Well this is pretty awesome. It you haven’t seen it, watch some Louisianians save a woman (and her dog!) from a sinking car:
NPR’s article has some really good pictures. You may remember a previous post with pictures of flooding in Texas. I had some song lyrics attached. Someone has posted the song itself (from a now-defunct band) on Youtube and is shown to the right.
There is a lot not to like about the south, but they do come together in times like this. The Cajun Navy came together in Katrina, and was sort of recommissioned during this flooding. It’s one of the positive aspects of the “Hold my beer and watch this s**t” culture that so often gets people in the region in trouble. You have a boat, of course roaming the floods and looking for people is what you do.
This isn’t unique to the south. There is a communitarianism in the west as well, even among those alleged rugged individualists. Out there, you often really can’t count on help because it’s so far away. But because it’s such a constant problem, it’s sort of always there. In the South it just comes up during freak weather, and with the exception of things like the Cajun Navy there isn’t any real formality to it. It’s just that you’re driving in flooding and you see some joe excited to use his F-150 to pull someone out of the water.
Rod Dreher has a really nice post on the subject.
Over There, JL Wall also has a post with links to ever more stuff.
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8 Responses to The Ballad of the Cajun Navy
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I see this kind of thing in my state. I call it “remnants of the Frontier Spirit” – the recognition of “today you, maybe tomorrow me” and also the recognition that the White Hats from Washington (or the Capital) probably won’t get there fast enough to fix whatever problem it is (if they even care enough to show up)
A lesser example I see a lot here are fundraisers being held (where there’s a band that donates their time and any money coming in goes to the cause, or dinners where the food is donated and then sold, or similar) to help a family that got burned out of their house but had no insurance (usually because they could not afford it in the first place) or someone with gigantic health bills not fully covered by insurance, things like that.
Fema got in touch with us within twenty hours after we called them and they are expected tomorrow to do the estimate on the damage.
I am fairly sure they are interested in doing a good job and probably have experience in disaster relief.
Happy to hear it!
My great aunt who’s my mom’s age lives in Ellicott City, Maryland. Apparently there was some really bad flooding there. Everything okay where you are?
We’ve had some really wicked thunderstorms. I got caught driving in one, and Clancy got caught driving in another. It was unpleasant, but fortunately nothing worse than that.
Good to hear. There was a time-lapse out of EC on Facebook that was pretty frightening.
I live about ten miles north of Baton Rouge and about ten miles east of the Mississippi River. The water in our yard was about 4&1/2 feet high but only got our AC and duct work. I have many family members who got lots of water, as in 5 feet in the house.
Community spirit certainly is part of it, but it also helps that many people have boats capable of operating in shallow water and are skilled in operating them.