Atchafalaya River
— — the slow brown water that keeps the delta alive.
Not only on a wall.
“A distributary of the Mississippi that carries about thirty percent of the combined Mississippi and Red River flow down through the largest river swamp in North America. Cypress and tupelo stand in the water, knees breaking the surface where the current slows. The Old River Control Structure upstream is what keeps the Mississippi from jumping its bed and taking this route to the Gulf instead. Pirogues still work the back bayous. A heron will hold for a long time before it lifts. from the studio
Atchafalaya River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Atchafalaya runs roughly 137 miles from the confluence of the Red and Mississippi rivers near Simmesport down to Atchafalaya Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. It is the fifth-largest river in the United States by discharge and the principal distributary of the Mississippi. The Old River Control Structure, completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1963, regulates the split so the Atchafalaya carries about thirty percent of the combined flow. Without it the Mississippi would likely have completed an avulsion and shifted its main channel west, leaving New Orleans on a tidal estuary.
The basin around the river covers about 1.4 million acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp, the largest contiguous river swamp in North America. Sediment carried down from the Red and the Mississippi is building new land at the river's mouth in Atchafalaya Bay, one of the few places on the Louisiana coast where the shoreline is gaining ground rather than losing it. Bald cypress trees here can live for more than a thousand years, their buttressed trunks marking the high water of seasons no one remembers.
The basin is a working landscape. Cajun families have fished, trapped, and run crawfish lines through these waters for generations, and the towns along the levees (Henderson, Catahoula, Butte La Rose) still take their seasons from the river. Lake Martin and the Pat S. Pinch Public Use Area give the easiest entry by car. Sound carries strangely over still water. A bull alligator a quarter-mile off can sound close enough to touch.