The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

— Mark Twain, Roughing It

In the summers of my youth, my father woke my entire family up at exactly 4 a.m. every Saturday morning. We packed our lunch, usually pop rouge (red pop) and baloney sandwiches, piled into our old black Buick and headed to the bayous about 20 miles south of Abbeville, La. We loaded up the boat my father had built with his own hands and sped southward down the Vermilion River, into Vermilion Bay, and then hooked east to Cote Blanche Bay. There we fished for drum and red snapper and seined for shrimp.

The water was cool in the morning and only the surface warmed by lunchtime; if you plunged your hand in the water or dove in from the front of the boat, as we usually did, the water was frigid and clean and clear. Even now, when I close my eyes, I see the movement of baby shrimp, crab, sand sharks, the simple trilling of life. On the distant shore, flights of egrets and gulls and pelicans took wing, descending in search of the silver fish that nourished them, banking and circling the newly installed oil rigs. I will always remember this pure celebration of life. No child could have asked for finer days.

When my children were young, we traveled from New England to south Louisiana so that my father could take us all to Cote Blanche Bay for a day of fishing. He was hesitant, but, as many mothers do, I wanted my children to experience those same days of joy that I had. Mothers are often naïve in their children’s interests. The water was dirty and fouled. Glycerin slicks and sludge and garbage floated around the boat as we released the winch and my son walked with the boat into the water, only to make a quick retreat at what he imagined was an alligator nudging his leg. It was a rusted Shell oil can.

The land along the bayou was dotted with abandoned rigs; solitary black pumps emitted noise and the aroma of crooked civilization. Where once there had existed the loud cry of the nutria, the honk of the alligator, the call of the peregrine falcon, now there was the monotonous swish of lift pumps left to draw off oil and gas from the heart of the marshlands. What I remember most from that day is the look on my daughter’s face; it was as though I had told her a fairy tale that took place in a landscape much like purgatory.

The following day, we drove from Abbeville towards New Orleans, crossing over the once pristine and life-filled Atchafalaya Basin, which had already become known as “Cancer Alley.” I felt that we had reached Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

That the levees surrounding New Orleans broke, that the bayou communities were swept away by Katrina and Rita, should have surprised no one. Stentorian alarms had been sounded for years. During the past few weeks, we’ve heard from every politician and bureaucrat on every level of government stating that one of the causes was the erosion of the wetlands and by doggit (one really said that) something must be done. Those who have expressed surprise or play-acted their own personal incredulity are either bad liars or have long ago turned their backs on their responsibilities, giving over to the corrupting force of money and position. Even a child can see what they have refused to see and hear, what we as a people have refused to see and hear.

Is it too late to save the coast of Louisiana? I can’t answer that. But I will say this; that if we, the public, the voters, the citizens, do not hold those in power, those who hold the purse strings, those who call the shots accountable, not only will we lose the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, we will lose the very life that sustains our species and this country, the wetlands.

Now I live in the Appalachian Mountains; a lowlander come to the highlands. Last week, while driving from Sylva up into the mountains and to my home, I counted eight huge funnels of smoke spiraling into the already polluted sky. It was a warm and windless day, and the thick smog hovered like a mean and petulant portent of things to come. Two years ago, bulldozers and tractors and dump trucks arrived on Greens Creek and began cutting into the western mountains. The primeval creeks that have for thousands of years yielded unsullied waters have now turned to a thick orange brew. Last spring, I disconnected the pipe that feeds water into the duck pond because I had found two dead fish floating on top of the water. I have seen here that same depleted concern for these problems, the same tired excuses from those in whom we have placed our future, whether elected or paid.

It is not that we do not know what should be done; it is that we have lost our will to succeed at greater purposes. I fear that Katrina and Rita will become not an impetus to change but an excuse: Times are bad all over, money is tight, there are fewer and fewer jobs, war takes the resources. The federal deficit is so deep it should be called the crimson tide. Poor and not so poor and even rich countries used to come begging to us, now we go begging and borrowing from what was once considered the “Third World” — China and South Korea and South America. When the politicians and grossly rich private sector starts thinking that the people – you know us — may not vote for them next election cycle or not buy their products, they start bandying about and using that word: you know, the one we teach out children – responsibility. Only they’ve become a little more sophisticated and all we hear now is about accountability.

Yes, someone must be held accountable for what long ago happened and is still happening to the coast of Louisiana and the mountains of Western Carolina. And someone must be made accountable for making it better. Americans know who must be held accountable, whose feet should be held to the fire until they are on fire. We don’t need a civics lesson at this late date. If we do not act, speak up, write, vote, participate, then it will be our feet, and the feet of our children, that will be on fire. And there may come a day when there will be nothing left to douse the flames.

(L.M. Young lives in Sylva and can be reached at linda.young35@verizon.net.)