Can I get a witness?
Travellers often report experiencing a kind of strange blink-blink minute upon first confronting in person a place they've seen many times in photographs. It isn't deja-vu; rather, it's a moment of palimpsest, when the post-card image superimposes on the real world and the mind fights to bring the two into focus and allow the real world to become what remains in the memory.
I've driven between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, surrounded by moiling, shouting, crowds at a military checkpoint, and felt uncomfortably exposed sitting, with cameras around my neck, in an obviously touristic minivan. I've ridden north along the Suez Canal, loomed over by hulks of vessels still rusting away from the Suez War, in the last, slowest, van of a convoy, the driver nervously chewing his nails, tugging his moustache, tapping the wheel, as the modern buses steadily accerated away from us into the night. So that's the nearest I'd experienced to stepping into the pages of Newsweek, until I toured New Orleans that cold, windy morning.
As my friendly Gothic shop-clerk promised, just moments from the quaint quiet of the Quarter are block after block of devastated houses. On every one -- even those I realized with a shock were occupied -- the red spray-paint criss-cross left by the search parties: date searched, by which group, bodies found.
The Lower 9th was always pretty rough, and looked it; when Tim lived in New Orleans, fellow musicians advised him -- a seasoned ghetto-dweller who had lived two doors down from the Black Panthers in Berkeley, in the heart of Ampere, New Jersey, and so on -- where not to go wandering. I drove down five or six blocks, turned and took some photos, turned again, and met such baleful stares that I knew I'd reached the 'don't go wandering' zone and turned back to Elysian Fields.
Gentilly and the whole City Park/University section had struck Tim as a 'maybe we could live here' part of town, and I remembered its pleasant little streets as being lined by comfortable bungalows and noncommittal quasi-colonials. I cruised the streets, across Mirabeau to St Bernard, across Fillmore up Cameron Blvd, back on Robert E Lee Blvd to Paris Ave, aghast.
Empty houses with sagging porches, empty houses with boarded-up windows and doors, empty houses with tattered blue tarps blowing like sails from crumpled rooflines. The occasional house with a FEMA trailer parked out front, indicating that there was at least electricity running to the property (or FEMA wouldn't give you the trailer); many were ramped, leaving me to wonder just how young and spry the inhabitants were, and how likely they were to be able to repair their devastated homes.
The map from the La. Tourist Office helpfully showed the places where the London Avenue Canal's levees had breached, but I think I would have found the spot without a map, following the bang-clang of a pile driver. There were two empty lots at the exact spot where the levee broke -- swept away? or so ruined that the city asserted eminent domain and removed them to ease repair works? -- and few other signs of return. The silence when the pile driver stopped was deafening.
I've driven between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, surrounded by moiling, shouting, crowds at a military checkpoint, and felt uncomfortably exposed sitting, with cameras around my neck, in an obviously touristic minivan. I've ridden north along the Suez Canal, loomed over by hulks of vessels still rusting away from the Suez War, in the last, slowest, van of a convoy, the driver nervously chewing his nails, tugging his moustache, tapping the wheel, as the modern buses steadily accerated away from us into the night. So that's the nearest I'd experienced to stepping into the pages of Newsweek, until I toured New Orleans that cold, windy morning.
As my friendly Gothic shop-clerk promised, just moments from the quaint quiet of the Quarter are block after block of devastated houses. On every one -- even those I realized with a shock were occupied -- the red spray-paint criss-cross left by the search parties: date searched, by which group, bodies found.
The Lower 9th was always pretty rough, and looked it; when Tim lived in New Orleans, fellow musicians advised him -- a seasoned ghetto-dweller who had lived two doors down from the Black Panthers in Berkeley, in the heart of Ampere, New Jersey, and so on -- where not to go wandering. I drove down five or six blocks, turned and took some photos, turned again, and met such baleful stares that I knew I'd reached the 'don't go wandering' zone and turned back to Elysian Fields.
Gentilly and the whole City Park/University section had struck Tim as a 'maybe we could live here' part of town, and I remembered its pleasant little streets as being lined by comfortable bungalows and noncommittal quasi-colonials. I cruised the streets, across Mirabeau to St Bernard, across Fillmore up Cameron Blvd, back on Robert E Lee Blvd to Paris Ave, aghast.
Empty houses with sagging porches, empty houses with boarded-up windows and doors, empty houses with tattered blue tarps blowing like sails from crumpled rooflines. The occasional house with a FEMA trailer parked out front, indicating that there was at least electricity running to the property (or FEMA wouldn't give you the trailer); many were ramped, leaving me to wonder just how young and spry the inhabitants were, and how likely they were to be able to repair their devastated homes.
The map from the La. Tourist Office helpfully showed the places where the London Avenue Canal's levees had breached, but I think I would have found the spot without a map, following the bang-clang of a pile driver. There were two empty lots at the exact spot where the levee broke -- swept away? or so ruined that the city asserted eminent domain and removed them to ease repair works? -- and few other signs of return. The silence when the pile driver stopped was deafening.
posted by CatzEyes at 7:06 AM
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