New Orleans

The news stories and pictures from New Orleans are so shocking and heartbreaking, I can only watch for short periods of time before I have to break away. Yes, I know that other cities and towns were devastated, and that pains me -- but my mourning for New Orleans is personal. I visited there once, and loved it so much that the memories of that visit are among the best I own. I always intended to return someday.

This was back in 1977. I was married to Jay, the father of Firstborn -- who of course was NotYetBorn at that time. We took a vacation the last two weeks in July. We spent the first week in Texas, with a friend who'd formerly lived in the Midwest but moved back home with his parents. When we left there we took off driving with no firm idea of where we were going. We had a tent and our camping equipment, a road atlas, and a magazine-like directory of KOA Kampgrounds which I looked through as we drove. (We also had a bag of truly obnoxious beef jerky that we'd bought on the road somewhere in Texas. I swear, you could chew on a hunk of that stuff all day without chewing it up or getting any nourishment.) I alternated between the atlas and the KOA guide, analyzing where we could go and what we could do there. We'd started north toward Baton Rouge, if I recall correctly, but when I turned to the Louisiana pages New Orleans caught my eye... and we turned around.

We checked into the KOA in Hammond, which is on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. The great thing about the KOAs was that each of them offered something beyond the camping experience itself -- in Hammond's case, daily guided bus tours of New Orleans. By the time we started setting up our tent we'd already signed up for the next day's tour.

The bus left in the morning, 9:00 or so. It was actually a van, a 12-passenger, and almost full. The driver was witty and informative, giving us history and local color on the drive across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway and into town. Once there, we spent the morning driving around the various neighborhoods and learning about them. It was a blindingly beautiful day, and I took all the typical tourist pictures out the window of the van: Canal Street, the Garden District, the hotel where much of Uncle Tom's Cabin was written, shotgun shacks, the back of Pete Fountain's house.

By lunchtime we were in the French Quarter, and here we left the van and wandered freely for a couple of hours. We had maps that guided us to reasonably-priced restaurants, points of interest, and souvenir shops. Jay and I ate outdoors at a charming courtyard restaurant, then went exploring on Bourbon Street. We took several pictures of Antoine's Restaurant: I've always loved Dinner at Antoine's, and this was the first time ever I'd visited the actual setting of a favorite book. We bought a few souvenirs -- a "Bourbon Street" sign is the only one I remember.

When we returned to the van, the guided tour resumed. We formally toured the French Quarter, looking and learning, and taking pictures out the windows. After that we went to one of the above-ground cemeteries, St. Louis No. 3, and disembarked again for a walking tour. We walked among rows and rows of elaborate tombs and crypts. The back wall fascinated me: it was a white marble mausoleum, with the dead stacked four-high as if in file drawers.

The next, and last, stop was a park on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain. Here we got out and stretched our legs one last time, and enjoyed the beauty and tranquility of the huge lake and its surrounding greenery. (That memory in particular haunts me.) Then we were back in the van, back on the Causeway; back at the KOA in time to fire up the Coleman stove and make supper.

Our vacation had a few more days to run, and we camped our way through Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri before arriving back home. But the New Orleans tour was the glittering highlight of the trip, so fascinating and fun I could hardly believe we'd stumbled onto it. The city beguiled me with its beauty, its history; its raffish and slightly disreputable glamour. I wanted to go back, maybe even move somewhere close by. This was pure moonbeams; we were a factory worker and a stenographer, everything we cared about was here... and the years went by.

Now New Orleans is wounded, perhaps mortally; and I cry when I think of what has been lost. I hadn't started keeping my journal yet when I visited there, so I've done all this from memory with the aid of my pictures. The fact that those memories are so accessible, so vivid, after all these years is a tribute to how deeply New Orleans affected me. I wish I could give more money, more than money; I wish I could make it not have happened.