Seeking tales and sipping whiskey in a shack floating down the bayou
Rolling down the river: DAAP faculty featured in NYT article
Wes Modes — a newly installed University of Cincinnati assistant professor and multidisciplinary artist in DAAP's School of Art — started the fall 2025 semester with an impressive “What I did last summer” essay to share.
Modes is featured in The New York Times for gathering the hidden histories of America’s rivers and the people who live along them through an ongoing project, "A Secret History of American River People."
Aboard a handmade shantyboat built with friends, the article details how Modes has traveled waterways across the U.S., from the Ohio and Mississippi to Louisiana’s bayous; interviewing more than 175 people about art, music, food, work, and family traditions — and about the shifting realities of life on the water.
The stories are often poignant and forelorn. Ninety-year-old Hugh Paul Fanguy described watching Louisiana’s land disappear: “It still shows up on the GPS,” he said of vanished islands. Former tugboat captain Andrus Hebert, once skeptical, declared: “This is like Huckleberry Finn. You’re living it out.”
But Modes also notes whose voices are missing: descendants of enslaved people and the Native communities who first lived along these waterways. “We’re experiencing how the river is now,” the article states — while displacement, gentrification, and environmental change have left some unable to tell their stories.
This summer’s journey ended with an interview with R.J. Molinere, a Houma native, alligator hunter, and former star of "Swamp People," who summed up his ties to the water: “This right here is us. That’s what we love. This is where we’re from.”
The article explains that the shantyboat travels are about more than just oral history. These travels, the author writes, reveal how rivers serve as a “porthole into the soul of a place” — its history, industry, values, and struggles with climate change.
Read the entire story (The NYT is a subscription publication. Contact angela.koenig@uc.edu for a pdf of the article).
Featured image of swamp water: iStock Photo/John Twynam.
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