Make Levees, Not War, part I...

Just back from a two-day pass to New Orleans.

I used to live there. It has been an integral part of my life ever since. It's where I got hooked on good art, good literature, strong coffee, and live music as a way of life. I still make po'boys. I cook lobsters with zatarain's pro boil, onions, corn, garlic and potatoes. I've only missed three jazzfests since 1991. I hadn't been back since Katrina.

Landed around 2:00 last friday, nerves jangling and brain humming. Had tried to keep expectations down but the weight of so many years just bubbled up as the plane vectored in down over lake ponchatrain. Although it's winter, and winter isn't the greenest season in new orleans, the first thing that struck me was the overal brown-ness of the land coming in. That, and all the leafless trees bent over at 45 degree angles. Greenest thing I saw other than the moss was the signage on I-10.

Coming down the escalators at the airport, a sign directing red cross volunteers to shuttle buses. FEMA presence everywhere. Abita and po'boys in the airport. That part's the same. But there is an eerie emptiness that is a new element of new orleans.

My friend Dave picked me up at the airport and took me to his music studio. We drove down airline highway to earhart expressway into town. The first thing you see is the forest of FEMA trailers on airline, waiting to get pushed out I suppose. As you drive into the city on the route you start to notice that every other house seems to have a blue tarp roof, all the same shade and all nailed down the same way. There are thousands of blue tarps, on houses grand and not so grand. Trash is everywhere in the streets. I can't imagine the fatigue of a resident here, trying to sift through and truly get the property clean.

The waterline was the second thing I noticed. It's an easy thing to miss. But once you see it, you see it everywhere.

Just like the ring around a dirty tub, but you see it on the outside of houses, in some places knee deep, in others above your head. There was one place that struck me most, as the water line was about neck high and all the windows in the area were broken there from floating garbage at the waterline. It finally hit me after a few hours that the water was that high for a very, very long time. Even the view from our hotel room saw destruction. I didn't go to the lower 9th ward or to lakeview. My friend Tim went to New Orleans East. It was much, much worse.

Everywhere you look, there is devastation and rebirth. New leaf buds on the trees arch over empty house lots and cypress stumps bigger than minivans. Vast swaths of the city lay dark at night. It's creepy. I just read the Third Man by Graham Greene a while back, and recently saw the movie. It's set in postwar Vienna and in the movie, the rubble is a part of the set. That's what New Orleans feels like. You start having fun and thinking, hey, the city's back! And then you turn a corner and someplace you used to know sits in front of you in ruins. Jarring.

Uptown survived the worst of the storm. Tulane took a lot of wind damage - but the fact that you don't see a waterline around there tells you everything you need to know. It looks a lot like it used to look, but with more trash. The trash is iconic. There's so much to truck in and out of the city, fresh bricks and old bricks, rotted wood and new wood, that the trash is of the least importance right now. You'll see boats beached in the neutral ground by the Superdome, and thousands of destroyed cars.

Spraypaint over the houses is a feature of mid city and other neighborhoods. There's typically a date that the house was searched. If the paint says "CF" that means a corpse was found there.

But at night, at the right time, it feels like it used to feel like. Free oysters, traditional new orleans jazz and funk at Le Bon Temps on Magazine. The Radiators with trombones at Tipitina's. Juice with Brint Anderson and friends at dba. Mother's serving debris breakfast with grits, huevos rancheros at the Bluebird.

Other signs of drastic change and recovery are everywhere. FEMA trailers blocking streets in Jefferson Parish. Burger King offering $250 a paycheck bonuses, Popeyes starting new employees at $9 an hour. Legendary bars and restaurants with limited menus and desperate pleas for experienced staff. You could come in from out of town, no contacts, and be a badass in six months.

Liminal is the only word for it. It's like noplace I've ever been. William Gibson fantasized about post-earthquake Tokyo and a San Francisco where the Golden Gate became a housing project. New Orleans is that post-apocalypse scenario. It's oddly normal, but completely abnormal, all at once.