‘Cajun Navy’ to the rescue
IN CALAMITIES SUCH AS HARVEY, OUTDOORSMEN MAKE A FINE TASK FORCE
When the outside water starts pouring in, outdoorsmen come to the rescue. They’re descending on Houston in their fleets of flat-bottomed aluminum boats, the sport fishermen and duck hunters outnumbering the government rescuers by the hundreds, their skiffs sitting low in the floodwaters with their human catch in the back, clutching plasticwrapped possessions. At a time such as this, you want the guys who can still thread a line when their hands are wet and cold.
The country is suddenly grateful for this “Cajun Navy,” for their know- how, for the fact that they can read a submerged log in the water, and haul their boats over tree stumps and levees and launch them from freeway junctions. There are no regulators to check their fishing licences or whether they have a fire extinguisher and life preservers on board, which they don’t. They’re used to manoeuvring through the cypress of Caddo Lake or the hydrilla and coontail of the Atchafalaya, where the water might be one metre or it might rise to five, and the stinking bog is called “coffee grinds” because of the way boots sink in it. Spending hours in monsoon rains doesn’t bother them, because they know ducks don’t just show up on a plate.
“They can handle their boats better than the average fireman, who handles a boat once a year during annual training,” says Lt.- Gen. (ret.) Russel Honore, who estimates outdoorsmen saved 10,000 from floodwaters in New Orleans while he was in command there after Hurricane Katrina. “They use their boats all the time and know their waters, and know their capacity. It’s an old professional pride.”
They speak an oddly poetic language, of spinnerbait and jigs, chatterbait and Texas rigs, of palomar knots and turls. They have suspended their pursuit of bass and black croppies, blue gills and redfish, crawfish and panfish, to motor through subdivisions, shirtless in the rain. You can’t help but be struck by just how much they know how to do — and how much your citified self doesn’t. Trim a rocking boat, tie a secure knot, navigate the corduroying displaced water, and interpret the faint dull colours in the mistheavy clouds.
Buster Stoker, 21, is a heavy equipment operator for R&R Construction in Sul- pher, La., and spends the rest of his time in his five- metre aluminum Pro Drive marsh boat, fishing for alligator-gar in the heat of summer and chasing fowl through water-thickets in the winter.
“The best day on the water is every day on the water,” he said.
He and several other construction colleagues met in the company parking lot Monday at 5 a. m., loaded up with gas and supplies, and headed toward Hous- ton. They launched their little fleet of 14 craft from the intersection of Highways 90 and 526, and over the next several hours they pulled hundreds of people out of their flooded homes in subdivisions, hauling them aboard like gasping bass.
Stoker’s shallow boat could carry no more than seven people and sometimes he took on water, but he estimates he ferried more than 100 people over countless kilometre-long trips, getting them to bigger boats and buses that carried them to shelters. He’s used to steering his boat in water full of obstacles.
“There were a lot of submerged cars, and street signs,” he said by phone, sitting in his truck on a Houston highway after a long day in the flood. “And there were currents getting in and out of the neighbourhoods.”
But it wasn’t much different from navigating around cypress knees and the thick mat- like vegetation of the marshes. He spent Monday night on a cot with a blanket at the Celebration of Life Church. He figured he and his friends would stay in Houston for a couple of more days but were worried about the weather moving into the Lake Charles, La., area.
“We might have to turn around and do it again back home,” he said.
This Cajun Navy is a nebulous, informal thing, it has no real corps or officers. It’s “an intensely informal and unorganized operation,” says Academy Award- winning filmmaker Allan Durand, a Lafayette, La., native, who did a documentary on the “Cajun Navy” volunteerboats following Katrina.
Local author-editors Trent Angers and Jefferson Hennessy have come closest to pinpointing the origin of the movement: It seems to have begun in the Lafayette- Abbeville area during Katrina, when a local state legislator named Nick Gautreaux organized a group of sportsmen to go to the aid of imperilled friends in St. Bernard Parish. Meantime, R&R Construction organized a similar flotilla out of the Lake Charles area. During the impromptu rescue effort, someone wrote “Cajun Navy” on a large white ice chest.
The same groups have by now acquired deep experience in storm aid, and are growing thanks to social media. They were critical in helping Baton Rouge residents during historic flooding there a year ago, when federal help wasn’t forthcoming. It’s a movement basically founded on the realization that large government agencies aren’t quickmoving.
So thank God they’re coming, in their skiffs and Gator Trax and Wigeons and Mudbugs and Riverhawks. They are unafraid of Houston’s vast floodwaters. They don’t care if they’re wet, “or how hot you are, or how bad you smell,” Durand said. “These are people who spend 300 or 400 hours in the swamp every year, and being in a subdivision in Houston is not real scary to them. It’s just water.”