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August 30, 2005
The Big Easy
Categories: Personal
A long time ago, I used to live in Houma, a small town a couple of hours west of New Orleans. I don't really remember it; I was only two. My dad worked construction and we soon moved back to Kentucky.
I've spent considerable time in New Orleans. I dated a girl who lived in St. Charles Parrish, just north and east of the city. I took a train to visit her the day after I graduated from high school. That summer I probably spend a total of three weeks or so in and around the city, hanging out in the Quarter, walking around City Park, strolling through the Garden District, and sweating in the heat. We visited New Orleans on Walkout because it was the only place in the country where the drinking age was 18. We (okay, everyone else) partied and did the Bourbon Street thing. I spent the night in New Orleans (at the same hotel -- Days Inn on Canal, a block or so from the Superdome), when I moved to Texas. I gave the guy working the night shift at the desk $10 to keep an extra eye on my car, since it was loaded with all of my worldly posessions and wandered the Quarter alone. Nervous and tired, I was in bed early. Sarah and I stayed in Biloxi on a trip back from South Carolina one New Years. We got up early enough to drive into New Orleans, eat breakfast at the Cafe du Monde, and watch the sun come up over the Mississippi. That was the last time I was there -- January of 2000.
Now, most of it's under water. For the moment, the Quarter is dry, but the city will never be the same again. It always was an odd place, a mixture of ease and menace, reverie and revelry, sitting eight odd feet below sea level, kept from being swamp by pumps and levees.
We are small and, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant. Try as we might to predict and control, we always come up short.
My thoughts and prayers are with those who are without power, whose homes are under water, who had to be airlifted off of roofs, and who have lost loved ones.
Posted by Nakia at August 30, 2005 05:32 PM