Washed Away

Sept. 7, 2005

Even if you’ve never been to New Orleans, chances are you have a memory of the place, which exists as a twilight city of dark pleasures in America’s subconcious mind.
Perhaps it’s the LSD scene from “Easy Rider,” where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda spend the day tripping with two hippie girls in the town’s decaying above-ground cemetary. Perhaps it’s an image of Louis Armstrong playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” in an old clip from the French Quarter. Perhaps you recall the vampire Lestat brooding down Canal Street in the novels of Anne Rice.
Perhaps it’s the skinny crone witch in the film, “The Big Easy,” conjuring her spells -- pins sticking in a doll or a dead rooster, dripping blood from its head into a love potion... Or maybe it was Dr. John, singing his “Gris Gris” song in full voo-doo regalia.
Perhaps your memories arise from the harmonies of the Neville Brothers or the spices of crawfish filè gumbo... Maybe when you think of New Orleans you conjure a “Girls Gone Wild” commercial with college girls popping their tops during Mardi Gras, draped only in beads. Or you recall images that are sanitized yet simmering -- the old John Wayne films about Andrew Jackson who defeated the British here in the War of 1812, or the French pirate Jean LaFitte, whose corsairs once prowled the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Texas.
Then there are memories generated only by our imaginations. In our long ago school history courses it was drummed into us that for slaves of the old South, being sold down the river to New Orleans was a trip to broiling Hell itself from which no rebellious field hand ever returned. In films such as “Roots” we saw men in top hats and velvet tails lashing brown people wet with blood on the auction blocks along the river.
Mark Twain’s riverboat pulling up to a Mississippi dock, its decks piled high with bales of cotton. Is there anyplace like New Orleans for filling the imagination?
My own memories are the stuffings of a well-fed tourist. Creole and Cajun food offered at unconscionably low prices in courtyard cafes in the French Quarter... Nibbling on beignets -- those fry-bread donuts, snowy with powdered sugar -- along with sips of chicory coffee at the outdoor cafe on the square downtown... Walking down Bourbon Street with a Hurricane cocktail the size of a Big Gulp, purchased from a street vendor... A nightclub doorway revealing a breathtaking brunette in spike heels and a bullwhip, wearing little else... Kids ecstatic with the joy of running up and down “the hill” at the zoo -- a pathetic 10-foot-high mound which is considered a marvel in a city built 20 feet below sea level. Doing the tourist bit at Preservation Hall to catch an earful of Dixieland jazz from players old enough to pass as Methuselah... Dodging some of the scariest looking junkies you’d ever hope to not meet in the town’s main square... Whatever it was, no one could ever say that New Orleans wasn’t alive and kicking.
But those memories are all that seem to be left of New Orleans and it’s a shame that they are joined now by images of people fleeing for their lives. Adding to our store of memories will be those of people helicoptered off the roofs of their drowning homes; poor folks looting WalMart and the shops on Canal Street, miles of homes underwater, and long lines of refugees heading for the Astrodome in Houston.
I had hoped to go back to New Orleans for a long weekend this spring. By that time, the water will have been pumped away while billions of federal and donated dollars will have been pumped back in to rebuild the city.
But one can only imagine that much of what gave Old New Orleans its voodoo spell will have been washed away forever. Already, personal accounts are streaming in from across the nation from residents who say they don’t know if they’ll ever return to the Crescent City. They’ve literally been washed away.
It sounds cruel, but it makes you wonder if it’s worth rebuilding a city that was constructed against all advice in a swamp below sea level in the 1700s. Our country is going to spend billions rebuilding New Orleans and then it’s going to be washed away again, and again, and again, along with other coastal cities. The global warming thing -- the seas that are now two degrees warmer, giving birth to more hurricanes than we’ve ever seen before. And soon, the melting of the ice caps and the rising of the waters and... so it goes.
The only thing that nature can’t destroy is the city that lives on in our memories.

--by Robert Downes

In an effort to help the victims of hurricane Katrina, Northern Express, Streeters & WKLT are sponsoring a huge fund raiser - Rock ’N Relief – on Friday, September 16, at Streeters Ground Zero. Hosted by Kenny Olson, the fund raiser will feature a silent auction and live music by Rumor, Amanda Waggener, Blisstripp, Mike Moran, Miriam Pico, Jocaine & 75 North, & More! Proceeds will go to the American Red Cross to help relief efforts. For more information check out Streeters website: www.streetersonline.com.