New Orleans still unfolds itself to you in a sensual way. That was always her seductive forte, but it is different after the storm.
For instance, in the immediate days after the flood, it was sound: choppers, jets, boats, sirens, big trucks, bigger trucks, chain saws. And then at night, the damn scariest silence you never heard.
Then it was sight: the impenetrable darkness of the night, punctuated in the distance from time to time by a red or blue cherry top on a slow-rolling cruiser, and most likely the driver—a young state trooper from some town in the Midwest suddenly dropped into Fallujah—was as terrified as you.
There were lots of monsters under the bed in those early days.
Then came the blinding sunlight of morning—so much of it unfiltered by tree limbs after Katrina’s indiscriminate and not-so-tidy pruning job—just slamming straight into your face and onto the ground.
Now the choppers are gone, and most of that other industrial noise, and at night you hear crickets. And the sunlight, so hellish weeks ago, is getting better with the approach of autumn, and the scary darkness is now sliced apart at night by streetlights and the yellow glow from occasional bedroom windows.
That leaves us the sense of smell. And, wow.
The Louisiana balladeer Randy Newman once wrote a song lamenting Baltimore’s civic downfall many years ago with the line “Oh, Baltimore. Man, it’s hard just to breathe.”
That would be New Orleans now. It stinks here, just flat-out stinks.
There are random piles of residential and commercial trash just everywhere, and even where there is no visible evidence, the slightest wind shift can take you to Puke City.
I mean it; it’s rough. Even in places that are cleaned up and open for business, you can still smell the Aftermath. The CVS and Walgreens drugstores are open Uptown, and even though the air-conditioning is blasting and they’ve cleaned the hell out of those places, you can still sense it when you first walk in, just barely taste it.
A friend of mine e-mailed me recently that when she walked into a grocery store, her daughter said to her, “Mom, it smells like ass in here.” I know that’s not very appetizing terminology or imagery for a newspaper, but standard operating procedures have changed around here because New Orleans, it smells like, well . . . never mind.
I’m just trying to convey what it’s like, and I can certainly muster no better description than that.
On many streets, refrigerators are duct-taped shut and lined up along the curbside, calling to mind nothing so much as the image of empty Mardi Gras parade ladders all in a row. All these structures, just waiting for something to happen.
Only problem is, there are no cleanup crews following these imaginary parades to remove the debris. So they stand, sturdy sentinels, fortress walls.
We should rename the streets around here Whirlpool Way, Amana Avenue, and Kenmore Court, because that’s what it looks like. The streets are paved in appliances. Where trees once stood, they are sometimes the only shade on a block.
Where are they going to put all these things? I don’t suppose they can be used to buttress our wetlands as they do with discarded Christmas trees every year, huh?
Do we even have any wetlands?
And, problem is, for every person who comes back here, either to reclaim residency or just to gather some valuables and clean up a bit, more garbage accumulates. Pity the folks who had been in the middle of home renovations when this hit, because their Dumpsters are now brimming with a primordial stew so nasty that even the rats abandoned it.
Very strange side note here: There are no rats. Everyone talks about this, says the same thing—they haven’t seen a rat since Day One. Here on Dry Land, where I live, we thought they’d overrun us. But I don’t know.
Anyway, I remember—until it was deemed injudicious by an image-conscious administration—when the city used to measure the success of Mardi Gras by announcing the accumulated tonnage of garbage collected during Carnival season. Well, by that measure, Katrina was a very successful hurricane.
Very.
Stink is a situation that TV and radio cannot successfully portray, olfactory being one of the senses not yet conquered by the airwaves or Internet. And until The Times-Picayune can successfully produce a scratch-’n’-sniff version of the daily newspaper—and this technology still seems to be at least three or four years down the road—we can only fail in our efforts to accurately capture the foulness of some of these street corners.
I don’t mean to be complaining here, jumping on the gripe train and all that. Compared to losing a loved one, a home, or a job, this is civic kibbles and bits. But in terms of livability, it matters. There seem to be nine hundred guys from Texas who’ve been trucked into town to cut down trees and limbs; aren’t there a dozen guys from River Parish Disposal who can cruise around New Orleans every day picking up stuff ?
The whole idea of it makes me very nostalgic, the radio playing in my backyard on autumn Sunday afternoons in New Orleans, after a Saints game, listening to Buddy D pitching River Parish Disposal: “Our business stinks, but it’s picking up.”
What a great slogan that is.
Buddy D. The Saints. Garbage pickup. Ah, memories of my old New Orleans.