Just the other night I was watching an old
baseball movie on TV, “A League of Their Own.” Dottie, the catcher for
Atlanta, calls for time as her sister, Kit, steps into the box. “High
fast balls,” she tells the pitcher. “Can’t hit ‘em, can’t lay off ‘em.”
New Orleans is my high fast ball. Can’t live here,
can’t stay away. I moved to Tucson after Hurricane Katrina, “The
Storm,” as the locals say. But I’ve come back more times than I can
count, driving through Lordsburg, Deming, El Paso, and stopping for the
night in Junction, where the endless flat turns into hills. Last trip,
when I went for dinner before collapsing at the Roadway Inn, the
waitress greeted me: “Bohemia, right?” You know you’ve got it bad
when a server in Texas knows your drink.
This time, I’m staying in New Orleans for a whole
year, in an attic apartment by City Park. I’ve rented out my Tucson
house so I can watch my grandson get his start. I miss the desert, but
my body defaults to this place as if it’s pre-selected in some hard
drive at my core. The minute I step onto its sidewalks my whole gait
changes—I slow down, I sashay—and my mucus membranes let out a sigh.
It’s a muscle memory as much as a choice. It’s a rhythm, a lilt.
My first stop when I got here in September was the
Rite Aid to pick up some cash. The woman at the register, black, about
my age, bagged my shampoo and opened the till. “Here your twenty,
baby,” she said.
I misted up. Where else does a purchase come with an
endearment? And when you’ve got “baby,” who needs verbs? The same thing
happened at Halloween. My son and his wife were cooking when the
trick-or-treaters rang the bell. One little girl took her candy, told
us thanks, and gave her own sweet back to us: “Y’all food smell good,”
she said.
There’s a tee shirt shop on Magazine with a singlet
that reads, “Listen to Your City.” And I’m hearing it, not just the
music down on Frenchmen Street, but the voices with their own riffs,
their own motifs: “Hey, how y’all doin’?” “Hey, all right.” I’m hearing
the poetry. “Y’all food smell good.” Two spondees.
But mostly I’m looking at a cityscape, a big messy
jumble of old and new. I’m walking through it, around the paths in City
Park, down to the Quarter via Esplanade, and through the streets of
Lakeview where I used to live before the lake moved in.
I’m looking at trees. The knobby stalwarts are still
here, the ancient oaks, along the new-built jogging paths in City Park
and by the practice track off Roosevelt Mall. But in their shadows the
young trees mark the spots where the brackish water took its toll.
Dying oaks stood rooted there when the mayor first
called us back to “look and leave.” I looked at them. They were
twisted, denuded, wearing their trauma for all to see. Then the city
axed them and planted more. Ten years later those saplings have
quadrupled in size, on a beeline to the canopy that shades the road.
By the shores of the Big Lake, one shady survivor
has become the park’s Zen Tree, its branches draped with wind chimes
whose deep gongs reassure us: “I’m okay, you’re okay, it’s past.” And
then, a little farther down the path, a Katrina tree rescinds all that.
It’s as if there had been a third choice then, when the arborists
determined who would live and who would die: a “maybe” or an “other,”
an “almost dead,” a “wait and see.” The gamblers lost. Amid the
survivors this one pokes up like a bad dream, frazzled, failing to
thrive. When I look at it, the storm comes back. I can almost hear the
wind blow.
By the art museum, where massive oaks once lined the
road, someone lost all hope and clear-cut the lot of them, planting in
their stead that anti-oak, the crepe myrtle, slender-bodied, bush as
much as tree. Someone played it safe.
In the neighborhoods, on the other hand, people
dreamed big—too big. They swung for the fences, building Hummer-houses
on bungalow lots. Or going for a land-grab and ending up with an
estate. My former house was the fourth from the veterinary clinic. Now
it’s the second. One neighbor spread out on the three lots north of
mine. The clinic ballooned in its former space as if, having given up
on small pets, it now deals in ungulates. Down the street the friendly
little school with its tiled depictions of nursery rhymes now looms
above its marquee. I can’t imagine a kindergartener’s first day at this
place, how scary that would be.
My coffee house, next to the vet’s, has kept its
footprint, except that it’s a Starbucks now. There’s that same side
door I would enter through when it was Coffee and Company, and we’d go
there after soccer games to pick up a lentil plate, too tired to cook.
When it first went up, I noticed the racing stripe above eye level,
then lettered beneath it the word “Katrina.” Immediately, I understood.
That’s the water line, the mark of the lake-lap overhead. My house had
a real one, just along the porch lights; every house in Lakeview did.
We hardly need a “lest we forget.” I like to think it’s empathy, a
corporation’s version of “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Here in Mid City houses wear their storm-signs too.
Every several blocks one flashes the X spray-painted by the National
Guard back in mid-September, 2005. I’m not sure why. I couldn’t wait to
blot mine out when I lived in my son’s house just after the storm. I
ended up painting his entire house just to cover up that bit of blight.
Now, strolling my grandson, I encounter on some tidy
street, a house encrypted with that selfsame code. It’s like coming
upon a Katrina tree, or a ghost bike propped up on a city street. To
me, it’s a kind of wallowing or maybe a sign of survivor’s guilt: “The
lake might have passed me by, but I was here too, and I’ve got proof.”
One day as I was pushing Andrés down the sidewalk, a
woman came out to say hello, as strangers here are wont to do. “Wow,
what color are those eyes?” she asked. “Well,” I answered, “I’m not
sure. They’re not blue and they’re not brown. I guess they’re grey.”
She took a closer look. “Lake Pontchartrain eyes,” she proclaimed.
And once she said that, I saw it too, a water line
almost to his rooftop, a strange murky marker on this new iteration,
this boy who, having missed it all, still carries the lake in the color
of his eyes.
At the end of that movie, Dottie and Kit are parting
ways, Dottie to marry and leave the league, Kit to play on. “Lay off
the high ones,” Dottie advises. “I like the high ones,” Kit replies.
And there’s the rub. I am at once the character Dottie, who abandoned
ship after the storm, and Kit who, despite herself, can’t lay off.
Before my lease runs out and I return to Tucson, I
have three weeks to walk the city: long, hot out-and-backs from the
southern boundary of City Park all the way to the river, an hour away.
Toward the end, just about to Decatur, I reach a kind of tipping point,
my footfalls in synch with the beating of my heart, the sweat spilling
into my eyes. And in that rhythm, in this space, I say to myself: “Here
your city, baby. Here it is.”
Sally Cole