Erin, Opal, Ivan, Dennis, … no, that’s not a list of my friends. It is, rather, a short list of the tropical cyclones that have battered Florida’s Gulfarium since 1995. And this list is by no means complete. It’s just the ones we try hardest to forget.

Funny things, these tropical cyclones. I remember Opal (October, ‘95) leaving small tables by the Gulfarium snack bar completely intact, knocking ten gallon glass aquariums off a shelf (tanks were unbroken), and washing up ten thousand Smilax roots in a long thin line on the beach. Smilax is the genus of woody vines generally known as catbriers and greenbriers. Some varieties have really vicious thorns. I learned just how vicious when using a machete to cut back some vines on my farm years ago… there’s nothing quite like having a catbrier thorn driven deep into your knuckle! However, my least favorite greenbrier encounter was with a variety called Carrion Flower that I found one summer day while working on the farm - the flowers smell like rotting meat. Really!

Smilax grows almost anywhere and on most continents and in most climates. Around here it likes swamps, old fields, and dry dunes along the beach that often get eroded by tropical cyclones. That explains how they found their way to the beach after Opal. It is a really tough plant that survives machetes and hurricanes.

An extract from the root of Jamaican greenbrier (Smilax regelii) is the main flavoring ingredient in many brands of root beer. I think I saw my first Barq’s Root Beer when I lived in Kenner, a New Orleans’ suburb. That was the year that Hurricane Frederick slammed into Mobile, Alabama. I don’t remember if Barq’s uses Smilax. I do remember scrambling to prepare our jobsite in Norco, Louisiana for the coming storm. Mobile got blasted by Frederick. But N.O. got not a drop of rain nor gust of wind.

After I was laid off from my job in Norco, I moved to Pascagoula, Mississippi. That’s where I was when I first read about Carrion Flower, and I had my doubts that it really smelled like dead meat. There were a few small catbriers growing near the office where I worked. One late summer afternoon I saw a dragonfly land on a catbrier vine. I watched in amazement as the alien-looking insect gnawed eagerly on a small helpless mosquito. Although, the mosquito-borne West Nile virus was as yet unseen in the US, it felt rather gratifying to see the tiny winged blood-sucker meet his demise.

Still, mosquitoes played a big role in my life in those days. It was then, living and hiking and fishing all around the Mississippi coast, that I began to develop a deep appreciation for the mosquito-filled swamps and marshes of the Gulf Coast. I caught my first pickerel in a cypress swamp just north of Pascagoula. It was a two foot chain pickerel (Esox niger)… think “miniature pike”, as in the famed pike and musky of northern lakes and rivers. The chain pickerel is much smaller than its northern cousins, but it has all the fight and vigor. Pikes and pickerels are powerful and ferocious predators. The pike’s mouth is full of long needle-like teeth.

It was while swatting mosquitoes and yanking a needle-toothed pickerel out of a Mississippi swamp that I was reminded of another fish I had once seen years before on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain near a New Orleans suburb. The fish was a garpike, or simply gar. It was a massive fish, as thick as my thigh. The mouth was wider than most gars, identifying this specimen as the largest of gars, the Alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula). The once majestic creature now lay dead on the remains of a lakeshore road destroyed years earlier by Hurricane Camille. The road was never repaired. It had become a jogging path for the locals. I spent a great deal of my time on the broken pavement of that Ponchartrain road... enough time to notice that there seemed to be very few fish in the shallows of that lake. And one very large dead gar.

People didn’t swim in Lake Ponchartrain when I lived near its shores. Pollution in the lake was pretty bad then. It has been cleaned up over the decades since, and people have been swimming in the lake in recent years. Even manatees, long absent from its shallow waters, have returned. But all that could change again, some say. As water from a Katrina-flooded New Orleans is pumped over repaired levees back into the lake, many wonder what the impact will be. There are reports of chemical spills and dangerous levels of bacteria in the floodwaters. There is reason to be concerned about the pollutants finding there way into the waterways around New Orleans.

Let’s put this in perspective: the floodwaters in New Orleans amount to an estimated 2 percent of the volume of Lake Ponchartrain. If the lake were a 12 ounce can of soda, the water in New Orleans would be about a half-tablespoon’s worth. Would you drink that can of soda then? Maybe not. But would it be safe for fish to live in? That’s a lot harder question to answer. Only time will tell. And in time, Katrina will be added to the list of best-forgotten names, children will play safely in Ponchartrain’s waters, and Smilax will once again grow on our beaches.