Ruins of Yscloskey

Text Box: Out of the Spotlight, A Town of Fishermen Fears for Way of Life --- After Katrina, Yscloskey, La., Teeters on the Brink; An Entire Parish Reels By Ken Wells The Wall Street Journal/Page One September 12, 2005 YSCLOSKEY, La. -- His wife safely settled in a donated house in Tennessee, Ricky Robin, a Cajun-speaking native of this historic low country, will in a few days point his 56-foot shrimp trawler the Lil' Rick toward the Gulf of Mexico, make a wide right turn west and head for parts unknown. A shrimper has to make a living, and there's no living here now. At a bridge crossing over Bayou La Loutre in this 200-year-old fishing village that once claimed 500 residents, Mr. Robin surveyed what's left of his life, and his way of life, and told his 68-year-old cousin, Ronald Robin, that it was time to go. "What we got left here, Ronald?" said the 51-year-old Mr. Robin, gesturing toward the ruins of a town where about 95% of what had once stood had been blown down or flattened by the violent waves and vicious currents of Hurricane Katrina. "The family seafood business? Gone. The ice house? Gone. The store? Gone. Momma's house? Gone. This bridge? Broke. Who's left to buy our shrimp and our oysters? Well, the oyster beds are gone. And where's our market? It's gone, too. I got no choice -- I think I gotta leave." The story of Yscloskey, 30 miles east-southeast of New Orleans, seems the story of all of St. Bernard Parish, where a dozen or so towns are strung out along a 2,000-square-mile web of marshlands, oak ridges, winding bayous and barrier beaches -- "God's country," says Ronald Robin. Nearby New Orleans, where the historic French Quarter and much of the Garden District escaped serious storm damage, will pump out its wrecked neighborhoods, rebuild and go on. But St. Bernard, a working-class place of 60,000 people settled more than 200 years ago by a gumbo of Canary Island Spaniards, French Creoles and Cajuns, Italians and Yugoslavs seems rent almost beyond repair. Though parish officials pluckily vow to rebuild these towns where pirates once roamed and Andrew Jackson once defended New Orleans from the British Army, St. Bernard is now a place without a core. "I doubt we have five habitable houses in the entire parish," said Henry "Junior" Rodriguez, president of the parish where about 27,000 homes stood before Katrina howled through. Indeed, even before the storm, St. Bernard was sometimes considered New Orleans's poor and unfashionable cousin, its economy propped up by pollution-spewing refineries that few other places wanted, its traditional fishing industry already under strain from coastal erosion, urban pollution and foreign competition. Then Katrina pounced. Shrieking winds, tornadoes and storm surges estimated at 15 feet to 26 feet high swamped the entire parish, tearing down its power and phone lines, flooding and badly damaging its court house, hospital and other public buildings and destroying or damaging almost all of its 17 schools. Large parts of Chalmette, the parish seat of 33,000, still lie under water and reeking muck. Piling on the town's misery: a devastating oil spill from a storm-damaged storage tank at the Murphy Oil Co. refinery there that spread a coat of acrid heavy crude over several square miles of streets, houses and businesses. By one estimate, 90% or more of St. Bernard Parish businesses have been crippled or destroyed, but the figure could be higher; no one has had time to do a proper survey. Oil, chemical and natural-gas plants here providing about a thousand jobs were all battered by the storm. They will eventually reopen but the parish's service, retail and small-business sectors, which provide most of its 17,000 or so full-time jobs, have been decimated -- entire malls and vast strip shopping centers in and around Chalmette lie gutted by wind and water. The National Guard had only late last week begun door-to-door searches for victims living and dead, wading through miles and miles of dispiriting neighborhoods of starving dogs, mud-caked streets, mildewing houses and abandoned, water-logged cars. About 100 bodies had been recovered as of yesterday but surveying the area by air and car, parish officials say many more may lie dead in the soggy rubble. Ricky and Ronald Robin and numerous other Yscloskey commercial fishermen rode out Hurricane Katrina on their boats in the relative shelter of a place called Violet Canal, a traditional hurricane hole about six miles east and south of Chalmette. Between them the Robins estimate they plucked maybe 95 people from the water in the horrific hours after Katrina's eye moved over these vast wetlands. Ricky watched from his trawler as his wife, Susan, outran a tidal wave in a minivan, scooting up a nearby Mississippi River levee to safety. For the first five days after the Aug. 28 storm, almost nobody from the outside came to help, leaving the job of rescuing the trapped and picking up the dead to the fishermen and a clutch of storm-shocked parish officials who slept on the roof of the flooded courthouse. "We were pushing bodies back into coffins at the black cemetery," he said. The Robins (which they pronounce in the French, Roe-BEHN) come from hurricane-hardened stock. They stuck it out through Hurricane Betsy, which blew in just west of here in 1965 and beat up St. Bernard Parish but not nearly with the ferocity of Katrina. They tell stories of ancestors who drove nails through their clothes to anchor themselves to a seining ship and rode a tidal wave for 15 miles before they ran aground to safety during the hurricane of 1915. They gave no thought to leaving during Katrina. "We were prepared," says Ricky. "We know where to go and we know what to do." Ricky Robin trusted the Lil' Rick -- after all, he built the boat himself, laying the keel while he was still in high school. He tethered it to a dock with long, stout lines and kept the engines running all night, pointing the boat into the waves and ready to make a run for it. But what they were unprepared for was a massive breach in the levee system to the west, and a huge storm surge which leapt with amazing ferocity and speed out of Lake Borgne to the north and the Gulf to the east. The water simply overran the levees north and east of them. "Think about 20-foot waves on top of a 25-foot tide and you'll know what I mean," Ricky Robin says. "I was pulling people from the water left and right." On an implacably sunny day late last week, the Robins were trying to drive in Ricky's aquamarine minivan for the first time all the way down Highway 46, the parish's main thoroughfare, to the Florissant Highway, which doglegs almost due east to Yscloskey. They were stopped briefly at a checkpoint where police diverted traffic away from a street where a nursing home still holds the bodies of at least 30 elderly or infirm residents trapped and drowned by flood waters. Reports of the deaths tear like a sharp oyster knife through the fabric of conversation here. In an easygoing place where people pride themselves on looking after each other, no one can fathom how the nursing home didn't get its people out. The Florissant Highway had been shut till now, covered in water and muck and blocked by a tangle of downed utility poles and wires, trees and debris from crushed houses. The Robins found the route open, though still covered in parts by dried mud. Perhaps a hundred or more houses or camps lined this five-mile stretch before Katrina. The ride to Yscloskey this day was a bleakly mesmerizing lesson in what storms can do. Not more than five or six houses were still upright. It wasn't the physical destruction -- homes reshaped into unbelievable sculptures of rubble -- so much that bothered the Robins. Family and friends lived here, people who gathered on Saturday afternoon to boil shrimp taken out of Ricky's nets or to shuck some oysters dredged up by Ronald from his boat. Somebody would bring the cold beer; somebody would bring a pot of jambalaya or gumbo or Cajun potato salad; somebody would bring the music and people would party late into the night. No one's going to party here for a long, long time. And the shallow-water oyster beds, scoured by ripping tides and already being dealt a lethal dose of pollution from storm runoff, are gone, dead or dying. As they drove, the Robins tried to explain bayou life. There are far more restaurants serving oyster poboys (the Cajun version of the submarine sandwich) and seafood in St. Bernard Parish than pizza joints. Bars well outnumber the churches. The area, about 90% white, is still heavily Catholic but not starched Catholic. The Spanish speaking "Islenos" from the Canary Islands and the French settlers who came two centuries ago brought with them a deep sense of religion tempered by a deep love of the verities: good food, plentiful drink, music, dancing, love and sex. Almost everyone has a pleasure boat, and some have camps and houseboats in the great sprawl of wetlands beyond the towns. Much leisure time is spent chasing speckled trout, redfish and flounder, the game fish hereabouts most prized for the pot. But the catch is only half of it. Taking it home and cooking up a shrimp-stuffed flounder or a spicy courtbouillon recipe passed down by a great-grandmother is an honored ritual. The Robins talked about these and other things as they entered Yscloskey proper. Things had already begun to change here before the storm. Rich doctors, lawyers and politicians had begun to invade the town, putting up levees and building fancy houses up on stilts and driving prices up. Katrina, though, appeared to have been an equal-opportunity destroyer. A fancy enclave at the edge of town was as decimated as the rest of it. Some houses were simply blown into the ether, their naked, massive concrete pilings glinting in the sun like some Roman ruin. "That's the ruins of the old store," said Ricky, pointing out a pile of old-brick rubble in the old part of town. "It was the first trading post here. I'll bet there's treasure buried in there." A bit later, Ricky declared he would trade buried treasure for a bulldozer and some dynamite when he peered across a wide flooded area and spotted his own beige home rising on 8-foot-high pilings amid the rubble. Though water damaged, it had survived; not so his mother's house nearby. It was now literally next door -- having been knocked off its foundations and shoved up against his own dwelling. It would take a bulldozer to get to them both. But flood waters, bottled up by a giant blocked drain, were still barring the way. "If I could blow this drain, I could get in there," he said. Then he thought this over and said, "But for what?" On the route back to Violet Canal, the Robins found one glad sight: San Pedro Pescador Catholic Church -- "the fishermen's church" -- was still standing. Every early August here, the church presides over the blessing of the shrimp fleet, where priests say mass and sprinkle holy water on a parade of brightly decorated boats. Hundreds attend and then the throngs head for community centers, backyards or bars to eat seafood, drink beer and dance. Ricky wondered about the fate of this ritual as well. Ronald shook his head. "This is God's country," he said, "and God's taking it back."

Ronald (left) and Ricky Robin at the Bayou LaLoutre Bridge in Ysclocskey. Right, Ricky’s view from his minivan as we traveled the hurricane ravaged Florissant Highway on Sept. 7, the first day the road had been cleared of trees and powerlines.

Photos by Ken Wells © 2005