In April 2006, eight months after Hurricane Katrina, my ex-boyfriend and I exited Interstate 10 for a third world version of New Orleans. Water level lines marked brick buildings, alerting me of a television drama I had missed while on a trip in Oaxaca, Mexico. Corner garbage cans sat pregnant, anticipating collection, just one of the many city systems that craved leadership. Abandoned cars parked under the highway stretched the length of the city’s historic districts. Broken stoplights flashed red, the high winds had turned the street signs backward or blew them off altogether, and waiters from the French Quarter beckoned us to come in as their only diners at a corner table with white linen collecting dust. New Orleans, which in the past had pumped me full of love with its heart and soul, now resembled a depressed soul, love-starved and lonely, aching for attention.
We had come up through the Southeast to visit family and friends as a continuation of another journey through Mexico. My friend Leigh Ann (who I had met at the Angkor temples in Cambodia six years before) was back in New Orleans to finish her PhD in public health at Tulane. She loved this town and considered herself a citizen long before she lost everything to waist-deep water. During that time, long after we would venture with Leigh Ann into a grocery store to witness the lack of food choice in the one store that remained open in a sea of boarded up shops, New Orleans tested her. She told us how her house was broken into, that she heard shots from murders that happened against residents who tried to help the city even more, and later emailed that a tornado had ripped through town a week before the 2007 Mardi Gras festivities. As she put it in her emails to us after our visit, “Someone somewhere big clearly has something against this city.”
She continued her periodic emails to announce crazy occurrences in the Bayou that kept the rest of us on our toes—the mayoral race, the snooze factor by government on rebuilding low-income housing for residents strewed about the country, and how FEMA trailers had to be destroyed after Katrina so as not to flood the RV market. Madness remained long after the storm. But it was the city’s festivals that provided a humorous backbone to Leigh Ann’s emails that I look forward to, knowing that the city might survive if its eccentrics continued to bring life to the place.
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