Working Title: NOLA

We were coming up from the bayou, but it felt more like we were coming back from the edge of the world. Three weeks earlier we had followed the twists and turns of Mississippi from St. Louis downstream to New Orleans. The closer we got to the Gulf the deeper the road beneath our Lexus sunk. It was a slow and exhilarating decline as water encroached on the shoulders of the road and funneled us down to the sea. Now we were resurfacing and I was having a hard time finding my breath.

I told people that I was going to down to volunteer, to re-paint houses, put roofs on wind blasted shacks, and see what was still there. I was a chivalrous product of Jesuit education. I was a man for others. Or that’s what I told people at least. Secretly, I had intended to make New Orleans the salvation of my summer. A cure-all for not finding work, the failing health of my grandfather, and the deep rut I had worked myself into. I would give back to New Orleans, New Orleans would give back to me.

And to my surprise, it worked. My roommate and I would arrive on work sites early in day when the heat was a slightly less oppressive. I would sweat out my troubles under the low hanging Louisiana sun and smile with my fellow volunteers during the day. We would come back to the bunk house in the evenings a jockey for the first shower. There would be big pots of jambalaya for dinner at the house or we could go out and inhale shrimp po’ boys or gumbo. During the weekends we would bar hop on Frenchman Street; beckoned into the next bar by a wailing trumpet or the raspy wail of heartbroken singer. Groups of volunteers would come and go. A group of fifteen would be replaced by a group seven by the end of the week. Days turned into weeks and we went from the wide-eyed newcomers to the elder statesmen of bunkhouse.

During that time I got to know New Orleans. I would stumble through the French Quarter, my drunken feet catching on the cobblestones. At the waterfront I would admire the same river that ran through my city some seven hundred miles to the north. I worked in the Ninth Ward and tried on a daily basis to decode what had been hit by a catastrophe of Mother Nature and what had just been ravaged by poverty.

One afternoon after work we went to the lower Ninth. Shielded behind a new levee were a dozen ultra modern, eco-friendly houses on stilts courtesy of Brad Pitt. Beat up Chevys and Cadillacs were parked underneath the six figure homes. The same poor people who lived in the lower Ninth before Katrina won a lottery and got to move back to where their houses once stood.

The Brad Pitt Houses overlooked both the river that crippled their city and the graveyard that Katrina left behind in the lower Ninth. While one side of the street gleamed with the generosity of a celebrity the other side told another story. Occasionally I could see brick and mortar of a foundation to a home that was no longer there. More often the scene was that of a broken sidewalk leading up to nothing but tall grass. Katrina had struck down the homes and now Mother Nature was growing up, over, and through the rubble she had left behind.

We drove slowly, squaring block after block of tall grass and loose brick. No one spoke. I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture. We all said we were going to come back another time, but none of us did. This too, was New Orleans, and this too I learned to love.

And so I smiled. I met new people. I did good work, explored, drank, and ate. I was happy again. New Orleans saved my summer and maybe more, it was exactly what I needed it to be. So it was no surprise that as we sped northward towards St. Louis my stomach churned. I was leaving an answer, a solution to a problem I didn’t really understand.

As we plunged back towards real life I felt like I had to bear the same carry-on luggage of melancholy that came with me on my flight back from my semester in Spain and my move from my home in Colorado to Ohio as a high school student. I was leaving something real and good, to place that only had questions. Senior year, graduation, real life, worry all built up like dangerous clouds in the north. The horizon sucked me back towards my life, and from the passenger seat there was no brake pedal in reach.