[StBernard] StoryCorps New Orleans: Junior Rodriguez mourns loss of his boyhood wilderness

[Westley Annis]

StoryCorps New Orleans: Junior Rodriguez mourns loss of his boyhood
wilderness
By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune 
June 03, 2010, 6:00AM

Junior Rodriguez remembers when his boyhood home in Verret bordered a swamp
as dense and rich in wildlife, he believes, as Georgia’s great Okefenokee.
In those days, he tells young Jared Serigné in a recent StoryCorps oral
history session, he would put a pirogue in at Verret at dawn, emerge at
Paris Road at dusk, then shine deer at night. 

And ducks?

“There was a time if I didn’t think I could kill 30 ducks I wouldn’t even
get up that morning,” he said.

True enough, that was illegal, Rodriguez cautioned. And for the record, not
to be condoned.

But that was more than 50 years ago. He was young, and St. Bernard Parish
seemed an inexhaustible paradise of seafood, wildfowl and muskrat, as it had
been to generations before him.

Not like now, after vastly more potent assaults than his have left the
natural landscape of St. Bernard on the verge of ruin, the clock down to its
last tick before the great complex of woods and marsh once teeming with life
finishes dissolving to open water, within his own lifetime.

Anyone born after the 1960s has no idea, he told Serigné.

“These people don’t know what they had,” he said.

A very familiar figure

At 74, Henry J. Rodriguez Jr. — “Junior” to everyone — remains one of the
most familiar figures in St. Bernard Parish. In his time he owned a bar, ran
a seafood business, trawled for shrimp and ran heavy equipment. He also
spent 33 years in local politics, retiring two years ago after being
defeated for a second term as parish president.

For years Rodriguez was catnip to national reporters who came to St. Bernard
to report on coastal issues — they, standing on a levee somewhere with their
microphones and safari vests, and massive Junior, thick-necked, hawk-nosed,
in white boots with a tuft of gray chest hair boiling out of the top of his
shirt. He would describe the accelerating death of his beloved wetlands and
bluntly lay it at the feet of over-educated, turf-conscious bureaucrats who
would overanalyze a coffee spill.

Reaching out to Islenos

When StoryCorps came to New Orleans last spring, organizers consciously
reached out to small communities whose voices might be overlooked. That
meant St. Bernard’s Islenos.

And in short order, an invitation reached Serigné, 26, a filmmaker and web
designer with a growing passion for protecting what’s left of the coastal
wetlands around St. Bernard. Serigné turned to Rodriguez, a mentor of sorts,
and asked him to ruminate for posterity on St. Bernard — past and present.

And so he did.

Now, what exactly is this “Mister Go?” a quizzical, out-of-town StoryCorps
staffer asked Rodriguez. It’s only two minutes, 57 seconds into the session.

“The biggest boondoggle you ever saw,” Rodriguez said, warming to the work.

St. Bernard was an extraordinary landscape anyway, he explained. Ninety-five
percent water (actually 76 percent). Home in 2005 to nearly 70,000 people
living on about 26 square miles of land, just a few feet above sea level.

But beyond that high ground once lay miles and miles of substantial marsh,
almost all of it now fire-hosed away by deadly saltwater sluicing up and
down the broad MRGO shipping channel, day after day, year after year.

Storm buffer laid low

Now the buffer that the marsh once offered to storms is all but gone. By
August 2005, the neat subdivisions of St. Bernard lay naked and exposed,
even to a near-miss like Hurricane Katrina.

“St. Bernard was entirely, 99.9 percent devastated,” said Rodriguez, who was
parish president at the time. “We thought it’d take us five years, and we’d
be back.

“Well, we’re a little (under) five now, and I think it’ll probably be 10
years before St. Bernard will get back to any sense of what it was. And
it’ll never be what it was before.”

This worries Serigné, who said he feels an undercurrent in public debate in
St. Bernard. He believes some decisions are colored by a sense, unexpressed
but visible just below the surface, that St. Bernard won’t be around much
longer — as a major community anyway.

Too valuable to lose

Rodriguez comforted his protege by telling him that the parish’s energy and
seafood contributions to the rest of the country are too valuable to write
off.

But there’s no salvation without a rescue of the wetlands, and it’s almost
too late to envision that, Rodriguez said. Even when you get some money for
a project, it has to run such a gauntlet of competing state and federal
agencies fiercely pursuing their particular missions that what emerges is
late and rarely effective.

If they start today, “it would be 20 years before they accomplish anything.
Anything,” Rodriguez said. “At some point in time you got to take a stand.
You have to save what you have, first, and stop that from deteriorating —
and build up from there. I don’t know, I’m 74 years old. I’ll be totally
honest with you, I don’t know if I’m going to see anything happen in my
time.

“And it’s a shame, because we are too far behind now. I always tell
everybody, you don’t know what you lost unless you know what you had." 


When Serigné asked whether a young person can make a difference, Rodriguez
urged him into the fight. Make your voice heard, he said.
“You got to pick up the slack,” Rodriguez said. “I can’t make the meetings
like I used to. You can learn something every day. But you can’t hear with
your mouth open, and that’s what’s wrong with a lot of people.


“So I’d best shut mine up.”
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