by Jake Halpern
“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.
Bobby Santiny, veteran storm rider, stands in front of his house, which is believed to be the oldest on the island.
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-t
imers 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.
Ambrose Besson with his fishing partner, Ray Cheramie, and a friend, Jary Nacio, standing beside the boat on which they often fish for shrimp and oysters.
“No,” I replied.
“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.”
