by Jake Halpern
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.”
“And you rebuilt after that?”
“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 s
ignificantly 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 M
otel 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.