O'Neil Couvillion

​

​

A list of the lost possessions of Mr. O'Neil Couvillion is written on the bow and stern of the final layer of the paper boat. 

In August of 2016, a powerful storm stalled over the Baton Rouge metro area and dumped more than two feet of rain in a matter of two days - three times as much rainfall as Katrina dropped on Louisiana a decade before. As rivers rose and overflowed into streets and then homes, boats transformed from pleasure crafts to lifelines, as neighbors sped through streets rescuing neighbors stranded in their homes.

O'Neil and his wife Cynthia found themselves in one of those boats leaving their flooding home in the Livingston Parish town of Walker. "We had a boat. It was rushing in so fast, we parked it right over here on that ramp, got our to go bags together. Opened the door and my neighbor’s son was over there and he helped us." They left their wet cat, which had taken off for the top of a storage trailer, and a lifetime's worth of posessions.

A few weeks later, O'Neil showed me around the soggy mess that the flood left of his home and his garden. Wet family photos, dead plants, soggy furniture, and crud-marked waterlines, the remnants of his old hovercraft. It was a small but heartbreaking window into the suffering that was being felt by the 55,000 families whose homes flooded during the storm, several of which are wrapped in the layers of this boat. "Everybody is suffering, I’m telling you," he said, and pointed down the road, which had turned into a canyon surrounded by mountains of debris from gutted homes. "Each one of these people could have a story just as good as mine. Some of them more. I’m just telling you, I’m one person in many."

Mr. Couvillion was one of many, but his story is unique. He is a collector. Over his lifetime, and over the 44 years he'd lived in Livingston Parish, he had amassed a trove of art and curios and family keepsakes and generations of plants, trees, and vegetables. Hovercraft: "We used to have gravel road and we used to have gravel in the front and open front porch, and there wasn’t a lick of gravel left when it was through when it would fly by. You used to have to wear earplugs. Earmuffs to fly it. And my son was little at the time and when he was flying on it you could barely see his head. And to make it sharp, you’d lean in it to sharp, and you’d make a sharp turn. We’d fly it around out front and we had a little fence out there and we’d try to get it as close to the fence as possible. And we looked up to the road and it was lined up with cars, they had a schoolbus, everybody was trying to see what the heck was going on, what that damned thing was. It would make so much noise you could hear it up the road. No muffler at all. That thing was bad. But unfortunately my neighbor across the street at the time, he called a fuss. They came over here and was gonna give me a ticket and the old man said, “I’m not gonna do that.” Put it up and don’t worry about it. So I did. I was gonna try and rebuild the dang thing but my wife and my daughter tied a horse, she had a horse, and she tied it to the back, and you see these things? The horse ripped it off, everything of it, it just ripped off.". "And I like it here. I don’t give a damn what they say about it. I’m comfortable here." house on three acres of land tucked in on a quiet road bordering the woods in Livingston Parish. As he showed me around, the sheer weight of the loss of these possessions had yet to be processed. "You never realize, these people that are on cable TV, they don’t ask the questions, like, what’s it like, what’s it like to lose everything. What’s it like to throw your memories in the garbage? They care more about the Olympics scandal than they did the flood. It’s heart-wrenching, to say the least, because when you have to pick up a cherished memory, something that your mother had or something like that, and you have to physically pick that up and throw it into the garbage, that’s heartbreaking." 

I didn't know what to do to help Mr. O'Neil, how to process the loss (his loss among 55,000), or how to answer when he asked "How do you replace thirty or forty years of history?" 

​A fire would’ve been a hell of a lot more better for us than a flood, because a fire you don’t have to pick up your memories and chunk and dunk em.

It is too much. 

In times like those, writing becomes my default method of dealing. So I did my best to make note of every material possession O'Neil showed me on that tour, because once things are thrown out, they're gone. Once they're gone they're gone. The list tells an important story in itself.