Mansion camping in New Orleans

On my last day in Texas, I had an interview down in Galveston, and from there I left for New Orleans. It was one of the most fun drives of this whole trip. One of the guys I interviewed earlier in the week had told me about this back way I could take through rural Louisiana. AND I got to take a car ferry on the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston to another little town. It was really cool, and quite entertaining to hear Sibyl tell me to "board the ferry." Then she got upset when it went a little off course, and I have to say it was nice to hear her recalculate without feeling responsible. AND I actually found a post office out off of this two-lane county road in bayou country, which is a big deal, because I am always looking for post offices on this trip, and there it was, in this little two-street town. AND the postal lady called me "sugar baby," and I managed not to laugh out loud until I was back in the car. All in all, a good day.

While in New Orleans, I stayed with my friend Jessica, who used to live around the corner from me in Portland. She and her friend Grant were in town for the month housesitting for her grandmother for the month and watching Raffles, the incredibly mellow Great Dane. The two of them were also working on putting together a brief film documentary about the current housing/homelessness situation in New Orleans. I was really happy to see Jessica, and I'd never met Grant before, but upon learning my name he immediately offered me a drink, so I knew we'd get along just fine. And we did for the most part, though all week we had an intense competition going to see who could be the best house guest. Anyway, the three of us Yankees decided to pretend we were native Southerners by drinking bourbon out on the porch of our Garden District mansion, and Grant announced his new name for our lifestyle: mansion camping. Works for me. We were joined a little later by one of Jessica's friends from college and my friend Dallas, a carpenter who moved to New Orleans from Portland about a year ago.

We spent the next few days listening to great live music, touring the city, joining impromptu street parades, and playing "Katrina paparazzi," photographing storm damage in various neighborhoods. I've seen a lot about the storm damage on the news and heard it on the radio, but it was really incredible to see it there in person. To give you an idea: In the middle of a halfway-rebuilt neighborhood, we saw one house that was basically a shell. The outer walls were up, but there was no roof, and the front door was hanging off the hinges, so you could see that on the inside it was stripped down to the studs. But there was still a mailbox next to the front door, and the mailman had delivered that week's JC Penney ad. (Neither snow, nor rain, nor the fact that a house is uninhabited...)

That kind of sums up my impression New Orleans. Overall, I loved the city, the music, the old houses with their amazing gardens, the atmosphere...I had a fantastic time there, but there's this sense that...well, that there is no sense. There's this wildness to it that is at once appealing and appalling. I don't really know how to put that into words, but there's my attempt.

My interviews in New Orleans were amazing. Obviously, people had pretty incredible stories about Katrina, but more than that, I was blown away by their attitude about it, which was basically, well, nothing worse than that's going to happen. My last interview was with a guy named Mike Read at his office in downtown New Orleans. His daughter Lauren was in my class at ND, though we didn't know each other, but two years she had complications after surgery, and she is now a quadriplegic. At first, they thought she'd be in a vegetative state for the rest of her life, and they even pulled the plug a couple of times, but she survived. She's come a long way, and she still can't talk, but she can understand what is going on around her. She was in the hospital when Katrina hit, and through a series of miracles, she survived and was evacuated, after the hospital lost power, water, etc. And he tells me this harrowing story of her evacuation and everything they went through, and then he tells me that they're so glad it happened. While I was picking my jaw up off the floor, he explained that the doctors and nurses in Baton Rouge told them about new treatments for Lauren, and they actually hired one of the nurses to come care for her at their home four days a week. I'm leaving out most of the details, but it was an incredible interview. I packed up my gear, and then we stood at the window in his office watching a protest in front of City Hall turn into a riot.

That's all I'm going to write about New Orleans. I'm currently suffering from a Christmas cookie-induced writer's block, and I just can't see putting all of the bizarre, amazing things that happened there into coherent sentences.