Grand Isle, Louisiana
“You’re going to Grand Isle?” said the rent-a-car woman skeptically, drawing out every last syllable in a thick New Orleans drawl that seemed to give me just enough time to reconsider my intentions. “You going to the edge of the world—you know that?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“I mean, that’s the end of the line,” she added, as she dangled my car keys over the counter, still unwilling to hand them over.
“I hear you,” I replied. In fact, that’s what I had been hearing for quite some time, almost verbatim, from a number of people, including the FEMA agent who had put me onto this story. A few months earlier I’d talked to a man named David Passey—one of many, many FEMA people I called during my location-scouting quest—and he convinced me rather quickly that Grand Isle was not to be missed. “Basically,” said Passey, “you take this two-lane road down the bayou, way out into the marsh, until you hit a bridge that takes you to this little island that sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s Grand Isle, and it gets pretty roughed up by hurricanes.”
This was an understatement. In 1893, and again in 1965, Grand Isle was destroyed by direct hits. Then, of course, there were the near misses, the many hurricanes that just passed through the region but still managed to sink the island. Yes, sink it.
This is the principal problem with Grand Isle: Cartographers may call it an island, but it more closely resembles an oversize sandbar composed of silt from the Mississippi River. When hurricanes of even a small magnitude draw near, they tend to create tidal surges that wash over the top. In the hours after a storm, often there is no visible land, just a handful of houses and trees poking out of the water. Grand Isle sits at the very edge of terra firma, a boundary between land and sea that itself is really neither. Technically it is a “barrier island,” a giant seawall for the continent at its back. Ask anyone in New Orleans and they’ll tell you that Grand Isle is their rampart, their outermost line of defense against the Gulf. It’s the only inhabited barrier island in the state, and to mainlanders, it’s the end of the world.
“Insurance?” asked the car rental woman.
“The full package,” I told her. Then, at long last, she relinquished the keys.
An hour or so later I was on my way, following David Passey’s lead down the bayou and on toward the Gulf of Mexico. In this part of the world it is commonly said that there are only two directions—up the bayou and down the bayou. Strictly speaking, a bayou is a sluggish stream that meanders through a marsh or plantation. The bayou I was now driving alongside, known as Bayou Lafourche, was actually quite large because it was once a major distributary of the Mississippi River. At one time, the mouth of the Mississippi had dozens of distributaries, which branched out in a triangular fashion before dumping their waters into the Gulf of Mexico. At this broad interface, between the river and sea, a wide, silt-rich delta accumulated. Historically, this posed a major problem for the people of New Orleans. It made the mouth of the Mississippi virtually unnavigable. To solve this problem, the city built a series of levees that narrowed the river and channeled it far out into the depths of the Gulf. As a result, the many distributaries of the Mississippi turned into sluggish waterways—much like Bayou Lafourche—meandering their way across a great marsh before easing into the Gulf.
I was heading southward, or “down the bayou,” along a small road that followed Bayou Lafourche to the Gulf. Gradually all traces of solid land disappeared, giving way to a vast marshland. The road continued onward along a narrow runway of rocks that tapered off into the distance. I found the never-ending flatness of the marsh to be oddly dreamlike—its reeds and water lilies extended as far as the eye could see, as if a giant Monet had been unfurled to the edge of the horizon. And through it all, almost nothing stirred. I drove for miles at a time without seeing another car. Occasionally I came upon a small house on stilts with a rickety gangplank that stretched down to the road. Once I passed through a small town that centered around a lonesome filling station and a Piggly Wiggly grocery store with a billboard that read, TRUST IN GOD WILL DRIVE AWAY FEAR. JESUS IS LORD. On the outskirts of this town were a handful of small shrimping boats anchored along the bayou, several of which had tattered Confederate flags fluttering in the wind. Two sunburned shrimpers looked up as my engine called to them, and they gave me hard blank stares as I sped past.
Fishing remains one of the most dependable ways to make a living along the bayou. Despite the landscape’s vacant appearance, the entire region is actually teeming with shrimp, crabs, oysters, and fish. “Anyone who is hungry here is just too lazy to step outside and get something to eat,” one fisherman later told me. The region’s bird life is also abundant. Bird watchers estimate that three quarters of all the known birds in North America have been spotted in the Grand Isle area—from common fowl like black duck and snow geese to rare gems like the Eurasian collard dove and the magnificent frigatebird.1
At one time, there was an equally impressive range of larger animals. Early European settlers came upon bears, panthers, wolves, and bison. In 1858, a New Orleans newspaper reported that one marsh inhabitant managed to kill four hundred alligators in just three months.2 The skins brought seventy-five cents apiece (a nice price back then), and before long the marsh was filled with hunters and trappers seeking their fortunes. A number of these hardy outdoorsmen chose to live on the sandy ridges that separated the marsh from the Gulf of Mexico. Among these ridges, two in particular stood out: a narrow peninsula that jutted out into the Gulf, known as Cheniere Caminada, and an island just a few hundred yards off its tip called Grand Isle. Both were remarkable because they had thick groves of oak trees with soil-gripping roots and protective branches that created a beautiful and apparently safe place to live. Word spread of this sanctuary at the foot of the Gulf, and by the end of the 1800s Grand Isle and Cheniere Caminada were occupied not just by trappers, fishermen, and farmers, but also by several luxury hotels.
Then, in early October of 1893, a massive hurricane swept in from the Gulf and devastated the two communities, killing roughly 850 people.3 Afterward, the peninsula of Cheniere Caminada was almost entirely abandoned, and it never regained its stature as a town. Grand Isle, on the other hand, survived. Although the luxury hotels closed for good, a number of the island’s fishermen and trappers stayed. Several decades later, in 1965, they paid the price once more. In the late summer of that year, Hurricane Betsy plowed through the island, damaging or destroying almost every standing structure. Afterward, as looters sifted through the rubble, even they must have been surprised at how little was left. Hurricane Betsy was so destructive that the National Hurricane Center retired its name, as is customary with particularly bad storms.
As I drove onward, hurricanes were very much on my mind. The road down the bayou offered constant reminders in the form of small blue warning signs reading, HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTE: FOR INFO TUNE TO 870 AM, 101.9 FM. Grand Isle is particularly prone to evacuations. When the town’s current mayor, David Camardelle, was first elected in 1997, he ordered mandatory evacuations on four weekends in a row. Evacuations like these are often a frantic race against time, or, more specifically, against one grim certainty: If a hurricane draws near, the tide will rise and large sections of the road to New Orleans will disappear beneath a swell of salt water. Needless to say, no one wants to be stuck halfway down the bayou when this happens. The options are either to leave early, which almost everybody does, or to stay. I knew from my brief phone conversation with Josie Cheramie, the island’s director of tourism, that a few locals always stayed, including the police and a handful of self-proclaimed “storm riders.” Amazingly enough, the storm riders were generally senior citizens. According to Cheramie, they were the last remnants of the old Grand Isle. Now, like most retirees on the island, they tended to hang out at a local diner called the Starfish—which is precisely where I was headed.
Continuing down the bayou, I fiddled with the dial on my car radio until I found a news update on an infant storm named Tropical Depression Fifteen (or TD Fifteen) that was currently soaking Honduras and Nicaragua. According to the radio, TD Fifteen was now threatening to spin out into the warm waters of the Caribbean and become a tropical storm. From there, if the conditions were right, it might even become a hurricane.
As my radio signal faded, I rolled down the windows, letting the warm air of the Gulf flap against my face. It was late October—Tuesday the thirtieth to be precise—the twilight of hurricane season.* For coastal dwellers it was a superstitious time of year when it was considered bad luck to breathe easy. And this year many people were doubly superstitious because the United States was riding a lucky streak in which not a single hurricane had hit the mainland in the past two storm seasons. If the luck held through November, it would be only the second time in a century that this had happened. No one liked statistics like these. They belied the nagging rule of odds: Two years was a long time—a storm was about due.
The unyielding flatness of the horizon was finally broken by what appeared to be a giant barstool way off in the distance. As I sped onward, the clumsy structure came into focus, and I recognized what it was: a water tower. This was the first landmark I’d spotted in miles, and it meant that Grand Isle was just around the corner. Moments later, I arrived on the sparsely settled peninsula of Cheniere Caminada, which ever so slightly rose from the marsh. I slowed my car as I passed the peninsula’s lone cemetery. It was a forlorn lot, with a giant wooden cross and a dead oak tree whose skeletal branches swayed over the top of several crumbling tombs. A nearby sign commemorated the hurricane victims of 1893, most of whom were reportedly “buried in mass graves in this cemetery.” The rest of Cheniere Caminada was just as spooky. Not a single person appeared anywhere near the handful of houses that lined the peninsula, and without hesitation I continued on across the low-lying steel bridge that stretched out to Grand Isle.
The moment I exited the bridge I felt a vague sense of relief. Unlike Cheniere Caminada, Grand Isle had a prominent central ridge that stood twelve feet in height and ran almost the entire length of the island. Although Grand Isle was just a sliver of land sticking out into the Gulf—seven miles in length and half a mile in width—its central ridge provided a sense of sturdiness, like a giant earthen backbone.
I turned onto Grand Isle’s one main road and followed it down the length of the island. This road effectively splits the island in two halves—one facing the Gulf and the other facing the marsh. On the “Gulf side” there is a picturesque beach lined with a number of palatial summer homes that belong to people from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and beyond are the roaring waves of the Gulf, which stretch out to the horizon, where the oil rigs lurk, rising together from the sea like some dark futuristic city. On the “marsh side” is a forest of oak trees that conceal most of the island’s far more modest homes, belonging to the locals, and beyond the trees are the murky waters of the marsh, also known as Barataria Bay. Though I hardly realized it at the time, the main road is a very meaningful divide in Grand Isle. On one side are the summer people, who love the sea; on the other side are the locals, who know what it can do.
Two miles later, on the marsh side of the road, I came across a sun-bleached sign with blue lettering that read, THE STAR FISH. I pulled into the parking lot and instinctively locked all my car doors, a gesture that certainly gave me away as an outsider. Almost immediately I was mistaken for a bird watcher. (This is a misconception that I am still rather sore about. Being a fact-checker I could handle—but a bird watcher?) “No,” I told the man who had inquired, “I’m here for the hurricanes.” He nodded his head skeptically.
Inside, the Starfish was a no-frills kind of place with a handful of wooden booths, a jukebox that played mainly soft rock, an aging waitress with a bottomless pot of coffee, and an electronic gambling machine in back that burped out a small jackpot of coins once every few days. I took a seat, feigned interest in a menu, and tilted my head toward a nearby table where a handful of seniors were sitting. In the coming days, I earned the nickname “plastic man,” because as one regular explained, “Your ears looked like they could stretch all the way across the room.”
My eavesdropping was soon interrupted when a skinny man in hunting overalls and camouflage baseball cap walked over to my table. “I’m Ambrose Besson,” he said in a garbled French accent that sounded more like “Ambroshe Bayzon.” Like so many people on Grand Isle, Ambrose prided himself as a “Cajun,” which is actually slang for Arcadian. The Arcadians were French pioneers who first settled the rocky shores of Nova Scotia in the 1600s and stayed there until the British began to expel them roughly a century later. Many of these hardy Frenchmen found their way down to southern Louisiana, where there was already a sizable French population. Here they resumed their lifestyle as pioneers, settling the outer fringes of the map and gleaming a hard, frugal life off the land. In Grand Isle, being Cajun—or a “coonass,” as the locals say—was a point of pride. Not only did it mean that you were keeping up the old tradition, it meant you were tough.
“Glad to meet you,” he said. “Are you visiting? A student of some sort, eh?” He eyed my notepad and nodded vigorously, as if he’d hit the nail on the head. “I’ve had students interview me before,” he boasted. “I believe they were from Iowa. In fact, I have the transcript if you’re interested. Mind if I sit down? Where you from, Iowa? No, not from Iowa? Can’t blame you. So, eh, what do you want to know?”
“You’re Ambrose Besson?” I asked.
“That’s me,” he said with a rat-tat-tat-tat of his fingers on the tabletop. He had a roughly shaved chin with a few breakaway curlicues and a face that was tanned and deeply creased from a lifetime of exposure to the wind and sun.
“Are you related to Roscoe Besson?” I asked him.
“Yes,” replied Ambrose. “Did you know Roscoe?”
“No,” I explained, “but I’ve read about him.” Roscoe “the Rock” Besson was a legend on Grand Isle. According to one newspaper article that I’d found, the Rock had been riding out storms for seven decades and was “determined to carry that tradition to his grave.”4 Unfortunately, this is precisely what he had done. As Ambrose soon explained to me, the Rock had since died of cancer. Fortunately, the next name on my list of storm riders to track down was Ambrose Besson—the Rock’s little brother.
The waitress refilled Ambrose’s coffee and brought me a large bowl of gumbo with a bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce. As I ate, Ambrose sipped his coffee and talked about storms. “I’ve never left for a hurricane,” he told me. “I just figure nothing is going to happen to me. I’ll get by, I’ll make it, and afterward I’ll start saving stuff.”
“What kind of stuff can you save?” I asked him.
“Not much,” he said with a laugh. “Believe me, not much. Your pictures, photograph albums—it’s impossible to evacuate all that stuff—so you got to get it out of the water right away. And today you’ve got freezers with fish and meat, and you got to get the generator turned on so it doesn’t spoil.” Ambrose paused for a minute or so, then added, “That’s one reason for staying, but that’s not worth risking your life.”
“So what is worth risking your life for?” I asked him.
“Well, I’ve been a police officer for forty-five years,” he said. “I’m in the reserves now, pretty much retired, but when I was on active duty, dealing with storms was part of the job. We took care of people’s property once they evacuated—drove around, did patrols, tried to stop the looting.” Looting has always been a serious concern on Grand Isle, explained Ambrose. Back in 1965, in the wake of Hurricane Betsy, the looters came down the bayou by boat and rummaged through the debris for whatever they could find. There was probably looting after the hurricane of 1893 as well, speculated Ambrose. He may be right. According to one local legend, after the storm thieves scoured Cheniere Caminada for gold. Many of the old homes on Cheniere Caminada had mud-filled walls, and in lieu of a bank, residents allegedly stuffed their gold coins into the mud for safekeeping. When the wind ripped these walls apart, the gold coins were dispersed and the thieves were soon looking for them.5
“After Betsy we put an end to looting,” said Ambrose. “We really stepped up our efforts to patrol the island directly before and after the storms.” In the coming days, a number of residents told me how grateful they were for this heightened security. As one woman put it: “It’s a terrible, sinking feeling to come onto the island after a storm and see the devastation, and then on top of that, find that someone has looted what you have left. And I think that’s one of the things that makes our police and civil defense so strong in their hearts to stay.”
“So you stay out of a sense of duty?” I asked Ambrose finally.
“Not really,” he replied. “As a policeman I needed to be here, but not really for the storms themselves. I could have just come back afterward—they would have flown me in.”
I suppressed an urge to sigh, stammered, began to ask another question, and then thought better of it. Ambrose had sensed correctly that I was looking for a story, or more precisely an answer, and he wasn’t going to tell me everything all at once. We had begun a courtship of sorts, and if I wanted his story we would have to dance.
Ambrose turned around to face the table where he was originally sitting. A handful of seniors, who looked to be his friends, watched on eagerly. “Hey y’all,” shouted Ambrose, “he’s putting me on The Young and the Restless, and I am going to appear in a leopard-skin bikini!” The table erupted in laughter. “That’s the gang,” Ambrose told me softly. “I’ll introduce you later.”
Over the course of the next two weeks, I would meet the core members of the gang and a handful of other seniors who also hung out at the Starfish. There was “Leg,” a burly, one-legged fisherman whose second wife had handicapped him with a blast from her shotgun. “She was shooting for my balls,” Leg later told me. “I’m just glad she missed and hit my leg instead.” There was Rosalie Trahan, a seventy-year-old woman who often spent her days cooking nightshade, a highly poisonous plant that she boiled eight or nine times to remove the toxins and turn it into a hardy Cajun dish called merille. There was seventy-six-year-old Ruby Mitchell, who grew up in a horse stable after her house was destroyed by a hurricane. “Back then, I wore flour sacks for clothing because that’s all my family could afford,” Ruby later recalled. A final regular worth mentioning (though he wasn’t there that first day) was Bobby Santiny, a cantankerous former oil rig worker who claimed to be the most dedicated storm rider on the island.
According to Ambrose, the members of his gang were the last of a kind. Most of them were “old-time Cajuns,” as he put it. Growing up, they learned the tricks of the marsh, like how to mend a fishing net, paddle a pirogue, or tiptoe over deep mud. They came of age in the 1950s, a time when the island was infiltrated by big oil companies, and almost overnight they had to adapt to a new way of life. They took jobs on oil rigs, or on charter boats, or looking after the many vacationers who had rediscovered Grand Isle. Nowadays members of “the gang” were mostly retired, and they spent their morning at the Starfish, drinking coffee and talking about storms and cooking and the way things used to be. Generally they spoke in Cajun French—a language that was quickly becoming extinct on Grand Isle—and when those from the younger generation came in to have lunch or grab a coffee on their way to work, they often didn’t understand a word being said.
Ambrose’s role in the gang was that of court jester, and he claimed it had been ever since he was born on April Fool’s Day in 1934. “That’s probably why I like to joke around so much,” he told me. Moments later, Ambrose turned and addressed the gang. “Listen up,” he told them. “The boy is writing a book about Grand Isle. It’s called Seven Miles of Sand and Sin.”
“That’s a good one,” replied someone.
“That is a good one,” admitted Ambrose. Pleased with himself, he turned back to me. “So, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know what it’s like during a hurricane,” I said quickly. Ambrose smiled. I had changed my approach.
“Well, I was here for Betsy, did you know that?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “What was that like?”
“Well, we stuck it out at the Coast Guard station,” explained Ambrose. “We had about ninety people in there for Betsy, because she came in fast and a lot of people got trapped on the island. The wind outside was breaking at about a hundred and eighty-five miles or so, and you could hear it coming like a freight train. The water came up six or seven feet over the island. You’d see houses, cars, even horses floating down the street. All the land on the island just went under. When I finally got to my house everything I owned was gone.”
“Yes,” said Ambrose, “and I didn’t have a nickel’s worth of insurance either. Nobody did. They wouldn’t sell it to us back then. It all came out of my own pocket.”
“What if there is another big hurricane?” I asked.
“Oh, there definitely will be another big hurricane,” replied Ambrose. “In fact, it could be out there right now. There’s a little pressure area out over the Yucatan, and it might come this way.” Ambrose turned toward the gang for one last bon mot. “I am being interviewed about the storms,” he explained, “because I’ve always stayed for them, unlike you pussies.” Ambrose mumbled the last word, presumably so as not to offend any of the ladies at the table, but they definitely heard him, and several rolled their eyes. Ambrose smiled apologetically and then motioned his head toward the door. “Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s go have a look at the Gulf, see if we are in for some mauvais temps. Better write that one down,” he added. “It’s French for ‘bad weather.’”
Ambrose and I strolled out of the Starfish toward his big, green pickup truck. The inside of the truck was clean and almost completely empty, except for Ambrose’s revolver, which he always kept above the emergency break. “I’m still a police officer,” he explained. The town of Grand Isle has exactly eight police officers to watch over its 1,541 residents. Of those eight officers, four are on active duty, four are in the reserves, and all but one of them are in their twenties. That one, of course, is Ambrose Besson, who at the age of sixty-seven is the old man of the force. “I still know what I am doing when I go out there,” he assured me. “Of course the laws have changed, and the techniques too. Now these young guys wear bulletproof vests.” Ambrose grunted disgustedly and then laughed. “Like they’re on Miami Vice or something.”
Ambrose steered us onto the main road and back toward the bridge. From the comfort of the truck’s passenger seat, I now had a chance to get a good look at many of the island’s oversize seafront houses. Most had names that eliminated any trace of subtlety. There was The Children’s Palace, Thanks Dad, Monee’s Moments, Pappy’s Dream, and How Lucky Can I Get. “Those are vacation homes,” explained Ambrose. “Down here we usually call them summer camps. People have been coming to Grand Isle for a long time to vacation. It’s kind of a tradition. They used to have some big hotels down here before the storm of 1893. You can read about it at the library.”
The following day, I located the library and spent the first of many afternoons there, reading up on Grand Isle’s history. A modern, spacious building on the Gulf side of the road, the library contained an excellent local history section. It was here that I read up on the vacation tradition that Ambrose had mentioned. I learned that the aristocracy of New Orleans used to summer in Grand Isle. They came to escape the diseases that ravaged the city, like malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid, and especially yellow fever. Often the summer crowd was lured by enticing ads such as this one, which ran in the Times-Democrat in August of 1882: “Why Not Come Down? . . . Iced tea, and moonlight, lovevine and jasmine-flower, youth and beauty, surf costume, dances and song, and whatever else the wild waves may suggest or happy hearts incline to.” Among those who came to visit was the novelist Kate Chopin, who used Grand Isle as the opulent setting for her masterpiece, The Awakening. There were a number of comfortable accommodations on the island, but the most extravagant of these was the Ocean Club, which was built in 1892 and featured 160 suites, 2 dining halls, 2 parlors, a billiards room, a card room, a children’s dining room, an observatory, tennis courts, a bowling alley, and some 60 bathhouses on the beach. The contractors who built the Ocean Club allegedly boasted, “Nothing could blow it away.” Roughly one year after its completion, however, the Ocean Club was destroyed along with the island’s other hotels in the great hurricane of 1893.6
As Ambrose and I continued down the island, passing one gleaming seafront mansion after another, I couldn’t help but wonder who was financing all of this new construction. Why were banks approving mortgages for these “summer camps” given the island’s calamitous history?
“Insurance,” explained Ambrose as we sped past a particularly large house called the Presidential Palace. “Today we’ve got government-backed insurance.” Ambrose was referring to the National Flood Insurance Program, which Congress established in 1968 to provide coastal residents with affordable coverage. Before that, flood insurance was almost impossible to get. As a result, banks wouldn’t provide mortgages, and people along the coast tended to pay in cash for rather modest homes. But when the National Flood Insurance Program went into effect, people began to build dozens of mansions along the beach, much like the Presidential Palace. There was an upside to all of this. In order to be eligible for this insurance, the government insisted on stricter building requirements. Today most homes on Grand Isle rested on stilts. The stilts significantly reduced the risk of flooding. Unfortunately, they did little to prevent wind damage.
“Have a look at this,” said Ambrose as he pulled his truck off the road. We were now parked in a large dusty lot that offered a clear treeless view down to the Gulf. In the center of this lot stood a rectangular building high up on stilts with a sign in front that read, RICKI’S MOTEL. The motel was a very ordinary structure, except that it had no roof.
“We had a tornado come through here a few weeks ago,” said Ambrose. “This motel got hit pretty bad. Now if there were some trees around it might have been a different story. You see, most of us around here live back in the trees because it’s the trees that save you when the storm comes. The trees break the speed of the wind. This last tornado did a lot of damage, but at my house all it did was break a few branches.”
Cutting down trees on Grand Isle was forbidden, explained Ambrose. In fact, as I would later learn, those who saved trees sometimes became heroes. Such was the case with François Rigaud Jr. The Rigauds were one of the very first families to settle Grand Isle in the 1780s. Sometime in the 1830s, François Rigaud Jr. allegedly encountered a wealthy newcomer cutting down some of the island’s oaks. Rigaud drew his two pistols and persuaded the man to stop, thus forever securing his fame.
Unfortunately for the people of Cheniere Caminada, there was no equivalent hero or tradition on the peninsula. Instead, they cut down most of their oaks so that the breezes of the Gulf could reach their front porches. During the hurricane of 1893, the winds coursed across the peninsula unchecked—but this was just part of the problem. Eventually the tide rose and with it came massive logs that had floated down the Mississippi and washed into the Gulf. Under other circumstances, a good covering of oak trees would have caught these logs, but since there was none, the logs hammered the peninsula like a barrage of torpedoes. The few trees that remained on the peninsula proved crucial. A single oak tree caught a large house that had been uprooted and was drifting toward the Gulf. Inside were roughly eighty frightened people (all but two of them lived). Elsewhere, a desperate woman named Adelaide Crosby allegedly had her husband tie her long hair to a tree to keep herself from being washed out to the ocean. She was thrashed against the branches for several hours but, miraculously, survived. Adelaide’s story is another celebrated legend on Grand Isle. Later in my stay I actually met Adelaide’s grandson, Russell Crosby, who lived just a few blocks away from Ambrose. Russell claimed his grandmother’s story was true and added that she was nine months pregnant at the time of her ordeal. The storm put Adelaide into a coma, but she recovered and had a healthy baby. “That baby was my aunt,” explained Russell. Most of the peninsula’s residents, however, were not as fortunate as Adelaide. All in all, roughly 820 people died on Cheniere Caminada. On Grand Isle, the number was just 27.7
Today, Grand Isle’s tradition of preserving its trees is still visibly evident. The island’s central ridge is lined with a narrow forest of oaks. The roots of these oaks go deep into the soil and hold the ridge together, and their branches stretch outward, offering shelter from the storms.
“Come on,” said Ambrose as he started up his truck again. “Enough about trees. Let’s have a look at the Gulf.” Ambrose steered us back toward the Starfish, driving down the main strip for a mile or so, then veered onto a small dirt road that led to the Gulf. Just before we reached the beach, we came upon the island’s “hurricane protection dune,” which is intended to break big waves during a storm. The dune, built by the Army Corps of Engineers, is about ten feet tall and runs the length of the island. Ambrose scrambled to the top and I scurried after him. All that separated us from the Gulf was a narrow strip of beach.
“You see over there?” asked Ambrose. There was a steady wind, and he clutched his cap to keep it from blowing off. “Do you see those little shore birds going up and down the beach?”
“Yeah,” I said. There were a dozen or so small, brown-feathered birds with long bills hopping and squawking at one another.
“They should be migrating south right now. That means they are not going to travel any further because the weather is bad farther on their migration route. That means something is going on in the Gulf,” he said as he scanned the horizon. “Now if that storm out there right now—I don’t know if they named it yet—if it comes this way, well, then, part of this dune will be gone.”
The wind gusted again, muffling our conversation. The birds along the shore continued to frolic in the surf. “Of course,” said Ambrose, “if we get the storm right here in Grand Isle, more than just this dune will be gone.”
Around twilight I parted ways with Ambrose and paid a visit to the Gulf View Lounge, a nondescript little bar that sat just half a mile down the road from the Starfish. I had been warned that the Gulf View was the biggest dive on the island. “Nothing including the front end of a gun would get me into the Gulf View,” one man from the Starfish told me. “Just look at the cars parked out front.” I was also told that the Gulf View was a hangout for some of the island’s harder-drinking seniors.
I parked my rental car alongside a badly dented pickup truck and headed into the Gulf View. The bar was situated in an old boarded-up building with a view of the Gulf that had long since been eclipsed by a number of newer structures, including Artie’s Sports Bar, which looked almost extravagant by comparison.
Upon entering the Gulf View, I was greeted by Smitty, the establishment’s eighty-five-year-old proprietor—a frail, white-haired man with light blue eyes, drooping earlobes, and soft, veiny arms. By his side was his daughter Paula, a pretty woman in her early fifties who later told me that she had given up a well-paying job in Texas in order to return to Grand Isle and help her father run the bar. Other than the three of us, the place was pretty much empty—except for eighty-seven-year-old Sid Santiny, who was here for his nightly beer with his wife, Mildred. “Up until recently, Sid and I used to shoot pool in the evenings,” explained Smitty. “But I’m starting to get old.”
“Who was the better pool player?” I asked.
“Well, I couldn’t say,” replied Smitty. “Though I don’t think Sid ever beat me.”
As Paula poured me a Coors, Smitty took a seat beside me and explained that he once also owned a casino, a restaurant, a dance hall, and a movie theater on Grand Isle. In 1965, Betsy destroyed it all. One of the few things left standing was the marquee on the movie theater, recalled Smitty. So a day or two after the storm came through, Smitty instructed his daughter to climb up on a ladder and rearrange the letters to read, DOUBLE FEATURE TONIGHT . . . HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA & GONE WITH THE WIND. Smitty chuckled as he recounted this part of the story. “I lost everything in that storm,” he said with a shake of his head.
“My father never could be defeated,” Paula told me later in the evening. “After Betsy, when he told me to put a new sign on that marquee, he was making it clear—we got wiped out, but we’re going back up today. That’s just my dad. He’s a testimony to the strength of the human spirit. It’s just like William Faulkner said: ‘I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.’”
Over the next two weeks I enjoyed several visits to the Gulf View, where I sipped beers and chatted with Paula, Smitty, Sid, and Mildred. Usually I visited in the afternoons or early evening, but the place never seemed to close. Like Smitty himself, the bar was indomitable. “Even when a hurricane comes, we only shut down if the cops force us to,” Paula told me. “We just keep serving beer.”
After my initial visit to the Gulf View, I set out in search of a place to sleep. With TD Fifteen on the horizon, I decided against tenting. By now, my tent was becoming something of a joke. Despite my lugging it around for several months, I had hardly used it at all, other than as a stepping stone into people’s guest bedrooms. For this trip, I even contemplated leaving it at home, but this seemed unwise, for the tent itself had become a good luck charm for me. It was my bulky, fifteen-pound rabbit’s foot.
I briefly considered staying at Ricki’s Motel but opted instead for the comforts of a solid roof overhead and settled on another seaside motel called the Sandpiper. Late that evening, I checked into a barren but clean room with a bed and a rickety table, flicked on the television for some news, and drifted off to sleep.
I awoke just after dawn with the television still on. It was Wednesday, October 31. Halloween. I sat up in bed and watched the TV as the weatherman pointed to a map on which a large white cloud was covering much of Central America. This was TD Fifteen, he announced, and it was on the verge of becoming Tropical Storm Michelle. Apparently, this whole weather system was headed for the warm waters of the Gulf of Honduras, which would provide the energy or “fuel” needed for a much bigger storm. Then it came down to prevailing winds. If they were blowing northward, the United States could be in trouble. “We should know more by this evening,” the weatherman added.
I showed up for breakfast around nine o’clock at the Starfish. Unlike the previous day, hardly anyone noticed my entrance. The regulars were glued to the television, which was playing the Weather Channel. The news was TD Fifteen, which had battered much of Central America. Flooding was rampant. In Nicaragua, some 15,000 people had been forced to flee their homes. In Honduras, thirty villages were cut off from the rest of the country. The newspapers, which were scattered across the restaurant, told similar stories. In Honduras a two-year-old boy had drowned as his father tried to carry him across a swollen stream. So far, a total of nineteen people were missing.8 But above all, the regulars in the Starfish wanted to know one thing: Where was it headed? On this matter, there was a great deal of conflicting information. Some meteorological computer models showed this weather system hitting the United States within three or four days. Others showed it turning west and hitting Mexico.
“I think it’s too late in the season for it to come up here,” one of the regulars told the waitress as she refilled his coffee. “The cold front coming down from Canada is going to save us.” This seemed to strike a chord with people. It was very late in the season. The cold front should save them. There was a nodding of heads, a general feeling of agreement, but nothing too emphatic. And so, as the television droned on and began to repeat itself, conversation carried on almost as usual. Yet still there was an underlying tension—a gnawing, prestorm excitement—and perhaps nowhere was it felt more acutely than at the local high school.
In the spring of 1993, a freak tornado blew in from the Gulf and destroyed much of Grand Isle’s high school complex. The roof came off, several walls caved in, and a set of lockers tipped over and killed that year’s prom queen, a girl named Tracie Allemand. Ever since then, the school was especially sensitive to even slight fluctuations in the weather. “A lot of parents watch the Weather Channel,” explained the principal, Richard F. Augustin, whose office I visited later in my stay. “If there’s some bad weather coming, parents will just come and pick up their kids.” Although much of the school had been rebuilt in the form of a giant concrete bunker and was now supposedly able to withstand 125-mile-per-hour winds, people still worried, according to Augustin. “For the first few years after the tornado struck, some kids would just start to cry when the weather got bad,” he told me. “Even to this day, you’ve got kids in high school that when the sky gets dark, they don’t freak out, but they are silent, thinking to themselves, just pondering.”
Despite all the hubbub over weather, none of it seemed to have any effect on Ambrose Besson. When he strolled into the Starfish shortly after nine, he sat down at my booth and casually began asking me how I had slept and what I’d eaten for dinner the night before. “Tomorrow night you’ll come over to my place for oysters,” he announced. Sure, I told him.
Midway through breakfast I asked Ambrose if he was worried about the possibility of TD Fifteen becoming Tropical Storm Michelle and then heading our way. “Not really,” he told me. “We’ve never had a hurricane hit here in the month of November. We had one in late October back in 1985. That was Hurricane Juan, and it arrived on Halloween night. Put four feet of water on the island. There was no wind damage, but a lot of water damage.”
“But it’s not November yet,” I reminded him.
“That’s right,” replied Ambrose. “I almost forgot. It’s Halloween, isn’t it?”
The waitress brought Ambrose a cup of coffee, and as he sipped it he inquired about my schedule for the day. When I told him I would be visiting Bobby Santiny—another person on my list of veteran storm riders—Ambrose laughed. “Bobby is a good friend of mine,” he told me. “Have you met him? He’s a real short fellow. The problem with Bobby is that he could drown standing up in three feet of water.”
Like Ambrose, Bobby Santiny had a reputation for refusing to evacuate during hurricanes. It was generally agreed that the two of them were the island’s longest-standing storm riders, and naturally they were somewhat competitive with each other. They were distant cousins who had grown up playing in the marsh together, gone to high school together, and ridden out quite a few storms together (including Betsy). They were both well qualified in public safety—Ambrose as a captain in the police department and Bobby as the island’s former director of civil defense. In their own ways, I think each of them aspired to don the mantle of Roscoe the Rock.
The Rock was a hard act to follow. Later in my stay, the Rock’s oldest son (a former chief of police by the name of Roscoe Jr.) informed me that his father had missed only one storm. “At the time, he was sick with cancer and we wheeled him out on a stretcher,” Roscoe Jr. recalled. “But he gave my mother such a hard time, and he was so belligerent, we decided never to do it again. In future storms we kept him down at the police station, in a jail cell actually, and he was happier there because at least he was on Grand Isle.”
Ultimately, it was Bobby Santiny who came closest to exuding this kind of zealotry. Unlike Ambrose, he unequivocally dismissed the notion of evacuating. He was resolved to stay even if another Betsy was headed directly toward the island, or at least that’s what he told me when I visited him later that afternoon.
Bobby Santiny lived back in the trees in what local historians estimate is the oldest house on the island. It was built around 1800 by Jacques Rigaud, the grandfather of François Rigaud Jr., the man who famously brandished his pistols to protect the island’s trees. The house was constructed without the use of any nails, and its walls were doubly reinforced with oak and bricks. It was a squat structure with low ceilings and a narrow wraparound porch. According to one local historian, the interior was once decorated with six large steel engravings of paintings by the French painter Le Brun, depicting scenes in the life of Alexander the Great.9 Nowadays, appearances were decidedly more modest. The porch was occupied by several trash bins, a cooler, some dangling Christmas lights, and a handful of lawn chairs.
Bobby Santiny was a short man in his sixties with narrow eyes and a receding tuft of white hair. When I arrived, I found him sitting on the porch with his wife, Joan. Apparently someone in the family had just returned from hunting, because Joan was now plucking a dozen or so dead doves, discarding their feathers into the trash bins around her.
As I took a seat on the porch next to Bobby, he offered me a Sprite. “That’ll be a dollar,” he told me. When his wife objected, he silenced her: “Come on, the boy is going to make a lot of money off my story.” Nervously I began to pose some preliminary questions. “Can you talk me through a storm?” I asked.
“For you, I’d say to haul ass,” snapped Bobby, “because you’d freak out, and I’d be laughing at you!” I blanched, but Bobby was just warming up. When we got talking about his brother, who was the town clerk, he was far less kind: “My brother leaves for storms because he’s chickenshit! He’s on the city council, and they all leave. I call them all a bunch of cowards!”
When I asked Bobby about his own storm-riding career, he told me his father used to own the local grocery store and that his family always stayed on the island to protect their business. Years later, Bobby became the island’s director of civil defense. “I would look after people’s stuff, check on their pets, and make sure there was no looting,” he told me. Currently Bobby was retired. When the storms came he went to the fire station and cooked for the younger men whose jobs required them to stay behind. “I cook jambalaya, gumbo, chicken stew, potato stew, chili soup,” said Bobby. “I get my rocks off when people like my food.”
After an hour or so of conversation, Bobby abruptly excused himself. “I got to go,” he told me, though he made no effort to get up from his chair.
“All right,” I said. “One last question: Do you ever ride storms with Ambrose Besson?”
“No,” snapped Bobby indignantiy, “I don’t.” He pointed out that Ambrose had missed Hurricane Flossy in 1956 because of military service. He also alleged that Ambrose had evacuated for one or two storms (a claim Ambrose later denied). “No, I don’t ride with Ambrose,” reaffirmed Bobby. “But his brother, Roscoe the Rock.” He paused for a moment, somewhat wistfully. “Now, we used to ride storms together.”
Later that evening I attended the town’s Halloween celebration, which was held at the firehouse. As the kids danced and gorged themselves on candy, the firemen hung out in the driveway. They were brawny, well-tanned men, and most of them were dressed in costume—one as a giant yellow bird, another as a Dalmatian, and a few others as wizards and warriors. They sat around sipping Bud Light, passing out plastic fire hats to the kids, and reminiscing about previous Halloweens. Along with the police and a few paramedics, these men were the island’s modern-day storm riders, and I was eager to chat with them.
As I soon learned, the firemen were mainly part-timers and volunteers. To make a living, most of them worked on the oil rigs. It was here that many of them had had their most harrowing encounters with hurricanes. “I was stuck out in the Gulf for Hurricane Juan,” one of them recalled. “They tried to evacuate us by chopper, but there were seventy-five-mile-per-hour winds.” Someone else recalled a storm causing fifty-foot swells to crash into the side of the rig. “If you didn’t hold on to your bunk, you’d get knocked out of bed.”
When it came to riding storms on the island itself, few of them had stories to tell. Most of them had been working as public safety officials for less than a decade, and in that time no major storms had hit the island. When I asked who among them would stay on the island for the next major hurricane, there was no immediate consensus. “It’s hard to say,” one of them told me. “Whoever is on duty,” said another.
The following day was November 1, and long before dawn ever broke TD Fifteen had become Tropical Storm Michelle. By the time I made it out of bed and over to the Starfish for breakfast, a slight breeze was picking up. The sky had turned cloudy and the waters of the Gulf grew rougher. Whitecaps crashed along the shore as creaky oyster boats wobbled in and out of port.
I spent most of the day at the Starfish, chatting with the gang and watching the news. According to the Weather Channel, Tropical Storm Michelle was working its way through the Caribbean, gaining strength by the hour, and heading toward western Cuba. Still, it was too early to say where it would hit. Everyone from Fidel Castro to Florida governor Jeb Bush was taking notice. Insurance companies were also on alert. Apparently, the storm had officially entered “the box”—a region demarcated by insurers, typically stretching from North Carolina in the north to Honduras in the south, and from Texas in the west to Haiti in the east. Once a storm enters “the box,” many insurers will not sell new policies or change existing ones. In short, all bets were set.
Around six P.M. I went to meet Ambrose for dinner. As I drove down Santiny Lane, I noticed that the homes in his neighborhood were decidedly more modest than the ones on the beach. Many were just rectangular boxes on stilts, high above the ground, nestled in the swaying treetops—creating the surreal effect of a floating trailer park.
I found Ambrose in his back yard, lugging two heaving sacks of oysters out to a wooden carving table. When I tried to help him with his load he shooed me away. “I’m going to show you how to shuck an oyster,” he grunted. Ambrose dropped one of his sacks to the ground with a thud, and emptied the other onto the table. The oysters that spilled out were still caked in thick black mud, and they looked more like coal than seafood. Ambrose grabbed one, washed it off, chiseled it open with a knife and hammer, sprinkled it with a bottle of hot sauce that he had ready, and then popped the whole slimy load down his throat. “We call these ‘Cajun Viagra’ down here,” he told me with a gulp.
“So you just eat them like that?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Ambrose, as he worked his knife along the inside of the shell. “In the old days—before the pollution—we used to walk down the street and eat oysters right off the shore. We used to go with a bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce in our back pocket and eat them right there in the water.”
“Really?” I asked.
“You don’t know much about the old days, do you?” replied Ambrose.
“Not really.”
“You know what hardtack is?” asked Ambrose.
“Hardtack was the only bread we had when I was growing up,” he explained. “My mother used to make it, and it was harder than rock. You hit someone over the head with hardtack and you’d kill them. To this day I do not eat the crust on sliced bread—I only like the soft stuff.” Ambrose ate another oyster, wiped his mouth, and continued. “And the coffee! We used to make one pot of coffee and it would last for the whole week. It was so thick, you could put a spoon in it and the spoon would stand up straight. And coffee was a luxury. For the most part it was mullet. Mullet for breakfast, mullet for lunch, and mullet for dinner. And of course, sometimes Mama and Papa would feed us and go to bed hungry. They never said a word, but we could see what was going on. It’s not that we were poor. That’s just the way it was on Grand Isle back then. That was the Cajun way. And it’s not that I’m complaining or saying how hard it was, it’s just that you need to understand these things if you’re going to do this story right.”
When I asked Ambrose to tell me more about the “Cajun way,” he replied succinctly: “The Cajuns lived a hard life off the land.” The history books more or less agreed. Ever since their expulsion from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, the Cajuns encountered one hardship after another. One particularly hardy band of thirty Arcadians, who arrived in Louisiana in 1770, did so only after a fifteen-month ordeal of shipboard starvation, mutiny, shipwreck, imprisonment, forced labor in Spanish Texas, and finally a 420-mile overland trek. Once they arrived, life was often just as hard. In the late 1700s, the Spanish governor of Louisiana noted with amazement that many Arcadian immigrants literally worked themselves to death in order to support large families, including widowed and orphaned relatives.10 This seemed to be the legacy to which the Cajun trappers and fishermen of Grand Isle aspired. In truth, they were not pure Cajuns. Most of them were a mix of many ethnic groups, including Arcadian, Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, German, Cuban, and perhaps others. Nonetheless, they tended to identify themselves as Cajuns. Like the New Englanders who trace their lineage back to the Mayflower with a regal sense of pride, many on Grand Isle boasted toughly that their families had been expelled from Nova Scotia.
When Ambrose finished shucking a few more oysters, he handed me a knife and gestured for me to get busy. As I struggled to help him shuck, he talked at length about the old days. His father was a trapper, he explained, who went after a range of animals including mink, muskrat, raccoon, and otter. Like most men in his line of work, he made month-long trips to the mouth of the Mississippi, where he lived in a tent, set traps, and collected pelts. Some of the other trappers brought their families with them. The children lived along the trapping lines and returned to school for brief spells to “catch back” their studies. But Ambrose and his father agreed it was better for him to stay on the island and attend school full-time. There was still plenty of work to be done. Ambrose farmed cucumbers every day before and after school. He combed the beach for driftwood to fuel his mother’s stove (cutting down an oak tree was out of the question). And of course, he fished. Above all, however, he dedicated himself to learning English. In the 1930s the dominant language on Grand Isle was still French. But like so many things, that was about to change.
In 1931, three years before Ambrose was born, a bridge to the island was built. It connected Grand Isle to Cheniere Caminada and—for all intents and purposes—the rest of the world. The effect was dramatic. Historically, Grand Isle was a place where pirates like Jean Lafitte and champion duelists like José “Pepe” Llulla came to seek safety and obscurity.11 Even in the early 1900s, the island remained extremely isolated. Perhaps the most telling sign of this situation was the closeness of Grand Isle’s families. Many of them were interrelated. According to Ambrose, children of his generation often addressed strangers as “Aunt” or “Uncle,” because in many cases that’s exactly what they were. Marrying family members was inevitable. A popular saying went, “If you were lucky enough to have a good-looking cousin, you also had a wife.” In 1919, when the U.S. Coast Guard built a station on Grand Isle, some of the servicemen married island girls. Other than this, however, visitors were far and few between.
As soon as the bridge was completed, however, automobiles began arriving with groceries, fuel, and building supplies. New houses went up and old ones came down. Spoken English became more and more prevalent. In the early 1940s, following the outbreak of World War II, the Civil Air Patrol built a base on the island. With the base came electricity (until then almost everyone on the island was still using kerosene). Shortly thereafter, the oil companies arrived and began hiring island men to work on offshore rigs. Money began to circulate as it never had before. Television, refrigerators, and gas stoves became increasingly commonplace. Some of these innovations were startling to the island’s older residents. “My grandmother didn’t know what a television was,” Ambrose told me. “I tried to tell her in French how it worked, but she didn’t believe it. She would say, ‘How can you be so stupid! Obviously there are people hiding behind that machine, playing a trick on you!”’ Ambrose had a similar experience when he tried to comfort his uncle, who had been scared by the roar of a passing airplane. “I tried to explain to him that it was a jet,” recalled Ambrose. “But he wouldn’t believe me. He kept asking, ‘How can a plane fly without a propeller?”’
“It’s not that these people were stupid,” explained Ambrose. “They had just led very isolated lives, and then suddenly, everything around them had changed.” For better or worse, the bridge had brought a new world to Grand Isle, and Ambrose was among the first to be born into that world. His was the bridge generation—both literally and metaphorically, for it bridged the gap between old and modern. Between Cajun and American. And according to Ambrose, between the tough and the pampered. “Young people today live like kings!” he declared. “They don’t know what it’s like to hunt for food, gather rainwater to drink, or collect driftwood to burn. And they certainly don’t know what it’s like to stay for the storms.”
“How about your kids?” I asked.
“My kids?” said Ambrose. “They never had to deal with that stuff.”
“So they didn’t stay for storms?”
“No,” said Ambrose. “They left with my wife.”
“How about your parents—did they stay?”
“Sure,” said Ambrose. “How could they leave? Before ’thirty-one there was no bridge. The bridge changed everything. It allowed people to leave. But in the early days it was still a long drive to the mainland, and the weather reports weren’t nearly as advanced, so most people continued to stay.”
According to Ambrose, staying for storms was just another one of Grand Isle’s antiquated rituals. I heard about this from a number of his contemporaries as well—fellow members of the bridge generation who remembered riding the storms of the 1940s and early 1950s, in the era just before evacuations became the norm.
From what I could gather, all storm-riding rituals began with a weather report. In lieu of the Weather Channel, people on Grand Isle used a number of different forecasting techniques. Some relied on the tide, others relied on the “storm birds” flying in from the sea, and still others relied on the bouque d’ie—a so-called eyebrow of clouds that gathered above the moon.
If it looked like a storm was coming, there were a number of things to do. The first order of business was usually cleaning the bathtub and sealing the drain with a good stopper. This way, a large quantity of drinking water could be safely stored in the house. Next, the livestock had to be tended. This meant tying up the horses on the high ground, collecting all the eggs from the henhouse, and killing as many chickens as could be eaten (because chances were, the rest would drown). Then it was time to board up the windows and put everything away, with the most valuable items on the highest shelves. Afterward someone had to tie up all the boats, making sure to leave one small pirogue nearby, to use once the island flooded. Finally, everyone gravitated toward the sturdiest house in the neighborhood and started cooking a big meal to pass the time before the storm arrived. Some households might even break out a bottle of wine and reminisce about storms from the past. But when the actual storm arrived, the mood sobered up quickly. If things got really tense, everyone would say the rosary together. Some of the older folks kept a rope nearby, as a last resort, in case they had to tie themselves to a tree. Eventually, the wind would soften and the tension would ease. This moment of calm was deceptive, for sometimes it was actually the eye of the storm passing overhead. To be safe, everyone waited it out. A few more hours would pass. At last, the wind would vanish, the birds would chirp, and then everyone knew: The storm was gone.
“In the old days, riding storms was just something everybody did,” said Ambrose finally. It was almost dark by now, and Ambrose worked swiftly, shucking the last few oysters on the table. His hand movements were efficient and graceful. Eventually he set down his knife and reached for the Louisiana Hot Sauce, which he poured generously over the remaining half-shells. “Here,” he said. “You can have the last of these.”
In the dim light of dusk, Ambrose used a garden hose to wash himself off. He turned on the water and rubbed his hands together methodically, working over each finger until all the dirt was off.
When he finally finished he looked back up at me and smiled. “It’s all just history now,” he said.
“But you still ride the storms,” I added.
“Yeah,” said Ambrose. “But it’s not like the old days.”
“So what’s it like, then?” I asked.
“It’s no big deal,” said Ambrose. “When a hurricane comes through, the road just kind of goes under. Sometimes the water connection goes, almost always the power goes, and then it’s back to kerosene lanterns. So we light our lanterns, strap stuff down, sit around, maybe cook a meal.”
“It sounds a little like the old days to me,” I said cautiously. Ambrose laughed.
“I suppose it does,” he said.
The following afternoon I met up with Ambrose at the Starfish around three. We sat in our usual booth, ordered coffee, and discussed plans for the rest of the day. “Why not visit the cemetery?” suggested Ambrose. It should be in top shape, he explained, because the graves were recently fixed up for All Saints’ Day.
Sounds good, I told him. I then asked whether he had heard the news about Michelle. Ambrose nodded. “It looks like this storm is going to enter the Gulf, and it’s definitely a hurricane,” he told me. “They think that it’s going to circle around and go back toward Florida. But you never know when it enters the Gulf. This is still a wait-and-see.”
Of course, I already knew this. I had been listening to weather reports throughout the day, memorizing every last trivial piece of information about the storm. Hurricane Michelle was continuing on a northeast course toward western Cuba. From there, the National Hurricane Center was predicting that a trough of low pressure would sweep down through the Gulf and push the storm east through the Straits of Florida and out into the Atlantic. To test this theory, the National Weather Service was launching a series of weather balloons twice a day.
As for Grand Isle, the mayor wasn’t ready to call an evacuation. I had met up with him earlier in the day for a brief interview. “It’s not time for that yet,” he told me from his office in the old Coast Guard station, which is now the city hall. Ever since he evacuated the island on four consecutive weekends back in 1997, the mayor had developed a reputation (at least among some people) as an alarmist. Over the years several local business owners had accused him of driving away the tourists, and one even demanded to be reimbursed for his losses. “That guy walked into my office and threw a bill down on my desk,” lamented the mayor. “I told him, ‘Look, I lost several hundred dollars on my snow cone business, but I can’t worry about that—my job is to protect human life.’” As far as Hurricane Michelle was concerned, the mayor was determined to play it cool. “This one looks like it’s headed for Cuba,” he told me. “But I’ll be watching it.”
When Ambrose and I finished our afternoon coffee, we got into his pickup and headed down the main road toward the tip of the island. “I’m going to have to postpone my hunting trip,” he said, somewhat annoyed. “I was supposed to go to Alabama. I got a hunting cabin up near the Florida panhandle, and I was planning to spend two or three months up there, but with this hurricane coming, I’ll have to stick around for a bit.”
Ambrose steered us off the main road and onto a small tree-covered lane that led to the cemetery. He pulled his truck off to the side of the road and the two of us got out. The sky was overcast and the wind was really gusting, which today had a decidedly foreboding effect. We walked down the lane under a swaying canopy of oaks until we reached the gate to the cemetery. Inside was a collection of aboveground tombs; most were freshly whitewashed and adorned with flowers.
“Around here we don’t bury people in the ground,” explained Ambrose as we continued into the heart of the cemetery. “If you go down more than three or four feet you hit the water table. That’s why we use these big aboveground cement tombs. Still, sometimes we have problems during the storms.”
“What kind of problems?”
“During Betsy a couple of these tombs washed away,” explained Ambrose. “In fact, we found one of them thirty miles out in the marsh. It belonged to my niece. She was just a girl when she died. She was born with a physical defect. Really she was a twin, but the other child never developed on its own—it just grew off her side . . .”
“Like a Siamese twin?” I asked.
“That’s it,” said Ambrose. “We used to have some birth defects here on the island in the old days.”
“I see.”
“Well, anyway, as I said, this twin never fully developed. It was more like a large growth. So the doctors decided to cut it off, and my niece never really recovered from that surgery. She couldn’t do anything but drag herself on the floor at home. Her arms would just fold up, she couldn’t talk or anything, and eventually she died. I’m just glad we got her tomb back here in the cemetery.”
As we continued strolling through the cemetery, Ambrose pointed out that several of the tombs were buckled down to the earth with thick canvas belts. “Those are hurricane straps,” he explained. “They keep the tombs buckled down. A lot of people use them around here.”
“How about the Rock?” I asked. “Is his tomb buckled down?”
“No, the Rock is buried over here in our family tomb,” said Ambrose. He led the way to a large cement box, roughly the size of a minivan, with a small sliding door on front. “This tomb is big enough that it doesn’t need hurricane straps,” explained Ambrose. “All of my family is in here. There is a pit underneath, and you can stack plenty of people inside. We’ve got eight people in there right now, including my parents and my grandparents. The last one to be put in was my brother. I’ll go on top of him and then the tomb will be sealed.”
“Yes,” replied Ambrose.
I spent the rest of the day with Ambrose, driving around in his green pickup truck, keeping an eye out for storm birds and listening to him gripe about the great deer-hunting trip that he would have to miss if the storm rolled this way. “The deer hunting in Alabama is superbe!” he exclaimed. “You know that spaghetti sauce we ate last night at my place? That had some of my deer sausage in it,” he told me.
“Ambrose,” I said finally.
“Yeah.”
“What’s your honest take on Michelle?”
Ambrose paused for a moment. “You know, we haven’t had a bad hurricane since Betsy in 1965,” he told me. “We’re probably past due for a big one, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to be it. The weather experts say it’s headed for Cuba and then out into the Atlantic. And usually, well . . . those guys are right.”
The following day Hurricane Michelle was upgraded to a category-4 storm, but it shied away from the Gulf and continued directly north toward Cuba. In response, Havana’s mayor ordered the evacuation of 150,000 people from the city’s flood-prone areas.12 Meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center stood behind its prediction that from here Michelle would blow eastward out into the Atlantic. All signs indicated that a cold front was on its way. By Saturday evening, it arrived. The air began to chill, talk of hurricanes began to dwindle, and the waitress at the Starfish turned the TV from the Weather Channel to college football.
Around sunset I met up with Ambrose, and we walked down to the beach to have a look at the Gulf. We scrambled over the island’s hurricane protection dune and continued right up to the surf. The sea had a slight chop to it, probably the same as it had all week, but it no longer seemed menacing. In the distance the sun was making its final descent, arcing downward into a tight pocket of sea between two oil rigs. The air was calm, and through it we could hear the chirping of those same little shore birds who had still not yet taken flight.
“Looks like I’ll be leaving tomorrow to go deer hunting after all,” said Ambrose. He looked out into the Gulf and smiled triumphantly.
As the sky darkened and the distant lights of the oil rigs began to glimmer, Ambrose turned to me and said, “You know what’s going to get us in the end? Erosion.”
“Erosion?”
“Yes,” replied Ambrose. “You see, the barrier islands rely on the silt from the Mississippi. That’s what keeps them built up. But when the Mississippi was channeled out into the Gulf of Mexico, we lost our silt. Now all that silt is just getting dumped out at sea. Meanwhile, the wave action is just eating up our little island. You see what I’m saying?”
“Grand Isle is disappearing?”
“Yes,” said Ambrose. “The island is going.”
I’d heard this assertion before. It was a serious concern throughout the region. In the last century alone, Louisiana’s barrier islands had lost forty percent of their surface area. Sometimes as much as forty to sixty feet of land were lost in a single three-to-four-day storm. A bad storm could take a huge chunk out of an island, perhaps even fragment it. The most famous example of this was Last Isle, which once sat ten miles to the west of Grand Isle. In many ways, the histories of the two islands were eerily similar. During the mid-1800s, Last Isle was the choice vacation spot for the New Orleans aristocracy. The island’s Muggah Hotel offered a range of luxuries, including a bowling alley, a billiards room, a card room, and a spacious ballroom. Advertisements boasted that “no pains [are] spared to insure the comforts of the guest.” Then, in August of 1856, a hurricane swept in from the Gulf and leveled the island. Afterward, Last Isle began to erode rapidly. Between 1890 and 1988 the surface area of the island decreased by seventy-seven percent. Today, what was once Last Isle is now four separate islands known as the Isles Dernier. From a distance, observers report that they look like sandbars barely rising from the sea. Their erosion is an ongoing process, and like all of Louisiana’s barrier islands, they have a PDD—a Projected Date of Disappearance. The Isles Dernier are slated to disappear in 2013. Grand Terre, the small windswept island off Grand Isle’s eastern tip, is expected to be gone by 2033. With Grand Isle, it’s more difficult to determine an exact PDD because the Army Corps of Engineers and the town of Grand Isle have been working feverishly to replenish the beach and build various protective structures.13
“They’ve been trying for years to keep the island from eroding,” explained Ambrose. “They’ve built dunes, breakwaters, rock groins, and pumped in tons of sand from offshore. But sooner or later this island is going back to the water.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Night had fallen. The sky was easing its way from purple to black, and Ambrose was squinting into the distance. He shook his head, then looked back at me. “You get another Betsy over here and there won’t be too much left,” he told me. “This island will be history.”
The following day, Sunday, November 4, Hurricane Michelle made landfall in western Cuba. At around eleven P.M. the storm blew in across the Bay of Pigs, and what the CIA failed to achieve in 1961 Michelle did rather handily, destroying some 10,000 homes and damaging another 100,000 as it traveled northward across the island. It was a heavy blow, and Michelle proved to be the worst hurricane to hit Cuba in almost fifty years.14
By Monday evening, Hurricane Michelle had run its course. Having pummeled Cuba, the dying storm swept across the Bahamas and sputtered east toward the Atlantic, where it dwindled into a sea breeze. Back on Grand Isle, news of the storm’s demise was most welcome. At the Starfish the mood was festive. Soft rock was playing on the jukebox, coins were clinking into the automated gambling machine, and quite a few of the regulars were stopping in to say hello. It was a good moment on Grand Isle. The Gulf coast was safe. Hurricane season was almost over. The whole island seemed to be settling in for a bit of peace. And somewhere far across the warm autumn night, Ambrose Besson was heading toward Alabama.
After Ambrose’s departure, I decided to stick around for a few more days. I enjoyed several afternoons of beer sipping with Paula and Smitty at the Gulf View, which by now had become my favorite bar on the island. “The only thing that I can tell you is that I might not be here tomorrow,” Smitty remarked at the end of each afternoon.
“Does this worry you?” I asked him.
“No, son,” he told me. “Worrying will kill you.”
Besides hanging out at the Gulf View, I read at the library, loitered at the town hall, attended a church service, and even accepted an invitation to the island’s American Legion dance, where I quickstepped with the seniors and drank whiskey late into the night. Before I departed, as I grabbed one last breakfast at the Starfish, the waitress handed me the bill and whispered: “I have a message for you.”
“Before you leave town, drive by the Gulf View.”
I shrugged my shoulders, paid the bill, and thanked the waitress for relaying the message to me.
As I returned to my motel room at the Sandpiper, I began to make a quick list of all the things I needed to do in the next few hours: find my swimming trunks, pay my hotel bill, return my rental car. The list went on, and as it did I began to feel slightly depressed. I was tired of living out of a backpack—tired of waking up in the dead of night, disoriented and unable to remember where I was. This wasn’t a sustainable way of life, and I knew it. I won’t be so cavalier as to say that I wanted to settle down for good. Nor did I have any intense domestic epiphanies. I simply wanted to go back to the place I knew best. I never thought of myself as a Bostonian. I never got misty-eyed at the sight of Fenway Park or Quincy Market. I didn’t like New England clam chowder, and I certainly didn’t root for the Celtics. But in other ways, I missed the place. I missed the autumn leaves, the cobblestone sidewalks, the ivy-covered mews, and the Charles River, which wound its way westward to the small neighborhood where my brother, my girlfriend, and a few of my good friends lived.
There is something unavoidably sentimental about home. At the New Republic, where pundits and policy wonks reigned supreme, I felt foolish even considering such a notion. But now that I was safely out of the beltway, and somewhat wiser from many months of travel, I felt far less apologetic about this. After all, home is not just a place, but a vast amalgamation of human experiences. It is an unruly mix of scenery, smells, carpentry, family, memories, ambitions, hardship, and a million other things as well. It is a concept bursting at the seams. It is a vague and elastic word that we have stretched to the outer limit, and then tried to fill with almost everything that is dear to us. Therefore, how could it not be messy? How could it not be rife with emotion? Yes, I was glad to be going home. To be sure, it was not a home in the Thad Knight sense of the word, but it was a start.
As I drove down the island toward the bridge and the bayou beyond, it really started to hit me: My stories were reported, my flying pass was about to expire, my journey was over. Why, I wondered, were moments like this always so anticlimactic? Then, rather suddenly, I remembered the waitress’s message. In all the hubbub of leaving, I had somehow forgotten her strange directive to drive by the Gulf View. Abruptly I pulled a U-turn and headed back down the main road toward Smitty’s bar. Was someone waiting there for me? Perhaps I was really meant to stop in. Yet several minutes later, when I pulled into the bar’s parking lot, there wasn’t another car in sight. I tried the front door, but it was locked and no one answered my knocks. Maybe the waitress had gotten the message wrong. Then, as I turned to leave, I saw the signboard out of the corner of my eye. It was one of those tacky contraptions with blinking lights and moveable letters—only this particular signboard was mounted on the roof of a wrecked car that had been painted in a patriotic red, white, and blue. This was the Gulf View’s marquee, and it usually announced various weekly specials. Today, however, it had an unusual message:
GOODBYE OUR EAST COAST BUDDY
MAY THE SEASONS OF YOUR LIFE
HAVE FEW HURRICANES!
I stood there for a good few minutes, staring at the marquee, wondering who on earth had put this together. Finally another car pulled into the parking lot and a woman hopped out. It was Paula Smith—Smitty’s daughter—and I realized immediately that this was probably her doing. Ever since Hurricane Betsy, she had been arranging the marquees for her father’s businesses.
“Did you do this?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Thank you,” I stammered.
“I don’t know,” said Paula. “We just thought it would be a nice way to say goodbye.”