Chris urges me to visit with Edison Dardar, another of the holdouts, before I leave Louisiana. Edison’s home is the first on the left along the Island Road in the community of Jean Charles. Across the way is a small, beached orange submarine from the 1950s. In front of it a handmade sign reads, “ISLAND iS NOT FOR SALE. IF YOU Don’t like THE ISLAND STAY OFF. Don’t GiVE uP FigHT For YOUR RighTS. It’s WORTH SaViNG. Edison Jr.”

      Chris tells me that Edison doesn’t like to speak to reporters. Still, I stop by a couple times during my month on the bayou. No one is ever home, or so it seems. One day, I leave a long handwritten note, introducing myself, mentioning Chris’s endorsement, and asking if Edison might allow me to call on him. I hear nothing. On my second-to-last morning on the island, as I am driving back toward Pointe-aux-Chenes and another interview, I decide to pull over, park, and try one last time.

      I consider walking up the stairs to the house, but if my time on Jean Charles has taught me anything it’s this: most people pass the afternoon beneath their homes or along one of the bayous, where the breeze is strong. I walk across the two-by-fours that connect the road to the concrete slab turned toolshed beneath Edison’s moss-green cottage. There are six cast nets hanging from a beam. Five plastic buckets. A washbasin. A scale. Various wrenches and other rusting tools tacked to the stilts that support the house high overhead. Cans of bug spray and Rust-Oleum line the jerry-rigged shelves. There is a laminated poster of Jesus and a pregnant black-and-white cat lounging atop an overturned crate. Miraculously Edison is also there, standing among it all, cradling a single yellow cucumber.

      “What’s that?” I ask by way of greeting, even though I already know.

      Edison looks at me, sighs, and says, “It’s yellow, so at least it’s good for seed. I get one or two a day. But it ain’t nothing like it used to be, with cucumber and green bean vines everywhere and a big garden besides.” His voice is low and slow and full of the local drawl I will miss once I am gone. I extend my hand and introduce myself.

      “I know who you are,” he replies. His blue eyes search mine while the four plastic pinwheels tacked at the front of his workbench whir.

      We walk together through the tall grass that surrounds his home and out to a homemade altar. The altar has four levels; each is wider than the last and is fashioned from found wood. On the platforms are all different kinds of objects—antique soda bottles, oyster shells, fishing buoys, rusting crab cages, and even a couple of strands of faded Mardi Gras beads. Presiding over the pyramid of wonders are two duck-shaped hunting decoys, ceremoniously screwed into place. The whole thing reminds me of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers—those dreamy and reverent cantilevered cones that invest meaning in objects that others normally regard as trash. “I was an oysterman, and we were always pulling up strange things from the bayou. If I saw something nice, I would bring it home and add it here,” Edison says, his gray hair going haywire in the wind. “But that was forty years ago.”

      Back when there were more people on the island, men would gather by the altar, drink a couple of beers, and talk over the daily catch. They might even go down to Antoine Naquin’s Dancehall, which was also the church and the five-and-dime, to listen to the local zydeco band. “I get mad when people leave,” Edison tells me, lifting objects from the altar. Each, I imagine, triggers a memory. “You know, the more people on the island, the bigger the island.”

      I let his words sit in the dense air. I know they seem illogical; people can’t make the island larger, and in fact its diminishing size is what leads most to leave. But there is truth to what Edison says. After a month of listening to the islanders’ stories I have come to think of the community as a kind of organism. The more people there are, the more robustly this organism can organize and reconstitute itself. With more people on the island, post-storm recovery is fast; with more people on the island, gas lines are repaired. With more people on the island, you don’t have to drive so far to get what you need.

      Edison’s father lived all of his ninety-one years on Jean Charles, Edison tells me, and his father’s father spent his whole life here too. “We’ve been down here a long time,” he says. “It used to be that you could catch four hundred pounds of shrimp a night in the little inlet right there. I still bring in enough to eat now, but not much more than that.” Later he will pull a five-gallon bucket out of his refrigerator, with about fifty shrimp squirming in the bottom. Two big whites and the rest brown, probably no more than two pounds total, or one two-hundredth of what he caught in a day when the fishing was good.

      Before we leave the altar he hands me a flare of oyster shells, growing out of and on each other. “When one oyster dies,” Edison says, “the next one builds on his shell, and the next one builds on him. Me? I plan on dying right here, on the island.” I try to hand the shells back but he refuses. “You take that with you,” he says. “A souvenir.”

      I run my thumb along the shiny inside of a shell, where the oyster’s belly once fit snug. It is a gift the land gave to Edison and that today he is determined to pass on.

      Edison is opposed to Albert’s relocation strategy. He fears that if the islanders all agree to leave, the land will be sold off to the highest bidder. This anxiety may seem irrational, but it is, at least partially, informed by half a millennium of Western wrongdoing to Native communities all over the Americas. It is also a sentiment that I will encounter regularly in vulnerable coastal communities throughout the United States. Those who have the least are often the most reluctant to give up their small share, especially if others will turn a profit from their sacrifice.

      Together we work our way through the roseau cane back toward the house, stopping at what remains of Edison’s garden. Instead of planting directly in the ground, he uses a couple of bathtubs that he salvaged from homes abandoned nearby. The plastic barrier keeps salt water out of the roots. There are three cantaloupes and five yellow cucumbers. Out front two persimmon trees Edison planted to replace those lost during Hurricane Andrew swim in the wind.

      The long arms of the trees are laden with round fruit ready to fall. The air is heavy with the smell of vegetal ripeness and coming rain. “Each tree you have is good protection during a storm, plus the fruit is pretty tasty too,” he says, plucking one from the branch and handing it to me. I think of Li-Young Lee’s poem “Persimmons,” and recite the first few lines aloud. Edison chuckles.

      How to eat:

      put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

      Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

      We walk together back to his workbench, and I cup the persimmon in my palms. Lift it up and down to better sense its density. The shiny globe is full of sun and the little freshwater that still snakes its way along the island’s stubborn spine. I lift it to my face, breathe in deeply, and smell the land giving of itself to make a musky sweetness. Before digging my nails into the skin I pause, wondering if I shouldn’t eat it—there are so few, and the one that I hold in my hands plays no small part in Edison’s ability to stay. But not eating it would be rude. So I take a bite, and the fruit’s thick pulp runs down my chin, luxurious and strange. It is a taste I have never encountered before. And in that moment I think I know why he and the others do not leave.