What I’ve Got Isn’t Enough

My heart was in my throat a few weeks ago as I watched Katrina churn inexorably towards New Orleans and Mississippi, and tonight I’m holding my breath again as Rita is causing the water to rise once again, and threaten still more places beloved by many. I’ve never been to most of these places, so the only vision I have of them is what is shown to me through the miracles of modern technology. It’s not enough, of course – there’s not enough technology to save the cities and towns and houses and trees, and maybe even the people, and my memory isn’t enough, because it doesn’t exist. Jim and I went to New Orleans for New Year’s 2003/2004 and we fell in love with it. New Orleans spoke to my heart; I hope it will live to speak to me again. I hope all the places loved and being lost tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the next will speak again to those who will strain to hear.

I wrote the following shortly after returning from New Orleans.

A short break from weather. work. wistfulness. streaming unconsciousness that is dreaming.

Walking these streets in the madhouse, to paraphrase Natalie Merchant, is an apt description of Bourbon Street just after the New Year’s ball has dropped in Jackson Square. Our bicycle and kayak guide, Veda, told us that some people tell her that they find New Orleans has a distinctive smell, and it makes them uncomfortable. They don’t like it; to them, things smell ever so slightly rotten – a miasma, perhaps, reaching over several centuries of tropical vegetation, disease, and death.

To me, the smell of New Orleans was instantly familiar and comforting. I grew up spending part of every February on St. John, USVI. Some of my first, and best, memories are from that small, beautiful island. Away from Bourbon St., New Orleans smells like St. John, smells like the Caribbean, like the tropics.

Bourbon Street is its own world of dizzying sights, sounds, feelings, smells. The sights of bright lights, waved 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 signs, this bar, that bar, the other bar, the topless bar, the topless-bottomless bar, the backs of bands playing to their audiences within. The sounds of bar barkers, live music from every other bar spilling out onto the street, the Rolling Stones mingling with Jimmy Buffett with blues jazz karaoke George Thorogood U2 songs you haven’t heard since college and don’t need to hear again. The feel of college kids bumping against you barely missing the slosh of beer from their cups, wending your way through the crowd the feel of slippery unknown beneath your feet hoping you don’t skid, the feel of music entering your bones, the feel of beads hitting your head from a balcony above the feel of too much drunkenness. The smell of beer, vomit, stale air wafting from bars that seldom see the light of day. Now that’s a miasma.

Less than half a block from Bourbon Street, though, and all of the above begins to fade into the ether. Languid tranquility returns, and the buildings and balconies, with lush overhanging plants, take on an otherworldly essence, glowing in the late afternoon sun or fading with the light. Slightly crumbling, subsiding, leaning, buildings, luxuriant ferns overhanging intricate delicate wrought iron balconies. A beautiful tropical urban decay. Walking quietly down streets as clop clop of horse and carriage goes by a shutter opens and a man sits on his stoop and begins to play the guitar laughter spills from the restaurant two doors down as people live and laugh and eat and love.