The slightest rain fell here Thursday morning.
You know, the kind of New Orleans rain that just gives everything a light coat and sheen, that tamps down the dust of the old shell roads and washes down the oyster stink in the French Quarter gutters and slicks up all the playground equipment and makes New Orleans smell—is it possible?—so fresh. So southern.
The kind of rain that falls even though the sun is shining. Does that happen in other places?
New Orleans rain has always been like drops of clarity in an otherwise murky habitat, sometimes too much, sometimes too little, but always a marvel to behold. There’s always something that needs to be washed down here.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois said it best: “Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped into our hands—and who knows what to do with it?”
Indeed, what to do?
That was the rain that fell Thursday. And we needed it. Because the oyster stink is at noxious levels and the city is stacked with an apocalyptic vision of dry kindling that requires only one dummy with a discarded cigarette to torch an entire block.
Which raises one of the things that most catches the eye here: the trees. Or the lack thereof. I don’t know that anyone will ever be able to count how many trees fell or just plain withered and died under Katrina’s fierce hot breath, but I’m sure some expert will tell us in due time. Whatever the raw number, it won’t match the impact on the senses.
I can’t remember where I read it, but someone interviewed a New Orleans artist who had returned home last week, and this guy—whose very living hinges upon his interpretations of shadow, nuance, and color—said the problem with New Orleans now is that there is too much sunlight on the ground.
That changes everything. Because if there were ever a town that couldn’t afford to surrender shade, it is this one, where a walk on a summer afternoon can be like sauntering through a blast furnace.
Maybe only the bad golfers will be happy about this development, for their way from tee to green is now so much more accessible.
It had been three weeks since it rained—since you know when—and that’s as unfathomable a notion here as a September without fresh oysters.
Of course, by the time you read this, Friday, rain might not be such a charming enterprise here. And Blanche DuBois’s notion of eternity may not be so romantic.
Rita swirls out in the Gulf of Mexico, capriciously choosing its path of destruction, and even the slightest brush of wind could take out so many more trees and the slightest rain—the kind that tourists with their Big Ass Beers in hand used to stand under French Quarter balconies and watch with a sense of comic wonder—could wind the clock back three weeks to that piece of eternity we don’t ever want to live again.
Under one of those French Quarter balconies, those famous mannequin legs at Big Daddy’s strip club improbably swing in and out of a window, an alluring, optimistic, or delusional signal that the libertine times will once again return to the Old City. That les bons temps will rouler again someday.
There is no power on that block of Bourbon Street where the legs swing; the owner just thought that the best use of portable power would be to swing those legs.
Swinging in the rain. Drinking a hurricane instead of dodging one.
Living in a place where the past and present and future have never collided so chaotically and without rational analysis.
There is no one who can tell us what tomorrow will bring. But, personally, I consider it a very bad sign that the killer hurricane that is dancing on our television screens and toying with our collective psyche is named after a meter maid.
That can’t be good.