Wednesday, September 6, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The Cajun Navy
Handbook
I have a friend from the
Marine Corps, John “Scoot”
Davenport, who lives in
Youngsville, Louisiana, and
is an admiral in the Cajun
Navy.
That’s a joke — there is
no such thing as an admiral in
the Cajun Navy. But recently
I had the opportunity to talk
with Scoot about his experi-
ences as a volunteer during
the onslaught of Hurricane
Harvey in Houston.
Scoot, like all good sons
of the bayou country, has a
boat, an enormous affection
for people, and a lot of neigh-
bors who share his capacity
for selflessness. That’s what
the Cajun Navy is. There
is no formal organization,
except around a deeply held
principle of neighborhood
and community.
“Most of us around here
have boats for hunting and
fishing,” Scoot told me, “so
when we saw those people
needed help, we just went.
Didn’t even think about it. I
have a friend who is a para-
medic, and he jumped in with
me.”
Simple as that.
The trip to Houston, nor-
mally three hours, took nine,
and where other vehicles were
siphoned off the interstate
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by law enforcement, anyone
towing a boat was allowed to
keep heading into the storm.
Funny enough, the Cajun
Navy does have an app,
which allowed them to bring
some loose measure of orga-
nization to what was oth-
erwise, according to Scoot,
essentially chaos.
After hours of mostly
uncoordinated freelance res-
cues, Scoot and his squad-
ron of volunteers discovered
a series of assisted-living
homes under the floodwa-
ters. The homes were diffi-
cult to see at all, Scoot said,
because of the high water and
visibility problems caused by
navigating through treetops
and power lines during a still-
active hurricane. But Scoot,
and those oft-derided bayou
boys, managed to evacu-
ate nearly 180 elderly and
desperate Americans, their
wheelchairs, and their medi-
cal supplies, and haul them to
dry ground and safety.
They did it because that is
what good people and good
neighbors do. And there was
something else, another wel-
come patch of high ground in
all that flooding:
“You know,” Scoot said of
his experience, “I didn’t see
the first Antifa, BLM, or Nazi
protest the whole time I was
there. Nobody cared about
politics or race or religion or
sex or anything of that. It just
didn’t matter.”
It just didn’t matter.
The extraordinary human
response to Hurricane Harvey
might rightfully be seen as a
powerful counter-punch to
the noisy and angry narrative
that submits every high-visi-
bility moment of cultural and
political friction as evidence
of an America unraveling at
the seams.
We would do very well
to consider long and hard
who is behind those fringe
narratives, how they benefit
from pushing them, and what
it is they actually want.
Thankfully, I mark an
alternative tone amongst
the people I meet. While
acknowledging that there
seems to be an anxious strug-
gle for the American soul
underway, they are mostly
perplexed and exhausted
by the divisive vitriol. They
are tired of the daily “panic
broadcasts” and the big-
money engines driving an
endless loop of crisis journal-
ism and fear peddling. This
includes the “bigotry is big
business” types who keep
insisting that we are all, ines-
capably, racists and chauvin-
ists and homophobes.
The folks I talk to are per-
plexed because that narrative
— aimed directly at them —
doesn’t square with their own
experiences, or beliefs, and
they are exhausted because
it is a relentless bombard-
ment of media-driven oppro-
brium. Sadly, the average
American gets steamrolled in
the conversation, though it is
the average American — in
the interest of objectivity —
whose voice should probably
get the most airtime.
Sadly, it has taken an Old
Testament-style disaster to
change the focus, however
briefly. The truth is that the
average American is a far
more enlightened, affection-
ate, and responsive neighbor
— even with our differences
— than a total outsider might
be led to believe.
Maybe that’s Pollyanna,
but optimism was long con-
sidered an essential American
trait — before it was replaced
by the dour, infectious, and
ultimately destructive cyni-
cism now so much in vogue.
Instructively, and I think
these things are related,
it would be hard to find a
more cynical bunch than our
PHOTO PROVIDED
Volunteers step up in a crisis to help those in need.
representatives in Congress
— whose approval ratings
have cratered in the 20 per-
cent range — and who seem,
as a body, perfectly incapable
of supplying any leadership at
all that doesn’t line their own
pockets or guarantee their
own health care for life.
Congress, collectively,
has done a sufficient job of
supporting Wendell Berry’s
notion that “The great enemy
of freedom is the alignment of
political power with wealth.”
Back in the inner-city of
Houston, where there is no
wealth or political power,
Scoot and his fellow sailors
in the Cajun Navy drifted up
on a young man, probably 13.
He was pushing his bicycle
through the floodwaters, a
knapsack on the handlebars.
The rain and the wind were
relentless. Scoot asked if he
lived nearby, if he needed
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help.
“No,” the young man
said, “I live two miles from
here. I just told my parents I
wanted to help carry medical
supplies.”
Catastrophe on the scale of
Harvey has a way of cleans-
ing the lens because it strips
life down to its meaningful
essentials — food, water,
shelter — and erases the day-
to-day luxuries of philosophi-
cal waltzing, meme-warfare,
and virtue sniping. The hard-
est part, and there are plenty
of hard parts coming for those
unfortunate people who have
lost everything to this storm,
will be remembering what
it was like when, for a little
while at least, the only thing
that people saw, and what
they acted on in countless
scenes of affection and self-
lessness, was another human
being in need of help.
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