Do You Know What It MeansÉ
By Bob Seibert
Let me make it clear at the
outset that I love New Orleans. IÕve been in love with that city since my first
experience with it, in August of 1963.
I spent four plus years there as a graduate student; and have returned
periodically many times since then.
The city has never disappointed me. It is (or was) a truly distinctive American city, one of the
few with a character and ambience all its own.
The city pleased me in so
many ways. Let me count the waysÉ
The palate. New Orleans has always valued
food. The proper preparation and
enjoyment of food has been cultivated to a fine art there. It is one of the few places in the
United States where people actually take the time to enjoy a meal. I have never felt rushed in a New Orleans
restaurantÉsomething I cannot say about Chicago, New York or Washington.
And what meals there
wereÉmeals from the top and bottom of the prandial continuum. There are few places in the world that
can take the basic ingredients of life, rice and beans, and turn it into a
platonic dish: New Orleans Red
Beans and Rice, the Monday staple of the whole city, indescribable to the
unfamiliar.
Or a beef poÕboy from
Parasols or any one of hundreds of neighborhood sandwich shops. The ingredients are familiar, even
boring to us in the abstract:
roast beef, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, french bread. But put together in a way no other city
in the nation can. Or fried
soft-shelled crab, pepper weiner, trout, or grouper poÕboysÉall distinctive and
all addictive. Washed down with a
good cold local beer or a BarqÕs rootbeerÉI can taste it now.
On the high end of the scale,
restaurants of international repute offered their best. The best meal I have ever had anywhere,
anytime, was at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. I can tell you to this day what we had and the order in
which we had it. In fact I
will: Mixed Oysters, bienville,
rockefeller and raw; salad with fine herbs and merliton; turtle stew; a main
course of trout amondine, potatoes brabant, and a distinctive cheese souffle;
for desert, a decadent stuffed profiterole with bitter chocolate sauce. Wine
with every course. I even remember
the conversation – I treasure it, every bite and word.
But enough about food. There was also coffee and it didnÕt take
me long to discover the delights and effects of chicory-laced coffee,
dark-roast coffee and other variations of java in the Big Easy – long
before Starbucks was a world phenomenonÉstrong, cheap, and memorable. I was on my way for a second cup of
this brew when the news came from Dallas about Pres. KennedyÕs
assassination. New Orleans, you
will remember, played a role in that drama, too, although no satisfying
resolution came of it.
Architecture. New Orleans was a town of great
contrasts. The great houses on
Saint Charles Avenue were and are impressive. The great homes of the Garden District beguile and intrigue,
as do the mansions near Lake Pontchartrain. But very near them all, a block or two away, are the homes
of simpler people, the servants, slaves, merchants and policemen. The famous ÒshotgunÓ houses of the
city. These homes, rich and poor,
presented themselves in a checkerboard pattern. Unlike the endless ghettos of wealth and poverty in other
American cities, the wealthy and the poor generally lived close enough that
they had to acknowledge each other, interact with each other. A social richness resulted, unlike any
other American city I am acquainted with: Savannah, maybe, or Charleston?
And of course, the homes and
buildings of the Vieux Carre, the old French quarter, with buildings of
apparent French and Spanish influence: courtyards, fountains, balconies, iron
grilles and intriguing doorways.
IÕm not speaking of Bourbon Street here, but the smaller, more private
streets of the quarter. Royale, Bienville, Decatur (then), St. PeterÕs,
Rampart. The Napoleon House comes
to mind, and the Casa do los Marinos, Acme Oyster House, the Pontalba
buildings, Jackson Square, CafŽ du Monde, Preservation Hall. People actually lived, ate, loved and died
in those buildings. They were not
so much tourist attractions, as attractive to tourists, a distinction I insist
on. Like the other neighborhoods
of the city, they charmed and beguiled the visitor and the native alike.
Need I mention Mardi
Gras? No, I donÕt think soÉ
What IÕm talking about here
are components of the New Orleans ambience, the overall effectof the city
. A complex brew of indulgence,
over-indulgence, aesthetic stimulation, heat, history, Spanish moss, Ann Rice,
Pete Fountain and Aaron Neville, and the pleasure of a population of great
diversity. The range of accents
alone can carry us to higher levels of appreciation for the variety of people
making their way in the Crescent City.
New arrivals in New Orleans
were quickly apprised of the precarious nature of this urban jewel. In 1963 I was acquainted by by Joe E.
Walker with the Òbutton-hookÓ vulnerability of the city, the devastation that
would surely occur if a hurricane button hooked over the city, attacking first
from the south, and then reversing course over Lake Pontchartrain, in effect
dumping the lake into the saucer of the city. The levees, it was said, were inadequate to such a strain,
the pumps too small and too old to handle the deluge. How prophetic that insight has proved to be. What happened last week is almost
exactly the model of the buttonhook hurricane, and the effect is quite
literally overwhelming.
Like most people experiencing
Katrina from a distance, I hoped at first that New Orleans had escaped the
storm as it suddenly and unexpectedly veered toward the northeast. Perhaps New Orleans had Òlucked outÓ
once again. But then came the news
that the flooding was serious, that the city had to be totally evacuated, and
finally that the levees had broken and the city was flooded.
Two politicians drove the
point home by Tuesday. Mayor Nagin
used the word ÒPompeiiÓ in a press conference, invoking that hapless Roman city
destroyed in minutes by a pyroclastic volcanic cloud, preserved for all time in
its death throes.
Speaker Dennis Hastert
startled the media by speculating that New Orleans would never be rebuilt,
given its unique geology. The
speaker was quickly silenced by a firestorm of criticism as the country
contemplated the possible loss of this treasure of a city.
But in truth, the speaker
spoke the truth. There is no good
reason to rebuild New Orleans in situ, only to have it ravaged in the future by
a similar story. Scholars of
weather patterns insist that we are in for a period of superstorms, like Katrina. Whatever the cause, the oceans have
warmed and risen. The
resulting effects provide the perfect catalyst for the perfect storm.
It is statistically probable
that we will face more storms of the category five variety. And more tornados, droughts, ice
storms, and heavy rainstorms. Weather patterns are changing, and not
necessarily for the better.
In the case of New Orleans,
we have a geological worst case.
Below sea level already, the city is sinking at an alarming rate. Covering it with fill will, in the long
run, probably hasten the rate of sink.
The Mississippi silt that makes up most of the ground in New Orleans is
fragile and slippery. It is already
beyond its carrying capacity. In
other words, the city is already at its geological limits.
New Orleans, in its
periphery, is an industrial city, filled to capacity with chemical plants,
petroleum storage facilities, pipelines, refineries and shipping
entrepots. These industrial
complexes exist in dialectic opposition to the city proper.
In this industrial backyard,
the product of AmericaÕs heartland, our corn and wheat, pigs and cattle, flow
out through the port of New Orleans. Treasure from the outside, petroleum,
liquified natural gas and other necessities of industrial society flow in.
These industries are poor neighbors to the saltwater marshes,
bayous, barrier islands and mangrove swamps that make up the Mississippi delta,
bathing these precarious ecologies in industrial effluent and sewage. Damaged, these areas can no longer protect
New Orleans from the onslaught of storms from the seaÉa vicious circle of cause
and effect.
For this and other reasons, I
conclude reluctantly that the City of New Orleans should be abandoned where it
stands. We have the wherewithall to reconstruct this city on safer land,
farther up the Mississippi, for example, where the land is stable and
hurricanes are less likely to reach it.
We have done this on a smaller scale all over the U.S. where natural
disasters have pushed us to our limits.
Many riverside small towns have been uprooted and moved to higher ground
along the Illinois banks of the Mississippi, and even in Knox County along the
banks of streams.
Much of the French Quarter
could be disassembled and moved to a new location, to become a tourist
attraction like Williamsburg and Nauvoo.
The skyscrapers and mansions of the city, probably not. The shotgun
houses of the poor and middle class are probably damaged beyond removal and
repair. The rich can afford to
rebuild anyway, given insurance and their personal wealth.
And most likely, any new configuration of this old and
precious city will lose or destroy the peculiar ambience of New Orleans, that
combination of tastes, smells, sights, sounds and pleasures that have beguiled
our nation for decades.
The price of the big easyÕs
ambience has been too high -- many
thousands of lost citizens, hundreds of thousands of refugees (the word is not
too strong for the situation facing these poor people). We should not risk this again.
We probably shouldnÕt risk it
in Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi or Slidell, either. Maybe a five-mile national seafront,
with human habitation limited to further inland, a location both safer and more
ecologically viable than the current incursions on the fragile coasts of the
gulf. Casinos can be given, of
necessity, the right to construct their riverboats on dry land, increasing the
probable size and take of these dubious enterprises.
We have an opportunity now,
as unpleasant as that may appear, an opportunity to do something intelligent
with the land and beaches cleared for us by nature itself, red in tooth and
claw.
It is all too clear now that
our government is not up to the task of protecting its citizens in such
dangerous locales. It is clear
that the government is not willing to invest in the infrastructure that makes
such a location viable and safe. It is not even capable of providing the most
basic relief in a reasonable period of time. We should not bet on our governmentÕs abilities in the
future.
The tragedy of New Orleans
should not be repeated intentionally. No modern, industrial state should put
its citizens at such risk. It is
time to grow up.
ÉTo Miss New Orleans.