A Jeff for All Seasons

In 1983, the last time when the words “great” and “flood” were appearing together in sentences in Baton Rouge, I was thirteen and growing up in Victoria, Australia. We didn’t have many floods there; with the region’s bone-dry summers and weeks-long heat waves that arrived on hot northerlies that howled out of the northwestern part of the state to blanket Melbourne with Mallee topsoil, the thing Victorians feared was fire. On February 16, 1983, years of severe drought brought the inevitable conclusion when 110-degree temperatures and sixty-mile-per-hour winds drove a hellstorm of bushfires through the eucalyptus-canopied outer suburbs and country towns around Melbourne. A million acres burned, seventy-five died, and thousands were left homeless. That day, with the disaster still to unfold, I forewent the usual overcrowded school bus ride in favor of a perch in the backseat of an air-conditioned Holden driven by my friend Craig Wilson’s mom, who had come to pick him up.

During the ride home we could see plumes of smoke rising from points in the hills that encircle Melbourne to the east; and as we neared Craig’s neighborhood, they began to close over the sky. His house stood at the base of a valley, in the shadow of a long ridge of hills. As his mother turned into their driveway, several miles of that ridge seemed to explode when the fire, burning from east to west, crested the hills and began funneling down the valley, moving upwards of forty miles per hour as tinder-dry eucalyptus erupted into flames ahead of the main fire line. Disoriented and terrified, we had no idea what to do or where to go; and had it not been for the total stranger who swung his truck into the driveway, spurred Craig’s panicking mom into snatching up some necessities, then led us out of harm’s way, I’m honestly not sure how things would have turned out. 

All I remember about this man was that his name was Jeff. The fires had cut all the routes back to his home, and unable to reach his own family, Jeff chose to help someone else’s. With his truck piled with the Wilsons’ belongings, he led us away to the local dump—the only place without trees, where we and several other families huddled all night while the fires reduced the surrounding area to a moonscape. By morning, my friend Craig’s house and many others in the neighborhood were rubble—including, we later learned, the home of our savior, Jeff. His family evacuated, though, and made it away safely. 

Since being on the receiving end of this monumental act of selflessness, I’ve had the good fortune never to be on the wrong side of a natural disaster again. Two weeks ago our family was so lucky. Our house didn’t flood; neither did our business. We have a roof over our heads and the kids have a school to go to. What’s more, we live in a part of the world that, for all of its warts, just proved itself to have a higher concentration of Jeffs per capita than anyone ever imagined. In the days since August 12, there have been so many Jeffs in Baton Rouge and across South Louisiana—driving boats, cooking jambalaya, manning shelters, showing up with crowbars and Skil saws—even the national media took a brief break from delivering its daily buffet of scandal and brutality to notice. Amid the mud and loss and desperation brought by the Great Flood of 2016, the best and most honest story that has emerged is that of the bottomless generosity, self sacrifice, and pragmatism that bind South Louisianans to one another. We reach out to friends, neighbors, and, particularly, to total strangers who have lost so much with no motive beyond the desire to help others get back on their feet. Yes, the media were slow to report the magnitude of this catastrophe; but if the story that they carry to the world is that of Baton Rougeans’ boundless desire to help one another, perhaps they’re closer than usual to depicting us as we really are. 

Thirty-three years ago, my fortuitous encounter with the original Jeff suggests to me that, wherever you find yourself, selflessness and altruism are the rule, not the exception. In times of great suffering, goodness is just easier to perceive. Disasters will happen; floods and fires will come and go; the world will change beneath our feet. But so long as we keep sight of the Jeff in all of ourselves, I’d like to think we’ll be all right in the end.