A ride to remember

My visit to Cameron Parish, where nature yields both incredible beauty and stunning challenges, was as uplifting as it was sobering. I won’t forget it.

Nature will have its say

The serenity of the scene belied a sobering truth: the beach is eroding at roughly 40 feet inward each year. Every bit of beach the queens walked on in their visit—and everything you see in this photo—will be under water by the time the Fur & Wildlife Festival returns in January 2010.

Guardians of the kingdom

The Fur & Wildlife Queen is a rare queen who represents not just an industry or town but an ecosystem. The refuge that is part of her domain is protected, preserved, and studied by a

team of biologists, including Philip Trosclair—better known as Scooter—who grew up nearby, interned here as a teen, got his degree, and returned for his adult career. At left, he shows an alligator skull found in the mud. The institutional memory rests in the experience of Refuge Manager Guthrie Perry, who has worked here for decades, and written books based on his research. Here, Perry introduces the visiting queens to the refuge, describing the challenges it currently faces.

Smile pretty

The Fur queen’s next stop led her peers to the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, 76,000 acres of marshland. Home to ducks, geese, spoonbill, egrets, deer, armadillo, muskrat, nutria, and mink, among other species, the refuge is perhaps best known for its alligators. But at the visitor’s center, your first greeter is this madly grinning coyote, which was bagged in the refuge. Chelsea tries to match his smile with some killer whites of her own.

Used to be my playground

The final stop in our tour of damage

and recovery areas were the old

school grounds. The original Cameron

schools plot had multiple buildings,

including the auditorium where the

Fur queen was crowned each year.

Rita wiped all that out, leaving only a

cement footprint, where you can still

see the outline of the aisles once

walked by audiences for school

plays and concerts. After the

schools were rebuilt in one building

a few miles away, the old school

grounds became the festival site—

until Ike roared through this year,

not only blasting the festival site

but leveling the new school.

With board members homeless and

the town struggling to rebuild, the

festival has been cancelled until 2010.

Movin' on up

One regulation put in place after Rita was that all houses must be built at a specific elevation or manually elevated at levels ranging from 4 to 12 feet (depending on the zone), yielding an unusual landscape of new homes perched on stilts of various materials (concrete block and brick mostly, though some are wooden). One re-builder christened the result with the amusing title at far left.

Debris

Many residents have not yet been able to return and their empty wrecked homes stand as a testimony to their loss. Houses are spray-painted with their street addresses (though the houses themselves may not have ended up where they stood before the storm) and the owner’s names, a poignant reminder that these were once neighborhoods. FEMA has become something of the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh away; after initially offering money for newly homeless residents who’d had no insurance, FEMA has recently issued a new map prohibiting the rebuilding of property in 80% of the parish, leaving residents with literally no place to call home again. The state is appealing the ruling.

Battered

After volunteering in
the morning, the queens
headed deep into Cameron
Parish, where the hurricane
aftermath is evident
everywhere. 1800 of the
homes in the Parish were
destroyed by Ike, with the
majority of homes in the town
of Cameron wiped out.
This came just three years after
Rita destroyed 90% of the town.