Anderson launched his last voyage to Horn Island on September 1, 1965. His grown daughter was visiting, two months pregnant. But he must have felt that burning.

Nine days into his stay, Anderson woke to fierce winds. There was no rain, but the tide was rising — fast. He rushed to disassemble camp, then waded through chest-deep water that was rising into the island’s woods, dragging behind him his ten-foot boat, which he had tied to his waist. He eventually settled himself into the dunes facing the open Gulf. In his logbook from that voyage, he wrote that he slept well, sheltered by his overturned boat from the rains that soon raged.

That wind and rain was given a name: Betsy, the first hurricane in U.S. history to wreak a billion dollars in damage. The storm had “dignity,” Anderson wrote in his log. The next morning, he watched the tide wash over the ravaged beach.

“Never have I seen more ravishing jewelry than shone in the foam,” he wrote, describing the “thin broken pieces quivering with the slightest breath of air so that all the colors scintillated with the movement.”

But there was also what looked like “the remains of an all-night debauch”: trash and driftwood that had been carried from Louisiana; pine trees browned by the ocean’s salt. The spot where Anderson had made camp for decades was gone — washed away, he wrote. An old cow had lived on the island, the last remnant of its former use as a cattle farm, and she had been killed. When Anderson notes this fact in his logs, his heartbreak is evident.

In his notes about the storm, Anderson never mentions his family. Not his wife, who would often wake in the night, fearing her husband might have died. Not his visiting daughter, nor the granddaughter she carried in her womb, nor his other three children. They had called the Coast Guard, and Anderson had seen the cutter that was sent to rescue him, but he refused to reveal himself. The boat eventually left.

Anderson did not rush home. He stayed on the island for three more days after the storm had passed. When he finally returned, he had just a few words for his wife before he retired to his private cottage. By the next morning, he was gone again — wobbling on his bicycle the hundred miles towards New Orleans, adventuring again.