The last one?

Isn't it funny how minutes turn to days turn to months turn to years? Today was bright, cool and sparkling and as I rode the ferry across to meet a friend for coffee, I was reminded of how much I love the crossing that I make too seldom now.

For one thing, the tolls on the bridge went away, and with them the funding for the ferry. Now the ferry limps along, one tiny pedestrian boat from 715am-645pm only, leaving those living on the West Bank without a car a prisoner by the time the evening news is over. No more quick jaunts across for red beans and rice on Mondays. At some point they are going to start charging $2 each way, and maybe increase the hours back to 6am-midnight, but who knows when that will happen. For another, I crashed my bike and broke my elbow and couldn't ride my bike to work for several months.

So, as with all things, alas, the shine wore off the penny a bit, though I kept collecting moments and never wrote them down. Perhaps this will be my final ferry blog-- I have a new job that doesn't allow for a riverboat morning commute and less and less people ride these days, which cramps my viewing pleasure.

But, New Orleans is New Orleans, and like everything else, the ferry finds a way to keep on, as do the people. A few favorite memories since last we spoke:

I rode for about 8 weeks with a labor crew from down south who were replacing rotten pilings on the river. On Fridays they were loud and boisterous, planning the weekend according to how much wiggle room they had with their bills that week. Come Monday morning they would be quiet, heads tilted back, mouths open, trying to catch a few more winks after what I can only assume were raucous weekends. The leader of the group was a loud skinny man who talked loud and clearly thought he was hilarious (and he was), entertaining all of the passengers with his stories. The one that sticks in my head:

(they were talking about living in the city vs. living in the country)

"The only woman I know who lives in the city and doesn't lock her door is my grandma. And she's got the Alzheimer's. You have to be careful with her, though, because if you sneak out to smoke, she'll hear a noise and get scared and come lock the door. Then I'm locked out. So I knock on the door and she comes to the door and yells 'Who you is?' and I say, 'it's me grandma, your grandson'. And then she says, 'My grandson's in jail' so I say 'No, your good grandson'."

Then there is the old man with a giant sousaphone.

And this fellow, who I only saw one day. I don't know if you can see it, but he is in a wheelchair, wearing a hat that says, "I'm walking with Jesus." I know it's a sin to laugh, but still.

Today I saw my pelican friends. And a man dancing and rocking out to "Rocking Around the Clock".

And I felt so happy to be right where I was. Maybe this will be my last ferry blog, but that's ok. It was so fun to sit back and watch the world slide by on that muddy water for a few minutes each day. And you friends responded to my silly stories with a poem, a pelican sculpture and a song, which all moved me. It's a big beautiful world out there, let's keep our eyes up so we can savor it.

Phone Conversation Overheard on a Hot Friday Afternoon

Warning: Explicit Lyrics! Read on at your own risk.

- Yeah. Hey. Hey man. What you been doing? Where you at?
- …
- What do you mean you’re at home? If you was at home already why didn’t you come pick my ass up instead of making me take the damn ferry across? It’s hot as a mothafucka out here. Shit, man.
- …
- Man you are a lazy piece of shit. It’s like 100 degrees out here and you’re laying your ass on the couch. You better be there when I get there cause I’m gonna slap the shit out of you. It’s hot as a mothafucka out here.
(Random man not on the phone, but with a bottle of hooch) -  Yeah you right.

Changes

Lately, it seems like everything that is worth saving is in dire need of salvation. Luckily, I've always been a sucker for a good cause, but I have to wonder why  humans seem predisposed to destroy that which we hold most dear?

I heard a statistic recently that a new generation is born every 5 years. Not because we've redefined what constitutes a generation, but because over the last 15 years or so life and technology began to change so rapidly that people born even 5 years apart see the world in completely different ways. And the pace of change continues to accelerate. Change in and of itself isn't a bad thing. If we don't change, we die. What worries me is that we seem to be careening into an ever-narrowing tunnel with no sense or understanding of what came before or what lies ahead. I worry that change for change's sake is a cancerous madness (I think that's Mr. Ed Abbey I'm quoting).

The landscape in which we build our lives is constantly changing, too. Yesterday a wetland, today a Burger King. The land has changed so much between my grandfather's lifetime and my own that my very sense of what "normal" or "functioning" is skewed. A channelized river with concrete banks seemed perfectly normal and natural to me growing up, because that was all I knew. For god's sake, I am a professional environmentalist and I didn't realize the river I grew up swimming in was an artificial millrace connected to the much smaller, natural river channel (which I had never swum in) until I was nearly 30 years old. My very concept of what constitutes a natural environment is permanently altered by being born when I was. What does this mean for people born 50 years from now? What are we losing that we haven't yet fathomed?

What are we changing into? And once changed, can we ever return?

Fortunately, there is a remedy for the growing sense of loss I feel when I think about how quickly we use and discard what we deem valueless. There are people who look to and learn from the past to inform their lives, their sense of personhood and connectedness in the world. They are the people who hang photos of ancestors along those of their children. They are ones who turn up at a public meeting to save a stand of old growth forest. And they are the ones who take the time to craft pelicans out of old bricks from a building one's great great grandfather used to live in.

By honoring the past and by understanding that mindless change for the sake of growth or profit or simply because one feels empty is not enough to feed our souls, these people give rise to a vision of  a future that rightly holds tight to what matters most.

Happy, you are part of the cure for what ails this weary world. Thank you.

Question

How, pray tell, does one ride one's bicycle with one's breeches around one's knees?

An alligator!

What I see

I captured this gentleman a couple of weeks ago on a beautiful spring day. The only glimpse I caught of him was his reflection in the mirror. Here is his (completely imagined, wholly fabricated) story told on the 5 minute ferry ride.

"My name is Frank. Toots down there at the bar on Frenchman's may have told you it's Frances, but if you like your teeth, it's Frank. Only one ever got to call me Frances is my dear mother, and she's ten years in the ground now. Well, and Coraline. But that's another story for another beer.

Yeah, this bike is a real beauty, isn't she? Got her 3 years ago when I retired from offshore work for good. Good money in being a roughneck but after a certain age, it's hard on a man. 28 days of straight hard labor with no rest is hard on a man's body, hard on his woman, too. By the time I figured out it was a young man's game I'd grown out of, I'd lost a finger, my daughter's graduating high school and the right key to open my own damn front door. Cora coulda waited til I got home for a stretch, but I guess the waiting got to her, too.  At least now I can grow my beard as long as I damn well please.

Oh, I travel just about anywhere I can get to. Heading down to Venice for some fishing this weekend. Working part time doing trim work, saving up for my trips and taking off when I have enough dough to get me someplace grand makes for easy street. I've seen a hell of a lot of the Gulf of Mexico in my life, but it's all been underwater, you know? Now I'm taking my time and seeing it all one road at a time."

Ferry Style

This awesome guy was totally stylin' in his craft paper tophat, acid washed jean jacket and cool skull pin (which I coveted, and which you can buy when the Blue Nile nightclub has an art show).

What it means to live

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.

Elements of a good morning

Sunshine, coffee, river, peach danish (still warm from the oven) and a ferry ride.

Our Global Hope

Look, the "Global Hope" bulk oil carrier is in town. I'm sure that's an absolutely accurate name for the ship.



Ship's details here (one of my favorite new sites to visit!):

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/shipdetails.aspx?MMSI=351673000

What do you see?

I know it's supposed to be someone lifting a man overboard, but to me it looks like a lady in a ball gown on a boat! Strapless, cause that is tres chic!

What freedom wears

I remember my dad telling me once that there is no shame in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, only pride. At the time I was working as a laborer at a large plant nursery for 8 hours a day in the blazing heat of summer with a father and son from Mexico, Esteban (father) and Jose (son). We watered plants, cut them back, made small repairs around the greenhouses, moved plants from one place to another, transplanted established plants to bigger pots, and every once in a while propagated plants, taking cuttings from healthy plants that would then grow into new baby plants. It was exhausting, hard labor. I'd drink 2 gallons of water a day and come home at 5pm only to take a shower, eat a sandwich and collapse into bed, exhausted. I did this 5 days a week for 8 hours a day in the summer. Jose and Esteban did it 6 days a week for years on end.

One evening I talked to my dad about how hard they worked, how they could work circles around me. Some days, the only way I made it through the day with its sweat and dirt and sun, always the sun, was to remind myself that I was going to college, that one day this wouldn't have to be my life if I didn't choose it. But for Jose and Esteban, this was as good as it could get. No retirement, no health insurance, just back breaking labor until they couldn't work any longer. And yet, they came to work every day happy to be there, working hard everyday and clearly taking a lot of pride in what they did. Pride in one's work, no matter what it is, was an important lesson that I am grateful to have learned early on.

Last Friday I encountered two delightful souls on the morning ferry ride. One was an older gentleman who clearly had spent most of his life in the sun. He stood beside me on the rail, taking pictures of the city with a small digital camera. I don't think he noticed himself doing it, but when he took a picture of something he (apparently) liked, he gave a little grunt of happiness. What I loved most about this man was his outfit. He wore a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of cut-off jeans. The jeans were wrangler-type work jeans, and they still bore the evidence from years of starch and ironing in a crease in the front. Perfectly starched and creased cut-off shorts. I imagined this man a recent retiree enjoying his freedom after decades of hard work. I pictured him heading home after his last day on the job, walking into the kitchen to get a cold beer, then rummaging through the junk drawer to find a pair of scissors. With the blades in hand he walks to his closet and systematically removes all of the legs from his pants and the sleeves from his shirts. FREEDOM!

The other man was on his way to work. We remarked politely about the beautiful weather. (Here is where I have to tell you that I don't actually use people's real named on this blog, for obvious reasons. This man gave me what I am sure is a nickname, but it is so apt to him that clearly I can't use it, either. So I regret to inform you that I will have to use a different animal than the one he told me).

This man had a thick thatch of chest hair, a somewhat long head of hair (and chops) and eyes that were very alive. He looked just like a panther, I thought. Then he stuck out his hand and introduced himself as  Panther. It was my turn to grunt in happiness! Panther asked me what I did for a living, I told him and then reciprocated. He told me, shamefacedly, that he worked in construction, that he was in "limbo". My heart twisted for him because he was so clearly embarrassed that he didn't say, I don't know, "doctor" or "lawyer". Immediately I felt myself wanting to tell him that there is no shame in making a living, only pride. But I stayed silent and we both went on to make our way in the world on a warm spring morning.

Excuse me, but...

there's a cucumber in your bike basket!




(I don't know why, but this just made me laugh for some reason!)

Big boat, bird

The Maxerrelaxer

I’d like to take a moment to extol the virtues of a rare breed of human—the one who can relax anywhere, anytime. Some of us, while we are waiting in line at the post office or stuck at a red light in our car, find ourselves becoming agitated at having to wait. We see this interlude as wasted time, and we spend it sighing in exasperation, texting on our phones or shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, our bags growing heavier and heavier with each passing second until we are absolutely positive that a lead brick somehow made it into our purse or bag. Often, if there is more than one line, we convince ourselves that all of the other lines are moving faster than ours, but we know in our heart that if we move, our luck will then run out and the new line will stop altogether. And so we sit there in a kind of fuming stasis, waiting until we are released from the purgatory between one important something ending and the next beginning.

But some people have the uncanny ability to just take a load off regardless of where the opportunity presents itself. Let’s call them the “maxerrelaxers”. Sometimes you see them sprawled on the floor—dirty, clean, it doesn’t matter to the maxerrelaxer—in a long line at the DMV or waiting for the mall to open. They don’t let little things like a dearth of chairs prevent them from chilling out! I strive to be a maxxerrelaxer, but the truth is, I don’t like to sit on the filthy floor. That’s why I was so excited to see a man today who represents my ideal. He didn’t need the floor to take a load off—where I saw only a chain railing, he saw a hammock. Brilliant. Notice he even has one foot kicked up in a classic maxerrelaxer stance. I salute you! I will endeavor to take a load off and enjoy the wait just like you!

Where we goin' now, Shrek?

Sweet!

Motorcycle Maintenance and the Art of Conversation

Yesterday I met a lovely middle-aged man—we’ll call him MM—who was on a grand adventure with his middle-aged motorcycle buddies from Oklahoma down south to the ocean. I was a little peeved at MM when they first roared onto the ferry on account of him parking his bike WAY too close to me, thus invading my personal space. I decided to ignore them but then MM chose to strike up a conversation about the headlight on my bicycle. He ended up being funny and charming and was one of the rare conversationalists who asks you a question after answering yours.

One thing I’ve discovered talking to random strangers on the boat is that most anyone is overjoyed to tell you their story: what they’re up to on any given day, where they’re from, what body parts ache when it rains, etc. but very very rarely do I come across a person who seems genuinely interested in anything other than talking about themselves. And don’t get me started on people who glance at their phones every twenty seconds waiting for someone more interesting than you to communicate with them (sometimes I’m guilty, too). But MM wasn’t one of these one-sided talkers, and over the course of our 10 minute ride he asked about my work, and I told him where to camp on the Florida Gulf Coast and how to get to the Florabama (I hope he made it!).

In honor of MM and his motorcycle gang, I dare you to have a real conversation with at least 3 people today…it doesn’t have to be a long conversation, just an authentic one. Report the results of your experiment in the comments below, if you are so inclined.

Contact

Friday proved to be a day of windy rides. On the bike ride to the ferry, some dust blew in my contact and I had the bright idea to take it out to try to wipe it off once I got on the boat. Of course the wind blew it out of my hand and onto the ferry deck, which I'm sure was washed at least once in 1973. Blind, befuddled and wind-whipped, I proceeded to squat down and sweep my hand along the deck, my contact-less eye squinted shut so I could see well enough to actually find the contact, being careful not to move my feet lest I hear the tell-tale crunch of a hard contact shattering beneath my feet (a sound I know all too well, alas!). At some point I realized that to the passengers, I was now the weird lady on the ferry. Finally, behind me and to the left, I saw my contact glinting on the deck. I picked it up and held it in one hand, which forced me to weeble wobble my bike with the other off the ferry and into the street. I decided I couldn't make it to the office like this, so I detoured across the street to the casino to find a bathroom to wash my errant lens. I walked in through the doors to the guard, one eye still squinted shut (I really can't see anything with only one contact in because of my astigmatism). I'm sure I looked like just another customer come to play the slots at 730 in the morning and he waved me through without batting an eyelash.

I'm happy to report that I am typing this now with my vision fully restored.

The best part of the day was the ride back to Algiers after a long day at a conference. I decided to eat dinner in the quarter and dark was rapidly approaching when I got on the boat. The air was cool and the clouds scurried fast across the sky, tired after a long day, I imagine. As we approached the Algiers dock, I looked back and saw the lights of the street car moving down the road. It's a terrible picture, but do you see the line of beautiful, warm glowing yellow in the middle of the picture? That's the streetcar. For some reason it just struck me as so pretty and I got really happy.

So the day ended happily after all. Yay!

Yelp! It's a ferry!

Today I found out that the Algier/Canal St. Ferry has been reviewed on Yelp. For your entertainment, here are a few of my favorite snippets. Read all the reviews here

From Sunil: I wonder about the passengers though. There were couple of folks with beers in hand and this was in the middle of the day.

From Mo: Lets face it, the Mississippi aint looking its prettiest when it meets up with New Orleans. It just looks kinda industrial and dirty.

From Russel: I like taking visitors here after they've had a day running around the FQ like kids on speed, as the relaxing change of pace can usually do them some good by that point.

From Vicky: I heart you. You are the best way to cross the river. I love that I can drive on, park my car and watch New Orleans come closer or zoom away. It's also a great way to see the bridge closer, and from a different point of view.

No, Vicky. I heart you.

From Danielle: Nice views, ride the Mississippi and get your Tom Sawyer on!

Indeed.

From John: If you're bored, go across & come back. It's a kick.

Spring stream of consciousness

Spring is springing and there is no escape! The air is heavy despite a rising breeze and I should know better than to forget a jacket when a very temperamental March is only a few days away. But I have my Friday coffee and peach danish, so life isn't too terrible as I sit here and wait for the ferry.

The sky is darkening rapidly-- clouds are approaching the West Bank from the bridge and the French Quarter. Every time a gust blows across the river I am caressed with a wet washcloth of wind--it's both invigorating and clammy, like holding a boy's sweaty hand for the first time. 

A man beside me is wearing scrubs-- I think because they are comfortable and not because he works  in the medical field.  I really want to eat the peach danish in my bag but I'm saving it for when I can move away from Mr. Scrubs' cigarette so I can enjoy the peaches and cream aroma properly. I smelled freshly cut grass on the ride in this morning and it made me want to dig in the dirt so badly my heart constricted. This time of year makes my blood ache to grow flowers and strawberries and fling the windows wide so I can smell and hear the world coming to life again after the forced quiet of winter.

At the coffee shop this morning they were already preparing for the Lunch rush-- the special today is a Lenten dish and when the lady told me I was immediately transported back to my Catholic school days. Though I no longer practice, this hearkening back to the rituals of my childhood is somehow comforting. Family has been on my mind lately. Last night I dreamed I paid Rodney Dangerfield $200 to be my dad for the day. I have no idea where this came from and wonder what other strange B list celebrities live in my subconscious unbeknownst to me.

On the ferry now and all of a sudden the wind went from playful and wet to cold and fierce. The rain is starting to fall and I will be a drowned cat by the time I get to work. Blowing so hard now that the ferry can't dock. I love it.