Mardi Gras: Hail to the Queens, II

The queens were often cheered on by attendees from their own parishes. Cattle Queen Kristen, Gonzales Jambalaya Queen Jenna, Queen Cotton Brandy, Dixie Gem Peach Queen Jennifer, Fur & Wildlife Queen Lauren, and Frog Queen Chelsea are shown taking their turns in the spotlight, with especially raucous supporters for Fur and Frog. (Note: If I have mixed up any queens, please do correct me.)

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.

Not so fast

Trying to squeeze through a narrow cut-out in dense marsh,

Refuge Manager Perry (left), the Cotton Queen Brandy Matulich

(far right), and the Fur & Wildlife Pageant director Vicki Little

(near right), found themselves stuck and listing to one side—

not a problem except for being miles from true terra firma

with a lively alligator population calling the marsh home. But

with Scooter adding his muscle and talking Vicki through

driving while he and Guthrie gave a good heave, the airboat

and its passengers ended up free in the end.

Faster than a speeding bullet

While visitors are welcome to certain parts of the refuge in
specific months, able to do crabbing and crawfish trapping,
only the staff have full access to the 26-mile coastline via
airboats, which are powered by enormous airplane engines.
The Fur Queen arranged for her guests to zip through the
marshland at thrill-ride speed aboard airboats like this one,
which she shares with the Frog Queen.

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.

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.

Sometimes you feel like a crown, sometimes you don't

A Fur Queen has to enjoy the outdoors, even if she’s never picked up a gun or skinned a wild animal in her life. Lauren Naquin shows both sides of the Fur Queen lifestyle here: dressing up for formal events and dressing down to head into a nature reserve, as shown, where she has swapped her crown for noise-canceling headphones to board an airboat on the day she showed us around.

Cameron Parish: Home of the Fur & Wildlife Festival

Cameron Parish, Louisiana, is the largest of the state's parishes in land mass—1900 square miles—but second smallest in population, with just over 8,000 residents. It’s endless combination of open prairie, vast marshes, and bayous make it a sportsman’s paradise, and the natural home to the Louisiana Fur & Wildlife Festival. Since 1955, the festival has involved skeet-shooting, nutria-skinning, oyster-shucking, and more. But not this year: Hurricane Ike has wreaked so much havor, the January 2009 festival has been cancelled. This week, the Fur queen invited several of her fellow festival queens to come see her Parish anyway, both in its devastation and its natural splendor.