Living on the coast all of my life, I had lived through many hurricanes, but none the likes of Andrew. We took a direct hit that caused damage from every direction. The eye of the storm moved directly over the entire St. Mary and Iberia Parish area. A small tornado obviously made its way directly across our front yard.
I had purchased the property from Mr. Murphy Foster in 1973. I just happened to be the right guy to approach him at the right time. He did not need the place, but he had played around with it for some years just because he appreciated its innate beauty. It amuses me now to think back to the day when we made the transaction. I was to meet with him at 11:00 A.M. at his attorney's office with a check for the land. I made sure that I did not keep him waiting, and I think I was about 30 minutes early for the appointment. I was so excited on my way back to Centerville that I almost wet my pants! When I arrived back at my store, I was met with the message that Mr. Murphy was still at the lawyer's office waiting for me. In all the excitement, I had forgotten to give him the check! Embarrassed as I was, I high tailed it back up there and sheepishly forked over the cash! He was a real gentleman, and I think he got a kick out of my genuine youthful excitement!
The Foster family relationship went back as far as I could remember, and even farther than that. Both families attended the Episcopal Church in Franklin, and Mike and Pres were friends of my siblings and myself. Mike serves as Governor of Louisiana as I write, and Pres drank himself into the grave several years ago. Pres had been a very good customer of mine during the entire time that I owned the pharmacy in Centerville. I came close to leasing a great location for an alligator farm from Mike, but in the end I was afraid that the market for farm-raised gators was just too unpredictable.
When I purchased the land from Mr. Murphy in 1973 it needed a great deal of work before I could build a house there. I remember telling people that I had purchased a place to build a lot. The land was 275 feet wide by about 500 feet deep. It was not quite a perfect rectangle because the bayou bank was not parallel to the front line at the highway. There was an old slew that wound its way from Six Mile Lake down to Bayou Teche that crossed the property right about the spot where I intended to build. The Oaks surrounded this slew on ridges. It was a perfect setting for Live Oaks to grow, but one hell of a place to build a house! I very carefully, over a two year period, had thousands of yards of soil trucked into this area. I took great care in doing this so as not to kill any of the trees. The Live Oak does not have a taproot, and it sends out thousands of feeder roots not far under the surface of the ground to take in nutrients. If one carelessly covers these roots with a foot or so of soil, then in a year or two the trees will begin to die. So I had soil trucked in, spread it with a bulldozer, fertilized the trees, and repeated the process three times until I had built the area up sufficiently to support a house and not get flooded out.
The bayou front was another tremendous challenge. When I was a kid about 10 years old, a suction dredge came down the bayou and removed the silt. At that time there were houses only on the opposite side of the bayou and anyone living there could have the dredge pump as much of the silt onto their property as they wished. However, most people did not need the spoil so it just got piled up on the opposite bank. When I purchased the land about 100 feet from the bank inward had been buried in silt, and Willow trees were growing so densely that you could not even see daylight through them. I devoted every spare moment to clearing that patch of bayou front for the next year. The trees were so large in diameter; I had to cut them up in short pieces, because at high tide, I was working in water up to my ankles. I then had to load each log onto my truck and haul it up front on a hill so that I could later burn the whole thing.
I broke a bone in one wrist, and ruined the other one with the chain saw during this process. My back was not at all helped by manually moving tons and tons of wood out of this swamp. When every thing was finally cleared, I hired a "Marsh-Crane" to straddle the bank and pile up as much silt as was within its reach. I let this settle for a couple of months, and then I hired Mike Foster, who had started Bayou Sale Contractors by then, to move a large crane in and dredge as much as that larger machine could manage to reach. Mr. Israel Marceaux did the work this time, and he was as deaf as a post and could not speak a word of English. He and I communicated through gestures and broken English, but he did a wonderful job! What a nice old gentlemen he was, and I saw him now and then after the job was done. About six months later, I hired Mr. Nesome to spread the spoil. He did so with a John Deere Tractor with a rear mounted blade. He was too nice to be true, his rates were very reasonable, and he did the job better than anyone could ever imagine!
By this time, my customers were beginning to notice that I was spending a small fortune on this property. Naturally, some quit me as they could not stand the fact that I was doing fairly well financially, however most of them stayed with me, and one day (I don't remember when), I had built a place to build a house! I then needed to plant some good grass. I had my friend, Captain Smith, cut small sprigs of St. Augustine Grass for me in his spare time. I then took the sprigs and filled buckets with them. The next phase was carried out with a pointed stick with which I would pierce the ground, fill the hole with a sprig, then step on it to complete the planting process. I planted a sprig about every three feet, then watered it, and repeated the process until I felt as though I knew how God must have felt after planting the earth!
I have no idea how much money I spent preparing that property, but I am reasonably sure that I did not receive as much for the house and the land when I sold it after the storm! So I hope you can appreciate just how much the storm affected me personally! I had put as much of myself into that property as one human being could have possibly put! It was truly a labor of love, and after the storm, I had to put it back together just one more time! I had the pleasure of caring for the land for almost exactly nineteen years, but after that it would be some one else's turn! I remember one afternoon while planting grass, my soon to be, next-door neighbor walked over to talk with me. He looked at the place in amazement and said out loud, "who in the world would have ever thought that one man could have done all of this?" I remember telling him, "You obviously don't know me very well!" That was in the seventies, the hurricane was in 1992, and I did not have much left in me to give when the cleanup was complete! I'm just glad he did not walk over again; I don't think I could have given him the same answer, and that would have been a real pity!
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