Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  “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 th
at 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.”

  “So you’re the last one?”

  “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.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “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 sl
ightly 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: