Louisiana: Please Help Us
There was a time in my life when I used to go on expansive roadtrips more often: I've driven to California three times from the midwest, and once from LA all the way back to Massachussetts. It was my love of roadtripping that led me to many of my favourite experiences in life, and also to a point where, by age 29, I had seen 44 of the 50 states.
My plan to cover them all by age 30 was thwarted by at least one significant act of God, but I decided to finally take the plunge this year by turning a simple trip to visit my friend Allenn in Atlanta into a giant, multi-state Southern quest in which I would fill out the rest of my proverbial magnet map: AL, MS, LA, SC, NC and WV were the targets. I rented a car, loaded up Allenn as a roadtrip companion (he's one of the finest) for the first half of the journey, and set off.
While our trip took wind through Detroit and Nashville, it was New Orleans I was really headed for. Beyond simply scratching Louisiana off my list, New Orleans was the last big American city I had really been dying to see, and to get a glimpse of it in its slowly reawakening state was irresistible to me. Greg had warned me of potholes, absent traffic signals, and a general sense of destruction, but what we found was a hopeful, broken city, functioning more than I'd expect and yet with more work to do than I can reasonably imagine ever being accomplished.
Though I'd somehow become Canadian-phobicized to the potential dangers of already notorious New Orleans, I realized quickly that my time spent in Detroit and Gary were fine preparation for any sketchiness we might encounter. But it really wasn't the Mad Max landscape I might've imagined: it was a bruised, half-wrecked, beautiful city, with all the incongruity of a perfect spring taking hold of the gutted houses and FEMA trailers, slowly drawing in a steady stream of the city's backbone of generally awful tourists. Tired and cranky the first night, my swell travelling companion and I had a bitter argument, finally got dinner, and walked home covered in powdered sugar.
We stayed near the reasonably unscathed French Quarter, and enjoyed a day or two of completely incongruous strolls along some of the country's most ancient and beautiful streets juxtaposed with drives through Gentilly and Lakeview, past high-water marks on houses of six feet or more, past rescue effort spray paint on every house noting casualties, inspection teams, number of pets. Past the homeowners' own graffiti of "PLEASE HELP US" and "FEMA KILLS". Past neighbourhood after entire neighbourhood of no one left at all, past Mardi Gras beads hung on absolutely everything, and more signs about coming home than I'd ever known I could see. When I had my own mini-emergency, requiring me to FedEx keys to my cat-sitter from the only open FedEx outlet in the still-largely-cut-off city, I was quickly humbled by a fax that had been left poignantly on the counter from August. It read simply, "LEVEE BROKE", and then a phone number.
I do not know what will happen here, but I have never seen so many people take so much and still manage to smile.