(From the Register-Pajaronian)NEW ORLEANS — The thick glass doors slid shut behind us with a soft hiss, sealing us into a space about 15 feet square with an identical portal directly ahead. Outside, the city steamed under a low ceiling of gray clouds, leaving the few locals shambling along Carondelet Street soaked in sweat and glaring half-heartedly at each other. The piles of white trash bags that sat on almost every street corner had begun to sweat and tear, spilling chicken bones and beer cans onto the sidewalk. The smell, and I say this as a guy who lived in college dorms for three years without once picking up a toilet brush, was enough to make my gorge rise. Trash service, it seemed, had been sporadic at best since hurricane season.
After a dramatic pause, the second set of doors parted and a gust of air conditioning washed over us as we stepped into the hotel. The doors clicked immediately closed, keen not to waste one frosty breath on the wretches outside. A large marble lobby, several restaurants and clothing and souvenir shops occupied the first floor, and there was a lounge, a coffee bar and a gym upstairs. You could spend months here without ever having to face the city. Maybe that was the idea. There was even a FedEx store, for an occasional missive to those beyond the citadel walls. The brunette behind the front desk was the first white person I’d seen all day aside from my dad and the barista at a coffeehouse outside Baton Rouge.
After we got oriented, we set out for the French Quarter. Carondelet turns into Bourbon Street after it crosses Canal, so we were only a few blocks away. As we left, a valet warned us to keep our security cards with us at all times, because no one was being allowed inside without one after 10 p.m. There was another hotel across the street from ours, and the space between them was bustling with tourists and hotel workers, but after 100 feet we didn’t see anyone. Both sides of Carondelet were lined with huge old buildings, some with elaborate stonework or wrought iron fences, but they all seemed empty and quiet. One building with the word “SECURITY” chiseled into its high white face sported heavy new doors and perfect windows that mirrored the flat sky like the surface of a pond. Whatever they did there, they seemed to believe in truth in advertising. Other storefronts held signs for fried chicken and oyster po’ boy sandwiches, or plywood nailed over smashed windows, but they were all closed. It was just as well, because the overpowering low-tide smell rippling from the gutters and frequent dumpsters didn’t really give me a hankering for soul food.
We crossed Canal, a broad street with piles of garbage, pawn shops, liquor stores and T-shirt outlets stretching from the Mississippi River in one direction to some distant, invisible point in the other. Streetcar tracks dominated the center lane and locals walked and rode bikes right down them, seemingly confident that it would be a while before anything came clattering down the line. Here, there were a lot of people just standing around in front of wrecked storefronts. Some were obvious druggies, complete with lank hair, scabby arms and thousand-yard stares. Others were tough guys, glowering at anyone that walked by and swearing loudly, watching tourists carefully for some sign of shock or fear. We gave them none, and they quickly lost interest. Most of the people on Canal, though, were just normal folks whose livelihoods had washed away, and they had nothing left to do but stand around and sweat, waiting for help that increasingly seemed like it wasn’t coming.
A young black kid walked out of a corner market carrying a copy of Dante’s “Inferno” and I shivered in the heat.
•••
Displacement
The shopping mall was a few miles north of New Orleans on Interstate 10. It was a big place with several department stores and a food court and it was completely abandoned. The parking lot was blocked off and all the windows and doors were boarded up, but it looked as though looters had gotten to it nonetheless.
We got off the freeway at the next exit and discovered that the traffic signals were broken, which was OK because our rental was the only running vehicle around. Businesses with dirty brown waterlines stained 6 feet high on the walls stood open and dark, ransacked either by thieves or owners trying to salvage anything they could before walking away forever. One gas station had a sheetrock sign near the pumps proclaiming “We have gas!” in tall red letters. The prices still seemed fair, perhaps because anyone whose car survived Katrina had left a long time ago. Earlier, we’d seen thousands of waterlogged cars piled like cordwood near the Superdome, whose roof still gaped raggedly like a corpse’s mouth.
We drove through the neighborhood for 20 minutes and didn’t see a single occupied house. At a few, workers were stripping out insulation and tossing it into the street. At one neat white home, a man stood on his porch just staring at the watermark etched into his front door. A blaze of spraypaint seemed to indicate that no one had died in the home, so I guessed that was something. Other houses had different marks on them, and I hoped I was misreading them.
Ten miles further north, we started seeing boats scattered alongside the highway. They weren’t little fishing vessels, either. Most were in the neighborhood of 30 feet long, and one metal monster must have been nearly 200. Their presence was made more unsettling by the fact that we were almost a mile from the Mississippi. I didn’t like the idea of something that weighed 100 tons getting tossed around like a toy and then casually pitched into the bushes when God decided to let the water out of the bathtub. It made me a little nervous.
•••
Semester abroad
Tulane University had reopened a few weeks before we arrived in Louisiana, and, driving through campus, it seemed like any other school. As we sat in a coffee shop eating jambalaya, it was hard to believe that the campus had been flooded so badly that thousands of student records vanished and one of the best music archives in the country ceased to be. Not to mention, you know, the abject anarchy in the streets. Now, kids studied at poorly lit corner tables and fired off flirty MySpace messages via wireless connections and ordered jalapeño cheddar bagels lightly toasted. Better to be in here than out there, I thought. For once, it must’ve been nice to get back to school.
Later, we walked past Jackson Square in the Quarter. St. Louis Cathedral was open, but the square was chained shut. Even so, the breeze off the Mississippi cut the smell and heat here and the architecture was impressive in spite of the trash festooning the sidewalk and benches. Across Decatur Street, we bought cafe au lait and beignets under the green canopy at Cafe du Monde, an open-air eatery that was every bit as good as I’d heard it was. It was a few yards to the top of a rise overlooking the river, and we climbed the stairs. As I mounted the ridge, the wind swirled the powdered sugar from my snack and I held it away from my black shirt and looked up and suddenly there was the Greater New Orleans Bridge spanning the river.
The sky had cleared considerably and it looked like there were a lot of people driving into town. Looking up the street toward the Jax Beer building, I saw half a dozen restaurants with new health department certifications posted in the window along with notes indicating the date they’d reopen, and for a lot of them it was soon. I noticed that while a lot of the people milling around were visitors like us, many also looked like veteran coffee pourers, voodoo charm salesmen and schoolgirl-themed strippers. And while the tourists were walking around taking pictures and sadly shaking their heads, the locals were going on about their business, pausing only to sidestep the occasional sack of trash. It seemed like they’d been down before, and knew the way back up pretty well.
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