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Hurricane Rita

A watery search in Cajun country

Friends take a boat to retrieve their pets and possessions in Louisiana.

By TAMARA LUSH
Published September 26, 2005

DELCAMBRE, La. - The four friends eased the boat ahead, holding on to the walls of the house as they inched toward the front door. They kicked in the door and half-jumped, half-swam into the living room.

"The bird's alive!" one man shouted. "Get the bird!"

Ryan Douhon lives in the house. He and his wife left before Hurricane Rita hit, before the winds sent a river of water rushing through the small town 20 miles south of Lafayette. Douhon had left the bird and the cat to fend for themselves, and now he and his friends were there to save the pair and see what else Rita had spared.

Douhon handed his buddy Saul Touchet the cage with the yellow cockatiel. Then, holding the tabby cat, he waded through the water and eased him into the boat. He went back into the house and emerged wth a camouflage sleeping bag and a shotgun.

They were done with Douhon's house.

This is Cajun country. To tourists, that means gumbo and French accents and music made from fiddles and washboards.

To the people in Delcambre (pronounced Del-kum), Cajun country means fishing, friends, family. People are born here, work nearby and are buried in the cemetery in the middle of town. It's not exactly a poor place but people don't live in subdivisions with neat lawns and identical mailboxes. People here are more likely to live in an old, little wood home with a boat and a couple of weather-beaten cars. Usually, the home is mortgage-free, handed down by parents and maybe their parents before them. Residents can trace their lineage back to the Acadians, a group of French-Canadians who came to Louisiana in the 1700s.

"That was my grandma's house," explained Louis Bourque, one of the men in the boat pointing at a submerged wooden building. "She passed away and now my aunt lives there."

He says he has never seen the water like this. Sometimes the streets flood, but the water never comes up to the rafters of carports or the tops of windowsills. The entire town is a few feet above sea level; during Rita, the water rose 13 or 14 feet.

Nearly everybody left Delcambre before the storm hit, impressed by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

"We never thought it would be this bad," Bourque said.

Bourque is 25, a tall man who was wearing black bathing trunks, dark sunglasses and a black cap. He left town with his wife, who is pregnant, and $700.

Bourque and two of his friends in the boat work for oil companies. The other friend is a carpenter. They all grew up together. When they're not working, they're fishing and hunting.

Touchet, who has the words "sweet" and "sour" tattooed over each nipple, sighted two wooden duck decoys bobbing near a mailbox.

"Today's the end of teal (duck) hunting season," he said, sighing.

"These are people that live off of mother nature, real people," said L. Charles "Carlos" Magnon, who grew up in Lafayette (the big city of about 200,000) and makes his home part time in an RV in Delcambre (population 2,000). "This is the longest 20 miles in the world, between Lafayette and Delcambre."

Magnon was on the boat with the four friends. He wanted to see what the storm had done to his RV and his 45-foot sailboat.

It doesn't look good, not for Magnon or anyone in Delcambre. Nearly every house was engulfed in oily salt water.

An odor of gasoline and propane, a sweet, nauseating smell, permeates the town. No one seems concerned about this, not while everything is submerged. The men in the boat are smoking and they take great pains not to get their cigarettes wet jumping in and out.

"The smokes, dawg," Bourque calls out to Sam White, the owner of the boat who takes the Marlboros out of his pocket before he wades in the water.

When the boat glides up to Magnon's property, he is ecstatic. His is one of the few properties on high ground, about 9 feet above sea level. Still, water lapped at the RV's steps. His docked boat didn't move.

Next stop: Touchet's house. It's also the home of Bourque's mom; Bourque's sister is married to Touchet and his mom lives with the couple.

Touchet left behind two dogs. One, Sandy, is a chocolate Lab that they use for hunting. Mariah is a chow-Rottweiler mix. She's the family pet. As the boat approaches the house, Touchet whistles.

The sound of the water rippling under the boat is broken by barking. The Lab is sitting on a floating pile of wood and garbage, under the shade of the carport. The other dog is on the roof.

"They are warriors," Touchet yells.

It takes some coaxing to get the dogs into the boat. Douhon's tabby cat hides under the sleeping bag.

The four break down the house door. They take out a few things for Bourque's mom: an urn to mark her late husband's grave, a green candle and four crucifixes.

His mother has lived in that house for 30 years, Bourque explained. She doesn't have insurance.

"No one here does," said White.

White grew up in Delcambre, but he lives in the next town over, a luckier place without flooding.

On Thursday, White's wife gave birth to a son in New Iberia. They named him James. On Friday morning, the family was told to leave the hospital because of the hurricane. They fled to Coteau (Ko-tee) before James had even lived a day on this earth.

"He still had the clamp on his umbilical cord," White said. "The doctors gave me the tool to cut it off."

--Tamara Lush can be reached at 727 893-8612 or at lush@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 26, 2005, 01:19:05]