How Redemption Was Born of Devastation in an Off-Season Jaunt Through The Crescent City

This is my first visit to New Orleans where the city’s charms have had no effect on me. I hate to think that I’ve grown immune to them after years of soul hardening business brawls. Rather, I prefer to think of it more like a trip to the country. When you do a day trip to the country from LA or New York, the experience can just make you feel uncomfortable. In order to truly enjoy nature, you need time for your body to settle into it a bit- let the stresses fall away and trust that you have enough days ahead of you to make the guard let-down worth it. But the first several hours can be jarring as your urban adjustment is out of sync with nature’s rhythms and pace.

With New Orleans, it’s the same. The magic of this place can not be rushed into or fit into a Fodor’s 2-day itinerary. Your body - and more so your soul - needs to know that it can immerse itself adequately in the environment to have the whole trans-temporal experience. Otherwise the dirtiness of the place does not transmute itself into “timelessness,” nor the degeneracy of the natives into “local character.” Without the foreknowledge of immersion, it just stays filthy and weird.

Perhaps at nighttime when the ghouls truly make themselves known, you can have a nearer experience, but I doubt it. If your brain knows you’re just passing through, the daemons of the place probably don’t waste their time trying to reel you in. “Move along now, buddy. Nothing to see here. . .”

But I will also say that the new carpetbaggers make it pretty difficult to be taken in by the city as well. Maybe 1 out of 50 people you encounter here seems to be native, with moss growing out of their toes and the rococo alive in their hearts the way the place seems to demand. Reams of hipsters and emotionally stunted, historically oblivious college explorers looking for “an experience” ruin one’s ability to believe, - really believe - that you have gone back in time. And nothing pulls you out of the costume drama of the place quite like the ever present site of safety-yellow neoprene North Face parkas you see everywhere this time of year - the pervasive infestation of modern cluelessness and comfort everywhere assaulting the delicate senses looking to dissolve in an opioid delirium of mystery and antiquity. It’s awful.

In the past, I’ve been able to overcome that last hurdle, ignoring the transplants and letting the spirits of New Orleans Past cloak them enough for me to see the real beauty here. But today, I’m just passing through, and the stench of the soulless modern is more than I can bear.

I don’t think the winter air helps much either. . . One could almost be forgiven for thinking one is in the Early Autumn bustle of New York City and not the Deep South in the Dead of Winter. Coldness brings out the hurry in everyone. There’s no languorousness in this weather, and the beauty here cries out to be doted on and indulged, not glanced at in the rush to get indoors.

The drowsification of the summer heat is its own sort of consciousness altering agent, enhancing the colors and curves here like a mild psychotropic. Being here in the winter crispness is almost like seeing the back of a Hollywood film set. Without the gooey gauze of summer sweat bubbles to defocus you, you see all the stuff you’re not supposed to see - the riggers walking around, the starlets out of character - and the glorious illusion dries up in front of you like a veil of mist in the desert sun.

So I think I will heed its spirits’ admonitions and just move right along until I can give it the proper “country” experience it deserves. So long, New Orleans. . .I don’t foresee having any of these troubles in Houston.

D

[Update: By the time I got to posting this, I had driven one too many cobblestone streets, and the enchantment kicked in. Amazing how fast that happened. I really do love this place. . . D]