Praising the Cajun mariners

Right now, there are people out on the Gulf of Mexico, the Houma Navigation Canal, the Atchafalya and Bayou Lafourche, to name just a few waterways. In their hands are thick braids of heavy line to be wound around cleats or stanchions. Others guide the vessels they work on with hands at throttle or wheel, and sometimes both.

They are the reason “work” is included in the word work-boat, and the reason why over so many decades south Louisiana stands out as the place where quality mariners are to be found.

Some of them were hard at work last week, when the Carnival Triumph cruise ship was stuck out in the Gulf with no way back. One vessel, the Roland A. Falgout, was the only tried-and-true Cajun towboat to aid in the task. Other boats, including the Resolve Pioneer, ported in Mobile, were key to the task. Two towboats from Mobile helped stabilize the stricken big ship as it was guided there from waters so far away.

In San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, there are tales to tell of the kind of work mariners do. All ports have laudable traditions and tales worth telling.

So the point here is not that tug captains and deckhands in Morgan City or Fourchon are any better than those in other places. Rather, the point to be made is that if we want to look for heroes we don’t have to look in a lot of other places. They are right here among us, even if we don’t recognize it all the time.

The Lafourche Parish portion of the Carnival Triumph rescue is one tiny tile in the mosaic of what occurred on that ship’s voyage, the fire that injured nobody and the unpleasant need to cope with non-functioning toilets and air conditioners after that, as well as dwindling food supplies. The Cajun tugboat is part of all that history now, as is its crew.

And it isn’t the first time a Cajun boat or mariner has played a part in a major human drama, either.

Take for example Edward Bernard, who used to be called Coonie. He was among the mariners from here who commute to work in New York Harbor, using their skills and experience in the ports up there.

He and other mariners loaded up evacuees near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, when madmen struck the towers with planes and thousands were killed. He and others also brought medical supplies back to Ground Zero, the better to aid the wounded.

Bernard, who grew up in Raceland and listed Bayou Blue as his last residence, died at a hospital on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, from an illness he caught while doing his rescue work.

You won’t find his name on a statute. And you won’t find the names of the men from here who labored to bring the Carnival Triumph to port. Willie Preatto and Tim Robling, the co-captains, Mike Medierus, the engineer and Selvin Garcia, the deckhand, all did their part.

Their reward was the paycheck each normally gets as well as the knowledge that wives or friends had seen their vessel on television.

That’s what the mariners who do work here in these parts get for their trouble, for lifetimes spent out on the water, sometimes in difficult conditions. There are no songs that I know of. There are no epic poems. There is not a statue or other permanent reminder of the men who man the machines. And I am certain in some instances the women who do so.

But the tradition they are a part of is certainly worthy of all that. The families whose guts led to the glory of the local boat industry, the pioneers of the Cajun navy, they are worthy of praise too and are the ones who first had their hands on these throttles.

“Those first families are still the ones most reliable, who own the most reliable work boat companies in the world, the most skilled captains who stand ready to do any job, moving an oil rig or a cruise ship, the people who are the best of the best today,” says Woody Falgoust, the Thibodaux lawyer who wrote the book “Rise of the Cajun Mariners,” which if you haven’t read you should.

His work, so far, is the only standing testament to the tradition.

“It’s a way of life that sometimes we don’t appreciate,” Woody said.