by Jake Halpern
Island of the Storm Riders
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 t
he 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.
Ambrose pauses to lean against a walkway that crosses Grand Isle’s “hurricane protection dune.”
“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 scou
red 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.”
