New Orleans After Katrina

(Editor's Note: I wrote this some time ago but wanted to share it now because I think it encapsulates a lot of the reason that New Orleans has been able to rise out of the wreckage of the hurricane 10 years ago. Whatever the controversy over whether the poor have come back as much as the rest of the city, there is still hope with the kind of spirit I feel I found there.)

The minute I landed, I knew I’d found the right place.   New Orleans.  Always on my bucket list but a dog leg away from the Pacific Northwest and this the first time I was visiting.  Took eight hours to fly there, no easy routes available and I had to change planes in Chicago.   Worth it after a rainy cold spring back home. The air was sultry with warm humidity, the smell of magnolias and other trees in bloom.  There was a balm to New Orleans that loosened my bones.  “Lagniappe,” the little extra the Big Easy promises.

 It was midnight, midweek, but the French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, was alive.  No Starbucks and rolled up sidewalks here.  The crowds, both tourist and local, spilled for blocks into Bourbon and Royal’s cobbled streets. Mardi Gras was weeks past but spring break brought out the young men and women, their fists tight around neon green foot-high drinks and “huge ass beers.”

 A man pounded on his baby grand piano with neon-lit keys, his dark head pumping with the rhythm.  The surprise was how he got there in the middle of the street. The piano sat on plump tires, the whole contraption attached to his bicycle in front.   Down the way, a young Vietnamese woman serenaded with her electric violin. On another corner, a clarinetist wailed with her Dixie band.

 Two strippers with long pink wigs and no shirts strolled along, their bare breasts exposed.  On a nearby balcony, young men dangled shiny beads at a passerby to try to get her to lift her shirt, a tradition born out of Mardi Gras.  She complied.

 Now, you may not like the college frat atmosphere of the quarter, the oldest and highest part of the city that wasn’t hit by Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches that inundated the rest of the city.  But, you have to appreciate the laid-back tolerance New Orleans has for this kind of going on.  The next morning, early, the crews were out hosing down the place and picking up the trash.

 Tourism, which is back bigger than pre-Katrina, provides the city with major revenue, surpassed only by its port on the Mississippi River. On my visit, I still saw empty lots and some wrecked buildings in other parts of the city but it was mostly recovered, thanks in part to efforts led by actor Brad Pitt and musician Harry Connick Jr.  The brightly colored new homes were built on stilts to avoid any future flooding.

The tolerance I sensed, I believe, was driven by something more than revenue, maybe that “lagniappe” attitude that grows out of the long history of Spanish and French roots.  A gentler approach to what it means to be human, a grace in wanting to take time and enjoy the moment.  An expansion of the attitude in the Northwest that leads some to take a day off when the sun shines.

The young women, more voluptuous than their Northwest counterparts, flashed lots of tattoos and cleavage but almost always set off by some black lace, at the bodice or the trim on the leggings worn under short, flouncy skirts. I saw an entire elevator full of women off to a bachelorette party wearing chartreuse, orange and pink net tutus around their hips.

 New Orleans folk,  I learned, make a big deal out of what they eat.  “First rule,” one woman told me. “You must never go away from here hungry.” Add crawfish to their sea harvest of oysters and shrimp.  And celebrate pork -- pulled, barbecued and king on the menu. One of the leading restaurants was fittingly called Cochon.  I tasted pork face, which an earnest young waiter explained was the face peeled from the bone and left in the air to cure. It was delicious. Then, of course, there were all the famous Brennan restaurants, the originators of Bananas Foster.  Dickie Brennan, one of the many children of the founding family, had just opened a new restaurant called the Tableau in the quarter.

 Used to be folk would say while in New Orleans, you better order a Bloody Mary because the garnish was the only vegetables you’d get on your trip. But the chefs have changed with the times.  Almost as ubiquitous as pork and seafood was a side of shaved raw Brussels sprouts, albeit often with a sprinkle of bacon bits.

Coffee. There was an occasional Starbucks but more often, local outfits like the famous Café du Monde down by the river which featured coffee made with chicory and its slight bitterness.  Lines stretched around the place, open 24 hours a day, everyone waiting for the deep fried powdered sugar covered treat known as beignets. The floor around the tiny café tables was sprinkled white, along with the fronts of most customers.

 A must visit was Preservation Hall.   Can’t think of anywhere else to match it. The ancient little room in the French quarter was dark inside with just two overhead lights and benches for the audience.  Old fashioned. No amplification, no air-conditioning. Just the intimate experience of listening to the heartfelt playing of traditional jazz. The night I was there, the line of elderly black musicians clothed in white shirts and dark pants marched in to their seats and began their songs. Yes, they were so old they had to sit most of the time, except when the music got so hot they stood up. The lead trombonist, who had to weigh 400 pounds, rose, sweating from his chair and a la Louie Armstrong spread his arms and sang, “Take all of me.”

The city’s embrace of life extended all the way to their dead, buried in raised graves in cemeteries all over the city. When I couldn’t find my guide at a cemetery up in the elegant  garden district, the volunteer at the wrought iron gate said he’d fill me in. Uncanny.  The plump little man with a neat white beard wore a tee shirt stating he was against the death penalty.

  He wanted to share how the graves, dating to yellow fever times in the 19^th century, were built with a hole inside toward the back so they could be continually used by families. The graves turn into ovens during the long hot summers, reaching 200 degrees, like a crematorium, he explained. When the next family member needs burial,  the cemetery uses a big shovel and pushed the old remains to the back where they fall in the hole. Then they roll in the next one.

Back to the living. I can think of no finer place to mingle with the locals in New Orleans than the Mid-City Lanes Rock ‘N Bowl.   Last bowling alley I went to down in Portland in the Hollywood district went out of business. But the rock ‘n bowl and their Thursday night zydeco was going strong.  The musicians and their squeeze box concertina kept the dancers stomping while nearby you heard the crack of bowling balls hitting pins in the several lanes. 

Four glorious days of sunshine and temperatures in the 70s soothed my early springtime angst over the Northwest’s cold and rainy days.  It rained in New Orleans, but not until the morning I left. I took solace in the promise of even more abandon when I got home.  In my luggage, I had half a dozen sweet pralines from the French Market.