For the first couple of months I was here, I felt grimy and overwhelmed pretty much all of the time. Everything about NOLA is pungent, overripe. I'd ride my bike from here to there, constantly assaulted by the smell of diesel fumes, urine, decaying garbage, and the evidence of one two many hurricanes (both the drinking kind and the weather kind). I'd wait at the ferry terminal in the evening and sit on the yellow wall to watch a rat or two scurry around in pursuit of dinner or love or the meaning of life and wonder how I could ever let my guard down in a place so overstimulating.
But now it's been almost six months of getting to know this place, and though my neighborhood garbage truck still smells like vanilla-scented decaying flesh, I'm starting to feel more comfortable in the swirl that is New Orleans.
This place is alive. This place knows what it is to be alive. I was thinking about this earlier today on the ferry ride to the Quarter. There are other cities in the South with good music, good food and good people, but there is just something different about New Orleans. I think the city's extreme joie de vivre has to do with several things, two of which I'd like to explore today:
1. The Mighty Mississippi. This river brings new ideas and products and people and diseases through New Orleans at an alarmingly fast rate. Cholera, the blues, bananas, travelers, artists, grifters, oil, and on and on. I imagine that living next to such a fast-moving body of water has to affect people, too. There is a constant flushing that has to be cleansing on a subconscious level, leaving one feeling inspired and open to new ideas. At least it feels that way for me.
2. New Orleans and her people are always on the brink of destruction. For every wonderful thing the river brings, she brings hard things, too. Disease in earlier times and too too much water on occasion. Swirling storms threaten the city from the South for half the year, every year, sometimes working in concert with our hubris to wreak havoc that one can't rightly comprehend unless one was unlucky enough to live through it. And those are just a couple of the natural forces working against the people of New Orleans. There seem to be plenty of human-instigated challenges to go around, too.
And yet the city goes on, embracing people down on their luck and those whose star is rising with equal love and abandon. It's almost as if this place knows that life is only a temporary respite between the darkness from whence we came and the darkness to which we must all return. With the knowledge that the end could come at any time, the city, and the people, live with a throbbing vibrancy that colors everything about this place and makes it overwhelmingly beautiful despite it all.
What a beautiful encapsulation of New Orleans: "a temporary respite between the darkness from whence we came and the darkness to which we must all return"
ReplyDeleteI love that summation...pretty much 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die'.
And others might say that we learn things in the physical 'respite' which we cannot learn in the darkness.
Either way the rotting earthiness of the lower Mississippi River environs both sickens and cleanses us in a way no other place does so well.
I would try to explain more about why I am drawn to this city but Ferry Tales already says it better-great blog!