Night Water: A Letter from the Brown Shrimp Grounds

On the evening of June ninth, Clément Boudreaux left Guidry's Marina in Dulac, Louisiana — a small fishing community so deep in the Terrebonne Parish marsh that the road into town is elevated like a levee, and at night you drive it feeling like you're crossing open water. He was headed out for brown shrimp, running the Sainte-Marie — a sixty-foot trawler his grandfather built in 1961 — twelve miles southeast into the Atchafalaya delta basin. The nets went down around dusk. His deckhand Tibo fell asleep on a coil of rope at the stern. The radio played something that sounded like zydeco on the working channel. And Clément, with an hour of waiting ahead of him and a fuel receipt in his pocket, picked up a pencil and wrote a letter.

This episode follows that letter. Clément describes the particular sensation of towing nets at two and a half knots through still Gulf water at night — the bioluminescence lighting up behind the net ropes, the diesel hum, the way the sky and the water merge into something edgeless and borderless. He walks through the math of a night haul: ice costs, dock prices, fuel receipts, crew share, loan payments on a rebuilt engine. He talks about his daughter, who carries a field guide to Gulf marine species on the boat and wants to name everything in the bycatch. He talks about his grandfather, who never sold his boat. About his father, who also never sold his. He writes: I'm not going to be my grandfather and say this is the only life. I will say: it's a life. A real one. And then the timer goes off, and he puts down the pencil, and goes back to work.

Clément's letter was written on a fuel receipt from Guidry's Marina, two pages, both sides, in pencil. It is the kind of document that was never meant to be preserved — which is, perhaps, exactly why it deserves to be.