“Not with me, but I know someone whose hand got caught in cable and cranked up. That hand’s gone,” Hamilton says.
They dock the boat around 3 p.m. Without a word, Hamilton shoots off, and Jack informs me that almost as soon as they got back ashore, Hamilton received word his mother had been hospitalized.
Jack and I stop at a lunch spot called Frazier's Connection, where you can get a two-piece dark meat fried chicken plate for $6.99 and double-well highballs for $4. We talk over the sounds of elderly folks hammering the hell out of buttons on some video poker machines they keep in the corner of the restaurant.
“I’m thinking about getting another tattoo,” Jack explains. “Too good for the Westbank, too trashy for across the river…prettiest font I can find.”
The bartender jokingly tells him to take his shirt off.
“I’ll do ya up right in the back,” She says, and explains she’s apprenticing to become a tattoo artist. “You maybe have enough though, hun.”
Jack washes down his fried chicken thigh with whiskey and coke. “Life’s different now. I’ll have a home in a couple of days for the first time since January. I got a job. W-2. Maybe I should just get rebaptized at this point,” he says, ordering another drink.
Living in New Orleans, you hear plenty about the West Bank — nothing good. Looking at a map, the West Bank is the area covering the western bank of the Mississippi, although, parts of the West Bank actually lie east of New Orleans.
It’s a place that lives in the massive shadow of New Orleans, the place that always seems to be the final stop on the Mississippi, as far as Johnny Cash and Mark Twain are concerned, before it drains into the Gulf. The West Bank is farther down the line, but it never gets the credit for having to deal with the New Orleans sewage that floats through it every day.
“No ballads about the West Bank, though,” Jack says.
He explains that while he prefers this side of the river, for his own sanity, it’s wise to distance himself. “Lotta ghosts around here,” he says. “And the cops in Jefferson Parish all hate me.”
He points across the street, drowning a single fry with about six tablespoons of Tabasco, saying that his friend died right outside of the Dollar General. He was going about 200 mph on his Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR and lost control.
We drive no more than a mile down the road, and he shows me a small wooden sign that says St. Joachim Catholic church. He says he remembers his mother telling him that she and his father used to go to mass there, but they had changed allegiance to some Pentecostal cult by the time Jack was born.
St. Joachim, Jack explains that his mom used to tell him, was the grandfather of Mother Mary and the patron saint of fathers, grandfathers, and cabinet makers. “Can’t think of a patron saint for cypress divers,” he says, before following up, “Couldn’t stand my grandparents though. Shitty people… And the only grandparents I liked turned out not to even be my grandparents later on. But I’ll always think of ‘em that way.”
Jack explains that the church was the cornerstone of his growing up, something we share. For me, it was a hybrid strain of Evangelicalism and Southern Baptist, for him it was Pentecostalism. He explains that as far back as he remembers the sound of worshipful hands clapping along the shrill cries of repentance. He also recalls the first time seeing his father fight a man was in church. Someone in the congregation began to openly question and chastise the preacher during a sermon. His father dragged him out and you could hear the blows from inside the church as the pastor expounded on the dangers of heretical behavior.
Jack had a knack for speech, and although he received not much by way of a formal education, from about the age of 12 the leaders in the church targeted him and began insinuating that he was being called to the pulpit.
But eventually doubt crept in. He recalls one of those foundation-shaking moments when a member of their church, one of the older ladies, spurned potentially life-saving breast cancer treatment at the spiritual guidance of the pastor. Eventually, she died.
“I don’t know if treatment woulda saved ‘er. But she held onto our pastor’s words as if they were scripture. I remember being at that funeral. Couldn’t really keep on the firing line too long after that,” he says, turning back on I-10.
As we cross back over the bridge to New Orleans, Blaze Foley’s low voice rolls through the speaker.
“Let me ride in your big Caddilac, Lord Jesus,
Let me ride in your big Cadillac
Have you traded in your cross,
God the Father, God the Boss
For the keys to a big ole Cadillac
I’m so tired of walkin’ round
Let me hear your trumpet sound;
Let me ride in your big Cadillac
“Let me ride in your big Cadillac, Lord Jesus,
Let me ride in your big Cadillac”
As I head out of the car, I ask if he and Hamiton have plans to go back out soon.
“Got a court date later on this week. Same day downtown as the fuckin’ Taylor Swift concert,” he says.
After that first day on the water, I couldn’t get a hold of Jack or Hamilton for a while.
I received a text from Jack about a month later.
“Going out with Ham tomorrow. Leave at 6.”
The exhaust leak appears outside my door at 5:58 a.m. I open the door. Twenty-five wrenches and three handles of Gunpowder gin fall out. I try picking them up while stumbling around in the morning darkness.
Jack explains that he’s supposed to be in Tulsa on a nuclear restoration job, but he had to be back in Louisiana for a few days for a court-ordered driving instruction course, he says, flaunting each red light as we merge onto I-10.
He explains it was either a license suspension or a driving course. After much debate, he decided to take the course. He also mentions that the course has inspired him to start an advocacy group to lobby support for abolishing street lights and stop signs in Orleans and Jefferson Parish.
We stop again at the Time Clock. The same register baby is there to greet us. The same Copenhagen and Marlboros make the same thud on the counter.
“Ham’s got what should be a couple of big ones out there,” Jack says, chugging an energy drink. “He’s put in a lotta work searching for ‘em the past few weeks.”
No sun yet today. The stained glass is dull, and a pack of vultures picks apart a dead cat in the middle of the road.
Hamilton greets us excitedly. He hands us each a tank of oxygen and tells us to hurry and load up. “I got two of ‘em. One's 100%, and the other is 1,000%. You can see 'em on the sonar; it’s crazy, and you can tell that it’s fuckin’ big.”
With such high assurance, we hook the winch system to the front of the boat. The attachment adds an additional twenty-foot platform — a steel exoskeleton to support the hydraulic steel-cable winch system that attaches to big iron tongs, or chain dogs, the same type they used to use to pull virgin cypress from the swamps during the industrial logging era. Hamilton manufactured this system himself — one of the world's only sinker cypress recovery machines in existence. Hamilton stops to point out an alligator darting off onto some weeds on the riverfront.
“You know what the leading cause of death among alligators is?” he pauses. “Cannibalism. When a mother lays a nest of eggs, usually about 60, after about a year and a half or two years, if the babies haven’t left the nest, they’ll eat ‘em and lay more. Reptiles don’t play around like mammals with their kids. Mature males will also go out during mating season and fight. But they don’t just kill each other, though; they also gotta eat each other.”
“Like the primaries,” Jack cuts in, laughing.
Hamilton laughs and points to a small alligator that’s swimming near the bank with particularly beady eyes, “That one kinda looks like Rubio, don’t he?”
Travel is slower than before with the winch system in front of the boat. Hamilton and Jack get lost discussing what’s going on in the neighborhood. They talk about various old men they know, and the hookers they see ‘em out with. Who’s dead. Who’s dyin’. Who they wish would.
“The more shit changes ‘round here, the more shit stays the same,” Hamilton says.
“One thing that don’t,” Jack says, “we’re all still going to hell.”
“Hah! What’s that our ole buddy Ernst would say?” says Hamilton. “We’ll all get to heaven when the devil goes blind?”
The boat glides in silence for a while longer. Then, Hamilton smiles, laughs, and turns to Jack. “Hey, happy Veterans Day, man. I forgot to send you a text.”
Jack reaches for his gun, clicks the hammer back, and puts it to the side of his head jokingly. “Take it back.”
“I’ll do it,” he says, jamming the barrel of the gun further into the flesh of his temple. “The note’s already written, and your name’s at the top.”
Hours pass and we near the waypoint on the other end of Lost Lake.
Upon arrival they detach the winch system to better estimate the location of the log. At this point, it’s quicker to separate and anchor the cumbersome extension and maneuver the boat on its own.
As we drive in circles, Hamilton points to the screen. “You see that? The size of that mark? That’s a log.”
After dropping the markers, Jack goes under and feels around for the log. While Jack’s among the catfish, schools of minnows leap above the water and flash in the sun.
A few minutes go by. More and more bubbles break the surface.
“I know what’s down there,” Hamilton says. “If that’s not it, I need to get both my eyes checked.”
More bubbles. Dead silence. I climb the boat’s roof to capture the scene from a high point.
I remember coming across the fact that the oldest cypress tree in the United States is 2,600 years old. Older than this country ten times over. Older than the British and Byzantines and the Romans. Not quite as old as Walls of Jericho. But older than Christendom. And older than Christ.
Suddenly, quietly, you see a long shadow rising from the lake.
Jack's hand emerges from the lake, and a pair of goggles fly towards the Louisiana sunshine.
“Yeeeeeeeee—”
The log we found was remarkably cooperative. With little work, we managed to get it dislodged, positioned, and secured in the winches. After tying two giant white balloon buoys to the log’s front end to hold it above water, we tug it back to shore.
To get it from the water requires wrapping the log with polyester web slings and attaching those to a 10-ton telescopic forklift.
Hamilton pushes his catch as close to shore as possible and Jack jumps out waist-deep into the water and mud and gets the lift. The straps groan under the strain of the forklift and weight of the log. For a moment, Jack dangles the entire 40-foot tree in the air like it’s show and tell.
There’s no time to sit around and drink to victory. Another log’s out there, the evening’s approaching, and storm clouds gather in the western sky.
On Lost Lake, close to two hours later, Hamilton stands in disbelief.
Jack’s underwater; his blue dive rope is taught. “I coulda sworn this one was shorter,” he says to himself. “Ain’t right.”
After getting back to the edge of the boat Jack tells us the log is, to use the professional lingo, a “real big motherfucker.”
“I don’t know if we can get this’n back on its own, Ham,” Jack continues.
“Maybe not…” says Hamilton.
Hamilton charges me with the dive rope as he strains every muscle to unspool the thick steel winch cable. Beneath us, Jack scrapes mud away from the base of the tree, trying to expose enough of the edge to slip the chain dogs around. Unlike the first log, this one’s going to fight.
After a few failed attempts to get the tongs fully secured, they get a grip. Hamilton initiates the crank system to bring the log up from the muck. The wires screech and make cracking, whining sounds. The suction pressure from the log is too great, and the front end of the pontoon becomes completely submerged. This destabilizes the entire boat, causing it to rock.
Jack continues to dig through the mud, now having to avoid getting his rope caught up in the tongs. It’s at this point that wind rushes across the lake and a few raindrops fall.
It’s an hour-long battle of attrition with the log to gain centimeters of ground at a time. Eventually, one end breaks free, and Jack comes up, coveralls weighed down by a thick layer of silt. He then straddles the end and ropes the buoys around the front of the log to keep it in place as they reposition the pontoon to get a better grip on the opposite end.
The backend refuses to give for a while longer. Finally, the hydraulic engine lets out a last cry. It breaks free and the boat jumps.
A 70-foot cypress tree, over four feet in diameter, is secured to the undercarriage of the pontoon. It’s one of the biggest either of them had ever seen.
Hamilton’s commentary rolls as they test the winches for secure grips. “Look at the edge on those hatchetmarks…Gotta be somewhere around four-five hundred years old.”
With the Louisiana sun falling in the backdrop, Jack strides out onto the Lost Lake on top of the log – a good thirty feet. You can’t hardly see the log beneath him, and for a moment looks like he’s one of God’s Apostles who just was granted the miraculous power to walk on water. Jack howls, flings both arms in the air and drops back in the lake.
“We’re not huntin’ for splinters, man. What’d I say?” says Hamilton, grinning.
Jack walks out onto the water atop the cypress log. Photo credit: Nathan Rizzuti.
It’s a slow, careful ride back. Bayou birds glide alongside our boat. The sun turns from bright orange to the color of communion wine.
Hamilton points out a Bald Eagle, “Seein’ so many of ‘em nowadays.”
“Just coyotes with wings,” Jack says, sipping coffee.
Returning to the subject of Veteran’s Day, I ask Jack about his military service.
“Service,” he replies, “is an interesting word for it.”
Then he gets into it.
“I signed up as an 03,” he says, which makes him a Captain.
“I enlisted with the sole intent to see combat and die. My placement score and higher ranking made me a platoon leader during recruit training but was informed halfway through that my path and station meant I would almost certainly not see action. I realized the recruiter basically lied to me the whole way through. Probably shoulda seen that comin’.”
As he talks he uses a pair of large slip joint pliers and starts to bend a stack of quarters into themselves, turning them the shape of taco shells. One by one, he tosses them into the river.
“I tried to quit and was stripped of my position as platoon leader,” he continues. “The officers berated me for a week straight to try to break me into compliance. Finally, the senior drill instructor called me into his office and asked me to talk to him plainly, not like a recruit addressing a superior.
“He said he didn’t take me for a quitter. That I might be disillusioned, but was too tough and capable to quit. I was honest about my intentions, but he still said if I went home halfway, I’d regret it and that I was at risk of being dishonorably discharged.”
I get the sense he would have been OK with that. But the story goes on.
“I decided to return to training. Before I left his office he informed me we’d have to go back to speaking how we did before. I nodded and stood at attention. He asked if I was ready to go back to training. ‘Yes sir, senior drill instructor,’ I screamed, as was customary.
He leaned in real close and whispered, ’At least when you tried to quit, you didn’t cry like I did.’
The next day, I interrupted an inspection and demanded permission to speak. When addressed I said, ‘This recruit wants another chance to lead this platoon.’
‘Well lead it then,’ the senior drill instructor yelled back. I grabbed the guide staff off the wall and retained command of my platoon until graduation.”
After graduation, Jack got word that his father was sick, possibly dying.
“Between my complete distaste for the military, the loss of the chance of seein’ combat, and the idea that this might be my last chance to have a car shop with my dad, I decided to get out,” he says.
“I smoked weed, did blow, hoping to fail the drug test to get sent away, but I somehow passed. After advanced infantry training started, I didn’t even wait for field exercises to begin. On the morning we were to start, as we were lined up in front of the company, I announced that I refused to train any further.”
Jack explains that he was told the phrase “refuse to train” was the one he was to use for this to work.
“The captain started screaming threats. Everyone did. The captain was furious that I had pulled this shit on 9/11 of all days…I didn’t even realize that was the day. They locked me in the barracks, trying to prod me back into training with everyone else. Some came by and tried to reason with me, others tried to shame me. Nothing worked.
On the third day, as a last measure, they sent the police sergeant. Rumor had it he had killed three men overseas with a collapsible shovel.
We ended up talking about cars; he and my father both owned a ‘71 Chevelles. That’s the only time I’d ever heard this guy speak, and that’s all we talked about.
They dropped me from the platoon and I received non-judicial punishment, in the Marine Corps you call that getting ninja punched. They stripped my rank, fined me, and told me I’d serve time in the legal holding barracks.
I was charged with multiple counts of direct disrespect and disobedience toward superior commissioned and non-commissioned officers and an inability to adapt to authority. Finally, the paperwork was drafted for my discharge, and I was placed in a holding community on a floor with the other discharged soldiers.
It was a strange place. We bribed sergeants to sneak liquor in for us, got drunk every night, fought, and played chess on a makeshift board we drew on a portrait of one of the admirals.
When I got there, the informal leader of our floor was another disgraced marine called Story. He was on his way out but was intent on leaving me in charge. Before he left, he gave me his gold neck chain and went back to Florida and got hooked on junk, just like before he enlisted. I found him years later and brought him in to live with me. I tried to give him a second shot at life but…”
Jack’s voice trailed off. He paused for a second before continuing.
“Before I got out, my friend started a fight, and I got involved. The next thing I knew I put someone through a window, along with my hand. Broke my knuckles on the steel window frame. Nasty break. My fingers were bent back towards me.
A sergeant brought me to the naval hospital. They tried just to bend the fingers back straight — no meds. Knuckles were too broken up to hold the joint in. They put me under and cut my right hand open. I woke up in a cast, not knowing how long I’d been out. I also woke up to accusations of going AWOL because the Sergeant on duty failed to inform the right people I was hospitalized. I didn’t care, though. I was looking forward to getting out and didn’t care about the charges.
Turns out the American military won’t release a broken GI, even if they are due to leave. I was stuck several more months in holding before a doctor signed off on me
I ended up gettin’ home and started the car shop with my father. Shortly after, his liver cancer became more aggressive, and he passed the next year.”
Before I could ask, Jack said, “I don’t regret leaving.”
As we feel the shore getting closer night sets in. Over the soft harmony of cypress wood splitting the still surface of the river, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings sing,
“I won't get drunk no more, no more,
the old refrain it shines with use
While you mop your bread with barley-wine
and mop your floor in tobacco juice
So they kicked you out of paradise,
grinned and locked the garden gate
What those devils called your greatest sin,
Gabriel and I called you great escape”
Even a massive telescoping crane struggles to move a 70-foot tree to dry ground. But finally, she slips out.
Hamilton hovers his face up close to the rings and starts to explain how it has to have been felled prior to the industrial age by the way the trunk is hewn. “See that double hatchet cut, that’s old school, pre-industrial era,” he says.
He points to a spike sticking out of the side. “That’s where flatheads would tie ‘em together to make a raft.”
After we line the two logs up, he takes us over to the sawmill where he explains he likes to let the logs catch a little sun, then run them through the mill.
Standing next to a semi-truck trailer stacked high with fresh-cut cypress boards, I’m overcome with the powerful scent of cypress dust. I could snort two handfuls and still beg for more. As I stand there I suspect these guys might be in the game if only for the smell.
We head inside the church. Hanging from the walls, bolted to the ceiling, and littering the floors are rough-cut cypress planks, petrified stumps, polished pecky boards, prigues, canoes, oars, all made over the decades by Hamilton out of his personal collection. There are a few boards with stunning swamp scenery etched meticulously; pieces he explains were done by a tattoo-artist friend of his from Brazil. The bright moonlight generates a faint glow from the stained glass windows onto the artwork.
Jack points to an unfinished canoe on the operating table. Hamilton pieced it together over years, every layer from a different cypress log to get a variance of shades as he finds them in different sections of the swamps.
It may not be your standard orthodoxy, and it may not come with an ecumenically-approved hymnal, but it’s unmistakably a house of worship. Either way, the Good Book’s got plenty to say about it. As the prophet Isiah writes: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall make a name for the LORD, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”
Cypress is a curiously religious plant. In the Jewish and Christian faiths, it symbolizes rebirth and redemption, but in Roman and Greek mythology, permanent mourning. For America? From everything I’ve come to understand about its past, present, and future, it's a twisted blend of these extremes.
The majority of sinker cypress hunters hunt for profit, sure. But Hamilton’s intentions are different. It’d be easy to assume his obsession would be driven by a selfish motive – be it greed or Nielsen ratings or TikTok followers.
As a witness to it all, I was curious when I’d discover that you can milk cypress pulp and reduce it into some supreme narcotic that’s bought and distributed between members of the ruling class for $600,000 per liquid ounce.
But no. Turns out Hamilton has little, if any, commercial intentions. Almost all the cypress he recovers is used for personal projects or for pro bono work for friends and family. Play the cynic all you want, I choose to hold onto it as proof that love doesn’t always come with a 15% APR.
Hamilton explains a bit of his origin story with cypress at Johnny’s, which is a restaurant that goes by a different name, but they call it Johnny's after the man who designed the interior from top to bottom with sinker cypress that he found himself. Everything inside the restaurant, the tables, walls, to-go order sign, bathroom stall doors, floorboards, salt shakers – all cypress.
Johnny’s a local legend, and Hamilton, in many ways, is what you could call the next genealogical stage in that lineage. He does much of the same work, outfitting friends’ boats, patients, houses, and businesses.
As we tear apart a spread of deep fried roast beef po’ boys and gulf shrimp, Hamilton explains that his first cypress encounter came shortly after Hurricane Katrina. He returned to the city with his cousin to find his house destroyed. To get their minds off of destruction, they took a trip out to the swamp, where they found a felled cypress tree that had been uprooted by the storm. They came back with pirogues and a trawler and cut away the snapped roots.
He towed it back to shore and took it home, where he still had a small but functional woodworking operation.
“One of the only things that was working at the time,” he tells me.
He turned the log into lumber and made a table.
“Nothin’ but love ever since,” he says, sliding Jack a stack of hundred-dollar bills, the day’s pay.
Neutral Ground announced its reopening in early February, although the murmurings began months before.
Do you hear they’re opening in a shack behind Snake ‘n Jakes?...
Were you raised by idiots? I have it on good authority that they’re going full Chautauqua Method and holding roving pop-ups in large white tents across the Gulf region.
The PSA on Instagram read as follows:
“Losing the coffee house two years ago was devastating, but today we have a new home. And I can’t think of a more fitting space than a church. Sacred ground.”
In mid-February, characters from the Neutral Gorund’s storied history packed the church, filling the disoriented pews, folding chairs, and inflatable couches.
At about 9:34 p.m., Jack took the pulpit.
“I wrote this one a while back,” he says…
“Fading blue sky
Interrupted by
An electric banner
Blinking “buckle up and drive”
I toss that shit out the window
With what’s left of my smoke
Check the rearview for cops
And check my glovebox for some hope
Spent too many months thinkin’ bout
How much distance you’d need from peak of that bridge to the pavement
So you wouldn’t just lay there and bleed
But most nights now when I’m gettin’ down
And leaning towards losing my head
I turn up Willie, Walker, and Townes
‘Thank god for train songs instead
Every morning, I wake up
Stick my head out the door
Lookin’ down and up for cigarette butts
And words nobody’s heard before
I found ‘em one time in St. Tammany
On the back of a Chinese food menu
In the back of a gas station buffet
But they read clear and loud and true
They said: ‘hatred’s a hard drug, kids
And bitterness, well, it rots the bones
Be kind to one another as best you can
And love shouldn’t be given on loan…”
Nathan Rizzuti is an Ohio native who now lives, writes, and plays bluegrass in Southeast Louisiana.
