O, What A Time It Was

* * *

"Back to the Caribbean again after New Orleans and all that it stands for. It is certainly one of the most beautiful cities in the world, although how the people who live there managed to make it so remains a mystery to me." ~ John Kennedy Toole, in a 1963 letter from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Joel L. Fletcher, author of KEN & THELMA, THE STORY OF A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES (Pelican Publishing, 2005)

* * *

Crossing the great divide

Hurricane Katrina blew many of us out of New Orleans. It blew me clean across the Atchafalaya Basin to Lafayette.

The Atchafalya Basin contains all that remains of a vast hardwood bottom forest that covered the Mississippi floodway when Thomas Jefferson purchased New Orleans - and Napoleon threw in the western United States for Lagniappe. (Lagniappe is a French-Louisiana word meaning a little something extra.)

Jefferson's real prize was the port of New Orleans. It still is. Without New Orleans there could be a Baton Rouge, a Memphis, a Saint Louis, a Minneapolis, but there could not be a United States of America. Not as we know it.

For eons the Mississippi River has regularly flooded and ever so slowly moved west. Yes, rivers move. As it shifted back and forth in its snake-like march, the Mississippi left oxbows, false rivers, and hardwood bottom forests. With river canalizations came the elimination of all but the most pent-up floods, and the sidewinder-shifting west slowed till the bottomlands all but disappeared. Today the Atchafalaya Basin contains all that is left.

The Atchafalaya is a large swamp, however, covering hundreds of miles. Once it held Acadiana and New Orleans far apart. Now hurricane winds and interstate highways slice through it like a hot knife in butter.

Crossing it by airplane there are no stops, hopefully, between New Orleans and Lafayette. By bus, there is a forty-minute rest stop at the depot in downtown Baton Rouge, whether one is tired or not. In a private automobile one can stop anywhere anytime. But no one ever does - except for gasoline and salty snacks.

The Fallen Monk

Hammond, Louisiana was our destination, in August, as Hurricane Katrina washed the road out behind us. Two weeks later, we drove away from Hammond, around Lake Pontchartrain, over The River, and across the Atchafalaya, bound for Lafayette - bypassing New Orleans altogether. At the helm navigating this exodus was our friend and personal savior from the storm, The Fallen Monk.

We stopped at a casino/gas station just over the Mississippi River Bridge from Baton Rouge. L. A. Norma dropped a few dollars into a shockingly ugly slot machine. In return, the house gave us free whiskey and beer. We expected little gratitude or personal growth from gambling, but this struck all three of us as a right joyous gain. We lavishly tipped our thinly attired waitress and smoked Norma's cigarettes through two more free beverages.

"You don't have to ask me twice for free libation," Norma observed between puffs of smoke.

"You don't have to ask me once," said the ex-monk.

We lifted our glass in agreement with both.

* * *

After the Second World War was won, President General Dwight D. Eisenhower built America what came to be known as Ike's Defense Highway System, of which Interstate 10 is a magnificent part. Ever-so-many miles it is required by law to have a stretch long and straight enough to land an airplane. The part that crosses the Atchafalaya is straight enough to land a flock of airplanes, a long freight train, and a hundred automobiles, buses and trucks.

It is an amazing achievement, a delight to engineer and eye, but it has never landed an airplane. Oh, sure, maybe some drunken Saturday night a Cajun boy landed a Piper Cub right down the middle and took off again before it hardly stopped rolling. But Ike never stepped from a fighter jet, onto its concrete deck, declaring his mission accomplished. No! Nor do Amtrak's trains yaw and pitch over railroad tracks hanging from Interstate-10 bridges, as they do clinging to the side of the old Huey P. Long Bridge, at New Orleans.

As you approach the Huey P. Long, the tallest steel railroad bridge in the world, Amtrak's conductors tell passengers to close their eyes if they suffer fear of heights. People on trains sometimes do. Far below, the port's traffic runs thick on The River.

The train takes "the bottom road," around the Atchafalaya Basin. It passes down through New Iberia and Houma (jumping off place for the humongous Louisiana offshore oil industry), then up to New Orleans. Riding on the train you can dream of dreamier times, cozy in posh day coach seats or private bedroom compartments. You can watch miles of sugarcane fields, and cypress knee forests kicking high from primeval waters. Lately you can see FEMA trailer parks and shredded blue-tarps streaming atop the roofs of embattled castles.

You can walk around on the train, bounce down the aisles to mediocre meals in the diner - or you can pack your lunch. In the observation car, full-vision glass bulkheads rise from the deck and fold overhead. Below is a bar with snacks, beer and booze.

You can converse with fellow travelers, or spot alligators too deaf to flee the train's thunderous approach. Last trip over, a man from southern California treated us to Mexican beers and told post-Katrina stories about organizing rebuilding crews, finding them housing, and wooing donors. He said he had done similar work in Peru, in the days before Interstate 10 cut its nose-thumbing swath through the heart of Atchafalaya.

Above the bottom road, and above the Interstate, there is a top road. It passes through Opelousas, New Roads (the hometown of Ernest Gaines, and his setting for A LESSON BEFORE DYING), on its way down to Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

A recent train I rode along the bottom route pulled into New Orleans' Union Station, on Loyola Avenue, fifteen hours and fifty-seven minutes late. Everyone aboard was very tense.

"Tell me again they are not trying to discourage passenger traffic," L. A. Norma said, with a snort.

In front of the depot, we caught a cab to Elizabeth's Restaurant, rue Gallier at Chartres, for lunch. It was like the old days at Elizabeth's. There the levee is a tall green mound so docile you want to sit on it and stroke the clover. And the menu truthfully reads, "Real Food, Done Real Good."

I never gave up Squalor Heights, my garret apartment in Faubourg Marigny, though it has been mostly unlivable these past six months. I go back often to attend parties, and ten-cent martini lunches at Bacco. Recently I spent two weeks there, on assignment for Consumer Affairs.com (Christmas Among the Ruins).

New Orleans is still home, but now I teach a Writing Workshop for Project Heal, at the Acadiana Arts Council and last week I went to the Lafayette Public Library and took out a card. It is white with blue lettering and nestles in my wallet next to a gray and maroon one from the New Orleans Library.

A very special time

Those first days after the storm, had we realized we would not be going back soon - like crying men on the radio said - would we have gone mad and run up and down the road pulling our hair?

"Some long time, cher," my Lafayette barber says as he trims my beard. He keeps updated on how I have located - or not located - friends in New Orleans. He knows I visit my New Orleans barber's shop, on Rampart Street, every time I am in Town. He was elderly, worked alone, lived in a badly flooded neighborhood, and had a sister in Los Angeles. He has been my barber for over thirty years, but I don't know his last name.

"You only call your barber by their first name," my Lafayette barber says, smiling.

My New Orleans barber's first name is Jimmie, and his shop looks the same each time I visit. The door is always locked, and a little paper clock in the window says, "Open Tuesday to Saturday, 12 to 2."

The heart beats on

Leah Chase sang at the Hotel Monteleone, at the release party for Rosemary James' edited, MY NEW ORLEANS: BALLADS TO THE BIG EASY BY HER SONS, DAUGHTERS AND LOVERS. Leah Chase's mother is chef Leah Chase of Restaurant Dooky Chase (reopening soon). Chef Chase was one of the authors in attendance.

Diana Sullivan, president of RHINO, the oldest arts cooperative in Louisiana, e-mails about Canal Place, where RHINO has its gallery and where I used to work: "I wonder what you would make of it now? Everything there is covered in plastic but the ceilings. Including the Latinos working everywhere in those white space suits. (RHINO jeweler) Deborah Bommer-Morrissey and I have been over there working a lot. Some guy told her she works like a 'Latina gal.' We don't have a lot of RHINOs anymore, but they all work like 'Latinas.' We will reopen in February."

Flash:

Chris Rose, The Times-Picayune's popular, funny and sometimes profound columnist will be in Lafayette, February eleventh, for Second Saturday's Art Walk, an event where downtown art galleries, shops, cafés and bars coordinate their openings with a street party that goes on late into the night. No, it is not much like Bourbon Street, but Bootleggers, a charming watering hole, on Jefferson Street, sports a shingle outside that reads, "Got Hooch."

Rose will speak and sign his book of hurricane columns, at the Acadiana Arts Council's exhibition, "Sustained Winds - before - during - after, Gulf Coast Artists Respond." Please join us for art, sushi, boudin, and booze. After all, it is Carnival time in elegant exile.