In my salad days, I went to Sea, shipping from the port of New Orleans, then the nation's busiest.

We'd cast off from Uptown wharves, or West Bank granaries, or Baton Rouge oil terminals, and slowly slip down the muddy River past the Reagan-closed uptown Mariner's Hospital, the downtown Moonwalk, and comfortable, neighborly Faubourg Marigny.

Today, when you walk towards The River, look up at the passing ship and know there are sailors aboard her looking back at Faubourg Marigny's sweet green shore, longing for home.

Going down to the Sea, on the Mississippi, is an American epic.  One of life's rare journeys, full of metaphor, and not to be missed. 

It is eight hours from New Orleans to the mouth of The River.  A  thrilling eight hours of growing anticipation, of City fading, of landdwindling.

After The City has passed, you can see the full Gulf of Mexico, across the two strips of Louisiana that now make up the levee.  You also see Cows grazing along those slim banks.  Dusky brown cows, about the color of River water, walking slowly, swishing their tails, chewing sea grasses, and headed down to the final rickrack at Louisiana's very end.  I wonder who herded them, and if the cows were keen eyed about hurricanes.

 Near its mouth The River becomes a true delta fanning numerous passageways out to Sea, and false passages into marshes and bayous.  It must have driven the brothers Iberville and Bienville, "Mad as Frenchmen," in 1699, searching dead end bayous, and horseshoe loops, for The Great River inland, to the mythical Northwest Passage.

That passage was never found, but Mardi Gras Bayou was (one of those blind leads), and New Orleans.  Not the city - not yet - but the Native-American landing, near today's Moonwalk.

(The Moonwalk is presently closed, for progressive refitting with sleep-proof benches and, perhaps, an air-conditioned walkway with wetlands mural in electric neon, and a sneeze guard over The River.)

 This Native's portage, from River to Gulf (Lake Pontchatrain), is on what swamp dwellers call high ground, a two-to-four foot natural embankment that the early French found to be the perfect site for their church & military parade ground (present day Jackson Square & Saint Louis Cathedral).  Marigny became the first suburb, or Faubourg, down river from this landing.

 Adrien de Pauger plotted New Orleans' streets, in 1721.  In his honor Bourbon Street changes its name to Pauger, as it enters Faubourg Marigny.

1805 was the year Faubourg Marigny was carved from the plantation lands of Pierre Phillipe de Marginy de Mandeville, by his son Bernard, to pay gambling debts.

(This was two years after the Americans arrived, and were so snubbed by the Vieux Carre' French they huffed across Canal Street, leaving the wide divide known unto this day as "the neutral ground.").

Marigny quickly became the City's German settlement, with civic services like now-lost German Catholic Holy Trinity Church, and spectacularly still-with-us Saint Roch Cemetery, with its walled refuge for prosperous tombs with German names annotated, "Born in Bavaria." (What did those early Bavarian-Faubourgundians do for mountains, for what did they yodel?)  The family tomb of the disappearing Schwegmann name is here. 

The Marigny Plantation ended at what is now Franklin Avenue, where it met the Daunoy Plantation, a few buildings of which house today's popular Café Feelings, at Franklin & Chartres.  Faubourg Marigny extends several blocks beyond this corner.

Standing in front of Café Feelings, you can look up and see ships passing above, on The River.  Before those ships reach the Gulf of Mexico, they will pass the odd settlement of Pilot Town, a kind of dormitory on stilts, for River Pilots, and the last settlement before the open Sea.

Sand builds fast at the River's mouth, and the dredge Sugar Island sits near Pilot Town, most days, chewing up silt and passing it along a conveyer belt to deeper waters beyond.

Once I rode a tanker that ran aground here.  It was a rare day, when the Sugar Island was in dock for repairs, and we were loaded to the Plimsoll line with Baton Rouge refinery product, bound for Boston.

I was below deck and felt my body move past my feet, then sway back as we struck mud, and started to sough our way down into its grip.  The Old Man took command from the Pilot and had his engineers put us in full reverse.  Everyone ran out on deck.  The entire Pilot Town population hung over rails watching us sway and spin full around and back out into the Gulf.  I think we are the only vessel to have ever backed out of the Mississippi River.

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