Eight miles long, one mile wide, and sinking. Grand Isle is the only inhabited barrier island on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, and every generation since the 1780s has had to decide whether to stay. The worst decision point came on October 1, 1893, when a hurricane pushed a sixteen-foot storm surge across the neighboring community of Chenière Caminada and killed more than 1,500 people in a single night — still one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Grand Isle's cemetery holds rows of graves from that storm. The island rebuilt as a summer resort, then as a fishing and oil town. Betsy hit in 1965. Katrina in 2005. Ida made landfall in 2021 with 150-mph winds and put ten feet of water through the southern end of the parish. The year-round population has dropped to roughly 600 people. But every summer the island swells to 20,000 — camp owners, charter fishermen, families who've been coming for generations. The live oak chenier forest at the island's center, the last of its kind on the Gulf Coast, is still standing. So is Grand Isle.