Riding out Gustav Cajun style

Cajuns are survivors, and when you need a storm companion there’s no one better.

There’s an unassuming little family that lives in the coastal community of Bayou Dularge, a finger of fertile land that pokes daringly out into the marsh of southern Terrebonne Parish.

Their name is Voisin (pronounced vwa-zan), which means neighbor in French. I know them because they’re my cousins, and they stayed with us for Gustav.

In our recently developed street, where the houses still dwarf all the trees, we were among the lucky ones who received no damage at all, so riding out the storm with our Cajun guests was actually fun.

With Cajuns in your storm shelter, all you need is ice, some basic grilling supplies and candles. They’ll supply all the common sense, resourcefulness and humor you’ll ever need. (Oh, but don’t forget to lay in plenty of strong coffee. More on that later.)

The matriarch of this family is Rosalie, a devoted, sometimes impish grandmother with a quick and contagious laugh. She’s Italian by birth, but Cajun by marriage. She’s just as likely to chuckle at everyday absurdity as at her own fumbling. She’s her family’s buoyant spirit who puts smiles on glum faces, lifts sodden morale and has cooked up uncountable feasts from the bounty her men and boys have hauled in from the marsh.

Gerald, meanwhile, is the patriarch. He’s a quiet Cajun who earned his ruddy brown skin fishing, hunting and working the soil for most of his 69 years.

In a crisis he’s the quiet, confident presence you count on, effortlessly squashing nervous rumors, debunking needless hyperbole and coaxing those with irrational fears from emotional ledges with bone-dry humor.

His confidence comes from a deep knowledge of nature. “He’s always been a student of the earth,” says his son Doug.

Drawing on an unfiltered Camel on the back porch during Gustav’s howling crescendo, Gerald eyed the bent trees across the canal with calm indifference. “That’s about an 85-mile-an-hour wind, maybe 90,” he said. Meteorologists would later proclaim maximum gusts of 91 mph in Baton Rouge using the highest of high-tech monitors and gauges. Gerald knew it by watching the trees.

He’s old school. Really old school. In his shed there’s an old-fashioned freezer, a Marquette. In it he keeps all the fish, shrimp, frog legs, alligator and turtle meat he gets his leathery hands on. It’s the kind of freezer that entombs its contents in a six-inch glacier of ice. When a previous hurricane cut the power for two weeks, Gerald finally opened the lid to find everything still frozen solid. Here’s the thing: he bought that old freezer used 45 years ago, and the only work he’s ever had done on it was to replace the power cord. And rather than brag about the thing, his tone is a mixture of reverence and respect.

As Gustav approached, the Voisins arrived at our house equipped like Cajun commandos: a gallon each of gin and vodka, several cans of frozen orange juice, several bottles of tonic water, two cases of light beer, a couple of 60-quart ice chests of full of ice, three fully-charged Alltel cell phones (which put our own AT&T phones to shame), some Wonder Bread and Spam.

And of course, they brought humor.

I made the mistake of boasting about Baton Rouge tap water, assuring them they needn’t trifle with bottled water since ours comes from an aquifer thousands of years old. When our sidewalk sewer cover started burbling its smelly overflow into a nearby storm drain, Gerald quipped, “Hope that sewage doesn’t mess up your dinosaur-piss water.”

The day after Gustav, in the dim breezy dawn of first light, Gerald and I sat outside in silence. Finally, he asked, “You got a grill?” I looked into his bloodshot eyes—surely he wasn’t thinking of cooking this early. “Are you kidding?” I asked. He didn’t answer, just stared back in pre-caffeinated silence.

Twenty minutes later I was bringing water to a rolling boil on a wood fire in my Weber Grill, handing out smoky-tasting coffee a cup at a time by pouring the water through a coffee filter packed with dark roast. It was the best coffee I’ve ever had.

An hour later his son Doug had stoked the fire and was caramelizing onions for scrambled eggs with deer sausage, minced garlic and potatoes. Roughing it? Who’s roughing it?

Gerald and Rosalie usually stay home for hurricanes, but this time they hit the road because their youngest granddaughter, Alicia, was beside herself with worry—which to them was worse than a hurricane.

In the morning-after silence, I felt self-conscious about our three-year-old tract home, which was assembled using nail guns, a technique Gerald considers contemptible. “Why you think Andrew blew away so many of those houses in Homestead?” he once asked me. “You ever see the nails they use in a nail gun? It’s not nails. It’s pieces of wire.”

Ironic he’d ride out a hurricane in our cookie-cutter house rather than his bayou cypress fortress, built in 1864 from old-growth timber cut and milled right there on the land, a ridge that even now stays a few feet above storm surges.

A peek inside the attic reveals cypress joists and beams thick as porch columns, and across the back of the house runs a load-bearing cypress header 41 feet long.

Instead of nails or screws, the timbers are joined by fat wooden pegs, and the beams’ ends are carved so they intertwine and lock into each other.

Still, every year the brackish marsh creeps ever closer to the orange grove Gerald planted when he retired from his career with Louisiana Land and Exploration Co., leaving his home more exposed than ever to Gulf gales as the barrier islands melt into the sea.

Yet that house has emerged unscathed after 150 years of Mother Nature pounding it with her best shots. Same for the majestic pecan tree in the backyard, presumably planted around the time the house was built. In its heyday that tree threw out a canopy of shade 25 yards wide, but the last 15 years have taken their toll.

“Andrew took a third, Katrina took a third, Rita took a third and now Gustav took another third,” my cousin Doug joked. “It was the biggest pecan tree you ever saw—it musta had eight thirds.”

At which point we all laughed again in the muggy semi-darkness with our storm-weary Cajun guests, people who’ve lost tree limbs, time and precious land to hurricanes and the encroaching sea, but not a single splinter of their resolve or their humor, which remain as strong and true as the muscular cypress castle they call home.