Blues Bayou

By Ken Wells

I was 1,800 miles away from my spiritual home on the day Hurricane Ida churned in the Gulf on its way to assault the southeast Louisiana coast.

I was obviously in no danger, but I had reason to be fidgety. I have two brothers in Houma, one in Chauvin, and one in Baton Rouge. My nephew has a fishing camp in Cocodrie, my cousin one in Grand Isle. I have assorted relatives and many of my truest lifelong friends spread out all along the Gumbo Belt — Houma, Thibodaux, Matthews, New Orleans, LaPlace, Lafayette.

Plenty of phone calls, texts and Messenger chats later, I knew everyone had made reasonable sheltering plans. But, still, Ida was a monster, and it was clear that Houma, my birthplace, was in for a rough shucking.

Also, I was homesick. In a typical year, I visit three to four times, often for weeks at a time — to catch up with the bros and friends, fish reds and specks in Lake Decade and Oyster Bayou or sac-a’-lait in the Atchafalaya Basin. I make my non-negotiable dining stops: gumbo at A-Bear’s Café, boiled crabs or crawfish at 1921 Seafood, an oyster po’boy at Big Al’s. I sneak off to New Orleans to have dinner with my foodie friends at the latest hip Creole restaurant.

My brother Pershing has a music studio in Houma and is active in the local music scene. I love going out to listen to local bands where you can find everything from Cajun to Zydeco to Swamp Pop to R&B, and even localized hip-hop, if you want it. All this is my of way steeping myself in the sense of place that has informed a great deal of my writing career and is at the core of every novel and non-fiction book I’ve written.

With the emergence of the Delta variant, this dreaded elongated pandemic has kept me away for almost two years now, vaccinated though I am. Air travel is a hectic, claustrophobic drag. Rental cars are non-existent or so expensive it’s cheaper to buy one. People are both wary and careless, gracious and cranky. This all sucks a great deal of pleasure out of going anywhere long distance.

Still, I often think of my homeplace as an indispensable friend, the place where my roots run deep and where I always feel welcomed, the place that recharges my inspiration. I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world, and I still conclude that there’s no place like it. But what if Ida ripped apart the very fabric of it?

So, from my dodgy backwoods internet connection in Maine, where I live from July through October, I spent part of the day of Ida’s approach streaming my friend Martin Folse’s essential local TV broadcast. I wanted to get a better sense of what might happen than I could get from the national news outlets. It wasn’t reassuring. Martin’s Ida projection map had Houma pretty close to the bullseye.

I have a lot of experience with hurricanes and understand all too well their destructive powers. As Hurricane Audrey roared over us, I recall being an eight-year-old kid hunkered down with my family in my grandparent’s small rental house on Gum Street in Houma. The roof miraculously survived, but I can still vividly remember the shrieking wind and the candles throwing flickering shadows on the wall after the power went out. I can admit it now: I was terrified.

I was a junior at Terrebonne High School in 1965 when the principal came on the speaker in the late morning to say, “Well, we’re dismissing school. There’s a hurricane called Betsy headed our way and it’s looking bad.” (Yes, we went to school that morning! There was no early-warning Weather Channel back then.)

We still lived on our little farm out on Bayou Black — a charming but aging house with a questionable tin roof. We sat on the bayouside in the middle of sprawling sugarcane fields which, as my nervous mom pointed out, would provide little shelter if Betsy hit us head-on with her projected 140 mph winds.

My father wanted to stay — until late afternoon when winds from Betsy’s outer bands started to really shake the roof. We had an invitation from a Houma friend to shelter at her substantial Victorian house on Wood Street and so we made the decision to flee.

It was a memorable drive down that old Bayou Black clamshell road — scudding clouds, pummeling winds, blinding rain, thousands of acres of sugarcane already blown flat as though a giant lawn mower had descended from the sky. A time or two, I thought our old Jeep Willys wagon was going to blow into the ditch — if not into the bayou itself. We made it, nerves frayed. Betsy swooped in at night, and I kept vigil at a window, at one point watching the tin roof of a garage across the street blow off sheet by sheet, the sections helicoptering away in the howling maw.

I recall falling asleep on a couch only to be awakened by a sound. Or, actually, the lack of any sound. The eye stood over us, and the night had gotten eerily quiet. We ventured out onto a porch and stared at the moon and a few twinkling stars. And then the other side of eyewall moved in — shaking the solid old house to its bones. But we made it through unscathed.

Our farmhouse wasn’t so lucky, and we knew the decision to leave was the right one. We lost about a third of the roof. The rain had drenched walls and buckled wooden floors. We had a few outbuildings back then, including what I called a corn crib — a small wooden building about the size of an outhouse where we stored feed for the chickens we still kept. We’d rounded up the chickens and locked them safely away in the corn crib, or so we thought.

But every outbuilding was gone, including the corn crib. We never found a feather, much less a chicken. Still, we picked up the pieces, and life eventually returned to normal.

And then there was Katrina. I was working on Page One of The Wall Street Journal then. When news of the catastrophic levee collapses moved over the wires, I was dispatched to cover the aftermath as the Louisiana-savvy guy on staff. I would spend the next four months in New Orleans and the fishing communities nearby, writing stories of both unbelievable destruction and uncanny courage and resilience as the area struggled to recover from an unimaginable disaster. (A great deal of that reportage is in my book, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous.)

Of course, the history of Katrina is now written, and New Orleans and vicinity did recover—spectacularly so.

Which gives me cause for optimism about the recovery — long and hard as it will no doubt be — of my homeplace. It was wrenching to read in the post-Ida headlines that 40% of the homes in Houma had been rendered uninhabitable. My brother Chris texted photos of wind-gutted houses in Chauvin. (He lost part of his roof, but his place stood.) My niece, Sunny, who lives near Atlanta but whose Cajun roots still run deep, went with a small relief convoy to Grand Isle.

But natural disasters are hardly unique to the Motherland. Tornado alley spans much of the Midwest. She sent pictures that resembled a place that had been carpet-bombed.

And yet, miraculously, no one died. And those much-derided Morganza-to-the-Gulf levees — the very ones the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decertified a few years back, saying they were inadequate to protect in a major storm — performed extraordinarily well. They held; had they not, Ida might have been Katrina writ large.

The feds were wrong and we were right. It proves that local wisdom and determination to build the system without federal support was the absolute right thing to do. (Hey, Congress, now that we’ve passed our test, give us the money to lift the system to New Orleans levels.)

I understand those who argue that it’s folly to continually rebuild in an area smack in the middle of a hurricane corridor. Remember the post-Katrina op-ed in the Washington Post that said New Orleans should be abandoned and turned into a marshy barrier against future storms?

But natural disasters are hardly unique to the Motherland. I went through the scary 1989 San Francisco earthquake that killed 63 people and caused $6 billion in damage. But no one seriously suggested that San Francisco be relocated to, say, Sacramento because it sits atop a well-known earthquake fault. San Francisco rebuilt, and property values have never been higher.

And, of course, there’s this. Far more people died in New England from Ida’s torrential rains than died in South Louisiana from the actual storm. There’s no completely safe place to which to relocate.

I was very aware of the pessimism after the first few days of Ida. People awoke to shocking scenes. In some neighborhoods, entire blocks of houses had been flattened or crushed. Power was out and would stay out. Gasoline to run generators was in short supply. A lot of people had lost everything— well, everything material.

But then came little vignettes of optimism. My brother in Chauvin took in a couple who’d lost their house. But they were hoping to rebuild, as was the guy down the street who now slept in a tent in his living room to ward off the rain that poured unimpeded through his missing roof. He wasn’t going anywhere.

And less than a week after Ida’s landfall, when the roads had been finally cleared of trees and boats, I got a text from my friend, John Weimer, who was part of a relief caravan that had made its way to Chauvin, bringing water, foodstuffs, and gasoline to people in urgent need. It was a scene repeated all over Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes and throughout the sprawling footprint of Ida’s landfall. Our generosity is contagious.

Along with pictures of destroyed camps and houses, John, a Thibodaux boy who happens to be the Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, took the pulse of the people he met there. “People are resilient and resolute,” he wrote. “Please send prayers.”

This is not to make light of what it will take to return to “normal.” Still, when I think about the arc of our story, we are a people of resilience and perseverance. We remain singular on the American landscape, a culture carved into a spectacular watery wilderness that is by some measures still the seventh-largest wetland on Earth (if, alas, a shrinking one).

We are truly a gumbo of people, descendants of aristocrats, pioneers, adventurers, refugees, pirates; people who, freed from bondage, rose up to make spectacular contributions to our polyglot culture. Our gifts to the world are substantial: jazz, Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop music. We’ve given the world gumbo — and hands-down the best regional cooking in all of America. We understand that boudin is about as close to Heaven as you can come on Earth. We know how to dance. I can assure you this is not necessarily true in Iowa, though I have nothing against the place.

I think about my Swiss-German Toups forbears who got to Louisiana in 1721 after a long and hazardous sea voyage from France. They were awarded a pig and 40 arpents (about 34 acres) on the Mississippi River in a place with no infrastructure, no modern medicine, and plenty of dangers like malaria, yellow fever, hurricanes, and venomous snakes. Yet they persevered and eventually prospered, never thinking of giving up because, while existence was sometimes challenging, South Louisiana became home. Not just home, but the home of the heart.

We should keep building those levees. But I doubt Ida will diminish that spirit.