Bayou St. John

This guide to Bayou St. John in New Orleans opens with a forty-pound paddlefish hauled from these shallow waters in 1902, strange enough to make local news. It traces the waterway from Native fishing camps that worked here long before French colonists arrived, through an 1878 pollution scare that left dead fish floating on the surface, to a rusted floodgate that sealed it off from Lake Pontchartrain for the better part of a century. Stand at the water's edge and imagine it that still and stale for so long.