NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 8)

Former Senator Larry Craig, he of a certain bathroom stall incident at the Minneapolis airport, was one American disinclined to rebuild New Orleans.

"Louisiana and New Orleans are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been," Craig was quoted as saying in the McCall (Idaho) Star-News. "A rookie cop on the ground in New Orleans, they pay him or her $17,000 starting pay and then wink and say you better make the rest of it on the street."

"I'm not humorous when I suggest we should turn it back to what it was, a wetland," Craig told the Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), saying that some areas of the Gulf, including New Orleans' flooded Ninth Ward, should be abandoned.

As they say in the South: Mmmm-hmmm.

Was it not time to spend the FEMA money and repair the wetlands, the infrastructure and the living spaces of this city? Are we not: Linked.

Two men arrived at the finish line of the Ironman competition with a string of rope joining them hip-to-hip. They rode bikes, swam in Lake Pontchartrain (Ponch-a-train) and ran through the city for seventy miles: Linked.

After Katrina, in St. Bernard's Parish, people waited days for help in ungodly temperatures. They sat on rooftops under a blue, cloudless sky and in heat so intense it burned their mouths to breathe. In some locations the water rose up to twenty feet. Panicked deer hopped from rooftop to rooftop, snakes and stingrays swam by and wild Russian boars searched for dry land. The first help some folks received was from Canada. A Vancouver-based search-and-rescue team arrived to serve. The neighborhood is now known as "Little Canada": Linked.

I had jumbling thoughts in my head as I raced along a sidewalk and passed an older black man sitting on a doorway stoop, sipping from a can of beer in a brown paper sack.

Smile! he shouted to me.

Shocked, I did exactly that. I smiled big and laughed out loud.

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, he quipped. And we were: Linked.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 7)

Funny how fast it can happen, when it happens: Change.

Sunday was killer hot but by Monday I was bundled up in two sweaters, a jacket and a scarf. Forget the Panama hat; it would have blown away. The temperature had plummeted twenty degrees to a daytime high of 62 degrees and a nighttime of 40.

One evening I took the St. Charles streetcar to Tulane (TOO-lane) University to see Joan Didion read from her work. I like Didion. I'm a fan of her sharp, concise writing.

After a long-winded intro by an English professor, Joan Didion entered center-stage through a set of heavy, dusty, old-fashioned curtains. The audience welcomed her with a standing ovation worthy of the petite rock star of the literary world she is. Didion ignored the applause and got right to the task at hand. She read from The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband at their dinner table.

She read of the fire she built in the living room that evening, of the Scotch she poured for him and the salad she tossed. She paused in her reading and then continued to relate their brief conversation and how she noticed John's hand raised in the air as his head slumped forward, and how she thought he was making a joke she didn't like. It was moving to hear the writing from her lips and in a voice that sounded both strong and exhausted.

She confirmed that as the book sat stacked in warehouses waiting for delivery, her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, also died.

Walking the neighborhoods of New Orleans, listening to Joan Didion read and taking a disaster tour had me wondering how or if we are linked to each other.

I was struck by the irony of Vanessa Redgrave, having recently lost her own daughter, set to perform the play version of this work at St. John's Cathedral in New York in October of 2009. I thought of how courageous and compelled these women were to put their sorrow into their art, perhaps because there was nothing else to be done. And now, tragically, they had become: Linked.

The shrimpers of the Louisiana coast are known as able-bodied, independent people born of families long tied to fishing. The sea is what they know and they know it well. Today, in the swampland and bayous, white shrimp boats languished half-sunk and rotten, scattered like abandoned toys. I saw these boat carcasses from the window of a tour bus. I was on the Hurricane Katrina Tour. A journey that would take us through the neighborhoods of Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, St. Bernard's Parish and the Ninth Ward. We'd see breached levees. We'd drive by devastated homes, public schools, shopping malls and restaurants. We'd see neighborhoods that had become virtual ghost towns.

The coastal wetlands are eroding at a rate of 16,000 to 20,000 acres every year. These same marshes provide natural protection from the damage of storm surges.

New Orleans' industries have a combined domestic economic impact of $140 billion every year. We eat the shrimp and oysters, our cars run on the oil, and we use the steel, rubber and coffee that arrive through New Orleans' ports. Nearly $4 billion of FEMA aid designated to help the region sat, unspent, three and a half years after Katrina.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 6)

I didn't want to hang tight to the French Quarter and its tourist crowds. It was, of course, a positive advancement to have conventions, weddings and spring breakers returning to the city but these people tended to spend their time in this one location and I needed to get out. I carried a small notebook and wrote of the images I saw:

• A roster of names attached to the outer wall of an Episcopal church. Murder victims. The list specified: SHOT, STABBED, BEATEN.

• On the cement stoop of an apartment building a skinny pock-faced young woman with straggly red hair nodded, eyes shut, as if her veins had recently been fed. Standing over her, a skinny black man punched at intercom buttons. He held a leash attached to a small, caramel-colored puppy so desperate, maybe for food and water, that when it struggled to climb the top step, it crumpled in a heap.

• Middle-class neighborhoods where children rode bikes, parents went to work and lawns were mowed on Saturday afternoons were now filled with empty houses that had been waiting three and a half years and counting for insurance companies to pay up. In 2005, when Katrina and Rita swept through, these same companies raked in record-setting profits of $48 billion; in 2006, $68 billion.

• In the Ninth Ward an utter wreck of a house sat high on cement blocks, the result of initial work done by a contractor. The house was owned by a man who gave everything he had to the contractor. Said contractor left the project and disappeared with the money.

• Junked FEMA trailers filled with formaldehyde, a colorless gas known to cause burning eyes, wheezing, nosebleeds, and cancer.

• Many people in New Orleans will tell you the Katrina flooding was not a "natural disaster," but the failed work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Levee walls had been planted 17 feet deep when they should have been 72 feet deep. The walls collapsed like dominoes and the water came in. In some places it took four minutes to rise from ground to roof level. The number of bodies found was tabulated close to two thousand — but not all the bodies had been found.

• After weeks of draining, the houses were filled with rats and snakes. And then the mold. If you wanted to buy a house in Lakeview, or New Orleans East, or Gentilly, you had to be prepared to wear a Hazmat suit.

• Governor Bobby Jindal had decided to relocate adolescent mental health facilities to a new location forty miles away, across Lake Pontchartrain. Most of the patients' parents didn't have cars to visit their children and there was no public transportation to the facilities. The Governor saved the State of Louisiana $9 million in the move.

The other side of lovely.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 5)

Back in the Quarter, on a street called Pirate Alley, I wandered into William Faulkner's former house, now a bookstore, and bought a copy of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. The novel, set in early 20th-century New Orleans, tells the story of a jazz musician and a photographer. I bought the book for three reasons: first, to read a novel set in New Orleans; second, to support an independent bookstore; and third, how could I resist? This was a former home of William Faulkner.

By two o'clock I was hungry again and, back at the Food Festival, I gobbled up a piece of fried catfish and a scoop of potato salad. This had me parched and sent me into Ye Old Absinthe Bar, where I quaffed a mug of amber ale as quickly as one might a glass of water. Back at the hotel by three o'clock, I had a shower and...oh yes...slipped like a love note into my pure white envelope of a bed and drifted off with thoughts of dinner.

When I awoke I called William back in L.A.

You okay?

Sure.

What are you eating?

Trader Joe's frozen dinners.

Okay.

You?

I'm great. I mean, eating my way around the city and writing.

In New Orleans I took to sending emails home to friends as I'd not done since our Hong Kong trip. It was in this writing that I started to consider another book. The writing my teacher Eunice Scarfe liked to call "the story behind the story." Maybe there was something there since I wasn't entirely certain how to repair the novel that I'd finished then shoved to a corner deep in my computer.