The words on the sign are “End of the World.” That is a real road marker in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, where the highway ends and the swamp takes over. It is not poetry. Since the early 1900s, the Trosclair family has been setting crab traps out here among the fishing camps perched on stilts above brackish water. Five generations. same dock. The same bayou. Whether the crabs are running big this week is the subject of the same debate over dinner.
When you actually stand on that dock at four in the morning and watch it happen, the story seems almost too good to be true.
Raymond Trosclair, 67, the current patriarch, grew up hearing his grandfather talk about catching blues before refrigerated trucks were invented and before Louisiana crabs were especially popular outside of Louisiana. The local market was the only one available at the time. Crabs were abundant, inexpensive, and not particularly glamorous. “Crabs never used to be big money,” a local fisherman recently remarked. The Trosclairs caught what they could sell and sold what they caught. It was barely sufficient.
The interstate was what made everything different. At some point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, refrigerated tractor-trailers, or “reefers” as they were known in the industry, started traveling 1,100 miles from south Louisiana to the markets in Baltimore and Washington, where restaurants were struggling due to Maryland’s diminishing Chesapeake Bay catch. It turned out that Maryland crab houses needed Louisiana blue crabs, which tend to grow larger in the warm, nutrient-rich gulf waters. For thirteen years running, Louisiana’s reported catch has surpassed Maryland’s, averaging about 45 million pounds annually as opposed to Maryland’s 25 million. Nearly overnight, the Trosclair dock was integrated into a supply chain that supplied a market they had never seen.
The majority of the logistics are now handled by Raymond’s 38-year-old son Marcus, whose work resembles managing a small distribution business more than fishing. He is always on his phone, negotiating prices per crate, checking truck schedules, and texting wholesalers. Watching that creates a tension, a subtle conflict between the romance of traditional bayou fishing and the fact that the company is still in operation today because someone figured out how to use a spreadsheet.
They were severely impacted by the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010. Not right away; at first, the crabs appeared to recover, but as the traps became lighter, the numbers never quite reached their previous levels. In Louisiana, commercial landings decreased from 53 million pounds in 2009 to less than 39 million by 2013. The Trosclairs refused to give up. This family may be more stubborn than economic reasoning sometimes permits.
Already on the water is the fifth generation. Celeste, Marcus’s fourteen-year-old daughter, spent the previous summer sorting crabs on the dock, separating the larger “No. 1s” from the smaller ones. Regarding which buyers pay fairly and which ones push too hard, she has strong opinions. Every generation has silently carried the question of whether she will stay, which no one at the dinner table asks out loud.
Something about a family that has spent more than a century measuring time in crab seasons is hard to describe. The bayou continues to rise. The trucks continue to head north. Additionally, the traps continue to enter the water every morning before sunrise.
