“For united we stand…”
Dateline: From the yacht, La Crosse, Wis.
“No man is an island…”
John Donne**
1624
“There is no greater feeling then helping your neighbor.”
Dennis Tieje
Elite angler/Roanoke, La.
I have seen the soul of mankind, and it is simple and it is recognized around this planet regardless of language, politics or beliefs.
The soul of mankind is found in the outstretched hand that offers to help.
In times of need you will help me, in times of need I will help you.
That my friends, is our soul.
Clean, simple, universal, we were born with magic inside, we don’t need to care about each other but we have the ability to do so, the God given ability to do so, so important is caring that Thou Shalt Help Each Other was chiseled not in stone but within all of us.
It is the Given of being Human.
Be it future generations, be it the man above, judgment will be based on what we gave, not what we took.
And in America there stands many monuments to the helping soul of that kind in man, but few stand as tall as a simple…
…4 foot plywood wall.
Lake Arthur’s Wall.
“db, the town, the town of Lake Arthur was determined to win, determined to hold that water back from destroying the whole town. It wasn’t just one person it was the whole community, and you know what, they won.” – Dennis Tietje
Know this, Lake Arthur’s win, was a win for us all.
Proof of the soul.
“…divided we fall…”
It is Louisiana, it is raining and the water is coming for you.
The town of Lake Arthur sits 7 feet above sea level, just 15 miles away Elite angler Dennis Tietje is watching the news about all the flooding around him, he sits 26 feet above the sea.
“We were fine here in Roanoke, we had some flooding in the drainage ditches on either side of the road, but we were fine.”
Dennis is sitting across from me at a family restaurant in La Crosse, Wis., where you can get a complete fried chicken dinner, chicken, veggies, soup or salad, and a drink for $9.54.
A per diem goldmine.
Dennis is picking at his smothered chicken plate, his wife Trudy, sitting next to him in the booth, is picking at her Monte Cristo sandwich. I’m trying to eat the classic triple decker club and take notes, notes trump food.
Full disclosure: I have known the Tietje’s since they began this Elite gig years ago, I consider both friends even though sometimes I make them crazy. Dennis has all the grace and respect that I’ve come to know as the sweet spot of the South. He has never once called me a “Yankee,” but did one time call me “Sir.”
That only happened once.
Dennis and Trudy own a Gatti’s Pizza franchise in their hometown, have been married 30 years, have two sons, Donovan, 26, and a teacher, and Logan now 18 who used to come up to my belly but now towers over me, hugs my head when he sees me, is enrolled in junior college.
Before fishing professionally Dennis told me he was “a crawdad farmer,” which I had to Google to see if in fact there was such a thing.
There is.
Sitting high and dry at 26 feet Dennis and Trudy had sent pizzas and quite possibly a few cans of beer to their neighbors in Lake Arthur, but “…as I sat watching the news I knew I had to do more then send food, db. I had to go, I had to go and help out.”
“Why?” I knew the answer, or at least I hoped I did, but I asked anyway.
“When I called a couple of my friends who lived in town there and told them I was going to come and help they said to me, ‘Why, it’s not your town?’ and I told them, I’m a neighbor, I’m a friend, so yeah it’s my town too.”
Chiseled inside, no need for stone tablets.
“…and if our backs…”
“Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.”
~ Anthony J. D’Angelo
When Dennis arrived in Lake Arthur, this is what he saw:
“The water was coming, db, the water was coming.”
But so was the town. “The town sits in a bowl, it’s a pumping out town, big pumps pump out flood water but the rain came so hard and for so long that the pumps couldn’t keep up, it overwhelmed the pumps and they failed.”
So Dennis and many of his friends and townsfolk jumped in and started to fix the pumps but “the water, the water just kept coming.”
To save the town 15,000 sandbags were placed to stop the water. “Everybody jumped in to help, it was amazing to see, blue collar folks, professionals, fathers, mothers, their kids…the National Guard on one side of town would fill the bags with sand and drive them over, unload and go back and do it all over again.”
To save a town, you need a town wide effort.
But, “but db there was a weak spot, the sand bags weren’t going to hold, and if the water broke through it would flood the town, the town would be lost.”
And so then came, Lake Arthur’s Wall.
“…should ever be against the wall…”
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other.”
– George Eliot
It will not be known as Dennis Tietje’s wall.
It will not be known as the National Guard’s wall.
It will not, nor should it, carry the name of just one person, for it can only be honestly, honestly called: Lake Arthur’s Wall.
It took a town to save a town and when everything dries out it should stand long and it should stand proud for all towns to see…see the “unity” that makes “community.”
“That wall, that wall 200 feet long 4 feet tall was built from scratch in 40 minutes.”
The water kept coming, kept getting higher and higher. “We all were watching, would it hold, it had to hold, just had to.”
And then, just as the water was inching to the top of the wall, it stopped.
“It held db, the wall held,” and across from me in a family restaurant a guy who didn’t even live in the town that got saved put down his fork and wiped a tear from his eye.
“Everyone rejoiced but it was hard to rejoice when on just the other side of the wall, those people were feeling destruction, but the town, the town was saved.”
“…we’ll be together…”
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” ~Herman Melville
I hope to one day lay my hand on Lake Arthur’s Wall.
I hope to one day shake as many of those hands who built that wall as possible.
To think of it as just plywood is to miss the point.
It is a wall built of hope, built of love, built of unity.
Let me ask you this, just one thing.
Think about it for a second before you x-out this page.
What really stopped the rain?
What really held the water back?
Deep within, I think I know.
The hand that created all this.
The hand that reaches out to save us all.
That hand wanted to see if we would reach back.
To one another.
When we did, the rain stopped.
And Lake Arthur’s Wall…held.
It held.
“…together, you and I.”
United We Stand
Brotherhood of Man
db
“We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.”
– Cicero
**“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
JOHN DONNE 1624