Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane

3. Bayou Country

CHAPTER 3 Bayou Country Cultural geography is never disconnected from physical geography, and that’s especially true for Louisiana. Roughly one-sixth of the Pelican State’s total area—nearly eight thousand square miles—is covered by water, with most of this submerged land lying in the southern parishes. The state’s rainfall averages sixty-four inches a year, vying for the highest in the continental United States. Although the winter rains are sometimes daylong drizzles, the summer showers tend to come in compact squalls and thunderstorms that dump torrents as they race through, sometimes drenching one side of a community while leaving the other side bone dry. And, of course, the state also gets its share of the ultimate rainstorms: hurricanes. Just east of the region devastated by Audrey sprawls the territory immortalized by Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, the tragic story of lovers parted when the British deported thousands of Frenchspeaking people from the Acadian region of Canada in 1755. Most of the displaced Acadians (the word eventually evolving into “Cajuns”) settled around the bayous and swamps of southern Louisiana, where virtually nobody else would have considered living. Here, isolated from the political turmoil of the rest of the world, they learned to thrive in peaceful harmony with nature. The soggy soil supported squash, okra, and tomatoes, which the Cajuns stewed in gumbos with alligator meat, craw‹sh, and cat‹sh. Rice also thrived, and mixing it with the other edibles led to the dish they called “jambalaya.” The more energetic ‹shermen poled their pirogues down the waterways to the Gulf, where they scooped up abundant shrimp and oysters. Unlike in the eastern provinces of Canada, with their bitter winters and rocky soil, food in southern 23 Louisiana was plentiful year-round. And although the Cajun homes were small and simple, they were built of cypress, which was impervious to rot. This was a place where families could literally live from day to day, oblivious to the insanity of the outside world. The pace of the Cajun lifestyle adjusted itself accordingly. Being born in southern Louisiana was hardly different from being planted there, and even until recently many inhabitants blissfully lived their entire lives without traveling beyond the next parish or two. When other parts of the South were mired in racial discord, here musical groups of mixed color gave birth to zydeco, that particular combination of French and African music set to a polka rhythm and played on guitar, accordion, and washboard. Saturday mornings were, and still are, a time of revelry in small towns in Acadiana, with restaurants serving beer at breakfast as their dance ›oors swarm with Cajuns, Creoles of mixed color, and the occasional Latino or African American cowboy. The majority are reverent Roman Catholics who seem to ‹gure that Christ would never have turned water into wine had he not intended to establish an important priority for his followers. Although some of Acadiana’s isolation had frayed by the midtwentieth century, the fundamental culture had not. Yes, as of 1934 there was an intracoastal waterway slicing westward from the Mississippi River to the Texas border. Motorized shrimp boats replaced most of the pirogues, and shrimp was actually being exported. And by the late 1950s, every road south seemed to terminate at a canal clustered with oil-drilling equipment ready to be towed offshore or having just been brought in. But by outside standards, traf‹c on the Louisiana intracoastal canal was relatively sparse; all of the oil equipment clustered at the south ends of the roads re›ected the simple fact that there just weren’t very many roads, and the shrimp boats were hardly harbingers of an industrial age. Well into the 1970s, television reception in the area amounted to a few snowy-screened channels from New Orleans and Lafayette, which for many Cajun families didn’t justify the expense of a TV set. Radio was the main conduit for getting news from the outside world. Although admitted to the Union as the eighteenth state back in 1812, Louisiana never did bother to replace the Napoleonic Code as the basis of its legal system, nor did it ever start referring to its political CATEGORY 5 24 subdivisions as “counties” rather than “parishes.” Louisiana was what it was, and its people and its politicians liked it that way. Even in the latter third of the twentieth century, for many folks, owning...