Spanish moss in the Barataria Preserve of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park/NPS

Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve celebrates the heady, rich nature and culture of New Orleans.

By Kim O’Connell

At the Barataria Preserve just south of New Orleans, I can walk from hardwood forest to swamp to marsh in the space of just a few hundred yards. Compared to the Appalachian forests I’m used to, where water tumbles coolly over rocks in well-defined creeks and rivers, here the water seems to be everywhere, brown and green, studded with trees and grasses and “cypress knees,” those stumpy growths that rise out of the swamp like woody stalagmites.

Barataria Preserve is one of six sites managed as part of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, an umbrella park of natural and cultural sites named for the early 19th-century French pirate and smuggler who helped Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans during the War of 1812. Taken together, the sites paint a rich portrait of coastal Louisiana: The Barataria unit protects some 26,000 acres of wetlands, while the Chalmette National Battlefield unit honors the resounding American victory in January 1815. Also part of Jean Lafitte are three museum centers in nearby cities that interpret various aspects of Acadian history, the name given to Louisiana’s Cajun people and culture. And downtown, the park’s French Quarter Visitor Center provides exhibits on the architecture, music, and food of the city’s most famous neighborhood. (It is only a five-minute walk from there to Café Du Monde, the open-air coffee stand serving chicory coffee and beignets for more than 100 years.)

I’ve come to New Orleans to learn more about this heady mix of nature and culture, and Barataria is my first stop. Less than an hour after I’ve left the city’s filigreed antebellum buildings and urban high rises behind, I’ve walking on a boardwalk through the Barataria swamp, a boardwalk that is designed to protect both the watery landscape from me and my sneakers from the watery landscape. As I turn a corner, I see that the boardwalk is protecting me from something else, too: A. mississippiensis, the American alligator. At least four feet long, the black creature sits just off the trail looking languidly at me as I give it a wide berth and quicken my pace. “That’s a pretty small one,” a park ranger tells me. “To see the big ones you usually have to be in a boat.” I learn later that an estimated two million wild alligators live in Louisiana—the highest crocodilian population of any U.S. state.

A boardwalk leads you through the swamp at Barataria Preserve at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park/Kim O'Connell

Eventually I come to the end of the boardwalk trail, where the dense, cypress-filled swamp gives way to open marsh. “Marsh is not swamp,” wrote author Delia Owens in her bestselling book Where the Crawdads Sing. “Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” Although Owens was talking about North Carolina, the description fits this Louisiana wetland, too, where tall grasses seemingly go on for miles. Some 400 plants are found at Barataria, with colorful common names that sound straight out of Dr. Seuss; in the freshwater marsh alone, plants include the bulltongue arrowhead, the smooth beggartick, and the longhair sedge. Walking through the swamp and marsh feels lush and sensory. As I turn down a new trail, I pass a couple sitting on a bench and we exchange pleasantries. I’m a little surprised to pass them again on my return trip, sitting in the same spot. Maybe they did a short hike in between, but I suspect they remained on that bench the whole time, soaking in the marshland magic.

Yet my trip to Barataria is also sobering. In addition to highlighting the vast array of flora and fauna at the park—reptiles, amphibians, and some 200 species of birds, including heron, egret, and ibis—the visitor center takes a clear-eyed view of the devastating effects of a century of leveeing the Mississippi River, and of climate change, on coastal Louisiana. A park ranger explains that, along the Louisiana coast, people talk about “relative sea-level rise”: Just as sea levels are rising due to climate change, so is the land sinking through a process known as subsidence, a side effect of industrial development and extraction. “Coastal Louisiana has lost an average of 34 square miles of land per year for the last 50 years,” a wall panel states. “If nothing is done to stop this land loss, in the next 50 years Louisiana could lose another 700 square miles, almost 500,000 acres.” The map of Louisiana would have to be completely redrawn.

These realities hang in my mind as I head back to New Orleans towards the Chalmette battlefield and the adjacent Chalmette National Cemetery, also part of Jean Lafitte. Located just a few miles downriver from the French Quarter, the Chalmette sites were heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which destroyed the old battlefield visitor center and toppled gravestones in the cemetery. Now, the sites have been preserved, and they make for a serene visit away from the hustle-bustle of downtown. It was here that President Jackson led a hastily assembled army in a decisive victory against British forces on January 8, 1815, the last gasp of the War of 1812.

This is one of the smaller versions of the roughly 2 million alligators in Louisiana/Kim O'Connell

Where Barataria is thick and lush, Chalmette feels open and expansive. As I drive the site’s loop road, which features pull-offs with interpretive markers, I am particularly intrigued to learn about Fazendeville, an African-American community that was established on the property in 1867 by Jean Pierre Fazende, a free man of color. Fazende subdivided the property and sold plots to formerly enslaved people from local plantations, and eventually the community grew to more than 200 people. It survived for 100 years until the National Park Service purchased the land for the park in a contentious process that destroyed the village, with most residents moving to the city’s 9th Ward. It was a battle of a very different sort, but one that the Park Service is now helping visitors to remember.

I conclude my visit to Chalmette with a tour of the adjacent national cemetery, a long, rectangular site bisected by an arrow-straight road. Here lie veterans of every American war from 1812 through Vietnam, and I spend a few moments walking among the graves, shaded by an alley of massive oak trees. Although these hardwoods are brawny and thick, each claiming its own space, and so different than the sinewy bald cypress trees that crowd the Barataria swamp, it occurs to me that both species are examples of resilience. In a city that has proved its own resilience again and again, spending time among them is well worth the trip.

Traveler postscript: Kim O'Connell describes her visit to Jean Lafitte National Park and Preserve in Episode 43 of Traveler's podcast series.