New Orleans: After The Storm (cont.)

New Orleans is womb-like, the social scene so small it borders on incestuous, yet it is still the big city. It is one hundred eighty degrees from the cultural void that is fast swallowing great tracts of America, and we would like it to stay that way. Perhaps you understand why so many couldn’t leave the Deep South–even with 150 mile an hour winds screaming in from the Gulf. It’s the same reason why we’re coming back. Truth be told, we just don’t know how to operate anywhere else.

We will not abandon our city. We will take hammers and saws; we will rebuild; and then we will make sure this never happens again. It will mean giving up our general complacency, rebuilding the levees properly, restoring the wetlands. We are proud, but we might not be able to do all of this ourselves. It might mean asking for your help. We hope you understand.

One other couple has moved back to the block, bringing the total now to four people. We joke, comparing ourselves to pioneers whose manifest destiny extends more south than west. Over warm, heavenly sweet beignets, we swap notes on life during the evacuation. Our accounts range from unprecedented kindness at the hands of both family and strangers to complete rudeness from the uninformed.

“I went to New Orleans once for Mardi Gras. But I’ll be damned if my tax dollars are going to rebuild a city that’s sinking.”

I understand why people think this way. Like a dirty family secret, the full truth is kept out of most media broadcasts. Yes, “Mardi Gras” man was right. The city is sinking. What most don’t know is that the effect is both unnecessary and reversible. Let’s put it this way: imagine clamping your aorta, then ripping it from your heart and redirecting it to your foot. That’s the fate of the Mississippi, and it’s no surprise that parts of the city are now black with necrosis. The great river is naturally intended to jump course every few hundred years, depositing its fertile soil throughout the Gulf Coast region; but humankind has corseted her with miles of retaining walls, forcing her flow into a rigid and predictable path. The result: not only is the city sinking, but the coast is eroding and our country is losing a valuable buffer against storms. If the winds had come howling 50 years ago, there’s a chance that places like the Lower Ninth Ward would still be there. In his haunting and graceful work, Bayou Farewell, travel writer Mike Tidwell presents several modern-day solutions, and with hope, we will see them actualized in our lifetimes.

I’ve learned all this since my first visit here, less than four years ago. Still, so much remains foreign to me. New Orleans is an enigma with as many personalities as she has citizens. She is the sound of zydeco from the lush, heady swamps on the outskirts. She is the smooth skin of a Creole beauty, the ripe, earthy smell of fresh brewed Irish stout, the taste of the Asian-style po-boys made by the Vietnamese of Mid City. She is the beat of African drums, the possessed wail of a Haitian voodoo priestess. She is the grace of Spanish architecture, a mother calling her child in French, "viens manger, j’ai preparé ton plat préféré, du jambalaya..." She and her coast are seafood and oil and history. She is more than I will ever know in one lifetime.

She is one of the last bastions of architectural antiquity in a nation with a love affair for the new; and if she dies, so does one of the nation’s soul centers.

“Na na na boo-boo, you smell like chee-eese.”

“Shut up! You smell like the refrigerator did when we came back from the ‘vacuation.”

“Oh yeah? You know what you smell like? You smell like…”

The window is open, and the children’s voices carry clear to my second-floor office. I step out onto the porch, and the boy freezes in mid-taunt. A girl who can only be his sister stares up at me, the adult interloper.

“Sorry! We don’t mean it or nothin’.” The little boy glances at his sister who nods, chomping vigorously on an oversized wad of pink bubblegum.

“Yeah, we was just foolin’.”

“It’s ok. Welcome back y’all.” I smile and leave the window open.

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