In Which There Is Water-Oh-My-God-Everywhere-!

New Orleans, LA--Once again (in a metaphorical rather than literal sense), some other-named town just outside of a city will not get its just deserts in this blog, as New Orleans will serve as a stand-in for whatever municipality truly contains the St. Bernard State Park (which, by the way, has free wireless, as do two of the other three LA S.P.s that Eve or I or both have stayed at; the one holdout S.P., at Grand Isle, is consistently rated one of the top State Parks in the country, a fact which I'm sure provides its supervisor a simultaneously plentiful source of pride (that his State Park, alone of Louisiana's, made the list) and fear (that when the day inevitably comes that sees G.I.S.P. fall off the list, his professional life will be, for all intents and purposes, ended)). Had I written something at Bayou Segnette S.P., however, I would most likely have town-stamped the post "Westwego, LA," not because B.S.S.P. is any further from New Orleans than St. Bernard, but because "Westwego" is such a wonderful name--as is, by the way, "Cut Off, LA," which, before you ask, is most definitely not cut off, and in fact it's difficult to imagine when it might have been, and so the pertinent question becomes not "From what is or has Cut Off (been) cut off from?" but rather "Just what, exactly, is or was cut off?"

But I'll diverge from this burlesque line of questioning-or-not-questioning (Ed.: not to mention sentence-completing-or-sentence-fragment-abandoning) to address facts: there is more water in Louisiana than anywhere else I've ever, carefully, set foot. On Monday night, we were positioned at Bayou Segnette S.P., Eve comfortably in her hammock (which setup now includes accompanying tarp so that it looks like a sharply-executed, floating blue tent), I in a new and unfamiliar tent, hastily and haphazardly erected (the consequences of this slapdashery being, as we shall see, more severe than I would have predicted). Our shelters having gotten us through the previous night's showers moisture-free, we viewed Monday night's projected thunderstorms with scorn. I learned, quickly, that "thunderstorm" has in a hurricane-ravaged land a slightly different meaning than that to which I was accustomed. The storm raged for close to five hours, and when I say "raged" I mean think of the most powerful Northeastern rainstorm you can. For me this is Hurricane Bob (I think) of the early nineties, when I was maybe seven. Tent-posts and guy-lines were whipped out of the ground like candles from a cake (Ed.: spare us your pathetic hyperbole: you replaced precisely one post, and the fact that you replaced it three times speaks more to your weakness than to the strength of the storm). Maybe so--but the rain and wind and lightning and cold, and the inch-deep-and-growing puddle in the tent drove me, still sleepless at 3 a.m., to the shelter of the car, and it was only when the rain and lightning ceased at 5 that I fell asleep, awakening at 6:30 to this strange and dreamlike sight. The rain had created ponds where the previous evening there had been grass--and, we later learned, had flooded a few suburbs not far from where we were staying.

Let me clarify the term "suburb" (Ed.: as usual, I see absolutely no way of stopping you), for here, again, the typical Northeastern meaning of the word is inadequate. The areas around New Orleans are overwhelmingly, for lack of a better word, depressed (topographically and economically) and depressing. In a way, it's the opposite of what seems to happen in the North--where the richer, and overwhelmingly whiter, folks move out of the inner city to the suburbs or (though I detest the term, it is occasionally useful) exurbs. But here--and I cannot speak to Southern cities in general, although I have a (fallible, obviously) hunch that it applies generally--people flock to the city. It doesn't seem, at least I haven't seen evidence of it, that there's a single suburb in the Northern sense of the word. Everyone seems to live in the city, if not formally then at least roughly defined. But let me leave sociology, such as it is, to the sociologists, seeing as they know how to do it properly.

The parts of Louisiana south of New Orleans extend much further than one could imagine, particularly if (like me) you heard a "preacher" in Baton Rouge proclaim his masculine being-from-Southern-Louisiana and thought there was a great deal more to go in that direction--but that's a story, and what a story, for another time. Maine has islands, plenty of islands, and a rocky coast which appears on a map to be a fairly accurate kind of meta-geology, that is to say it looks as rocky pictographically as it does in person; and southern Louisiana (actually southern, you shape-shifting ape-lifting preacher-man) looks much the same, map-wise; but it is not. For one thing, it's bigger: broader, longer, grander, but also thinner, less dense. I think it's the effect of the trees. In Maine you can't see very far because even the islands have enormous thick pine forests; in southern LA you can see forever, over the islands to the sea to more islands to more sea to even more islands and beyond them who knows? And Grand Isle is their apogee, level enough but in danger (as, geographically speaking, is New Orleans) of falling into the flat, flat ocean. That's the thing about these places--they're precarious.