mosquitoes

I've lived in places before where biting insects were problems.

I grew up in Montana, where the mosquitoes only thrived for a month or two, but they were big and there was a lot of them.

I lived in Mississippi, where the mosquitoes came out late in the year, when the heat dipped to tolerable levels. As the sun drooped into the horizon, swarms of the little buggers swirled about your head and arms.

I also lived for a time in New Orleans, where I woke up every morning with another bite or two from an unidentified bug, a reminder of just how well the humidity nutured a variety of insects and just how poorly my window unit air conditioner kept the nature of the place at bay.

But the character of the mosquitoes here in D.C. is entirely different from anywhere else. Unlike mosquitoes I'm familiar with, the ones here are tiny and stealthy. You don't have to swat down black swarms. In fact, you rarely see them. But every time I walk outside, I end up with a few more bites.

It doesn't feel like New Orleans, where the bugs just seemed to be an unavoidable piece of the city as a whole. Here, the bites are far more of an aggravation for seeming out of place. And the mosquitoes seem a bit more malevolent for coming in single, clandestine raids instead of frontal assaults in battalion strength.

Here is a wonderful essay on the character of New Orleans from a New Yorker writer who is writing a book on the city post-Katrina. Essentially, he talks about how the tyranny of time prevalent in most American's lives has far less of a hold in NOLA. It's certainly worth taking the time to look through the archives of the rest of the blog.

The essay reminded me of an observation I'd been struck by after we'd spent some time in the cities of Southeast Asia. New Orleans is often described as the "most European" of the U.S.A.'s cities, because of its unique character and French and Spanish influences, especially in the pedestrian-friendly (also a phrase you can't use very often in the States) French Quarter.
To me, however, the description doesn't quite fit. New Orleans, for better and for worse, is the closest thing the States has to a third-world city. The decay-inducing intense humidity, the cracked streets, the political system - these would be some of the "for worse." The easy-going lifestyle, the very loose adherence to time and appointments, the day-to-day absurdities which force you to laugh and loosen your own interpretation of what needs to happen - these I would include in the "for better."

FEMA trailers

FEMA trailer
Originally uploaded by w0bbly

A point I feel needs to be made:

The phrase "FEMA trailer," heard often on the post-Katrina news about New Orleans and Mississippi, conjured up an image in my head of the mobile-home type of trailer. The type which takes -wide as an adjective: single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide. The trailer of the trailer parks I know and make fun of.

No. The unfortunates who live in the FEMA trailers as a home of last resort have a trailer, a vehicular appendage which can actually be towed down the road.
It's a shocking sight to see streets lined with a FEMA trailer in every front yard. To see the lengths of PVC pipe on the outside forming a semi-permanent plumbing system, and to know in some cases this will be semi-permanent housing. Many of these trailers have been called home for more than a year and a half, and in what I assume is a weighty proportion of cases, the residents will have little option but to call them home for the foreseeable future.
At least when you see the FEMA trailers parked in the front yard of a flood-damaged house you know the residents have a chance of moving out of the front lawn and into the house at some point. Far more depressing are the FEMA trailer parks. Rows upon rows of the trailers parked on lots of white gravel, fenced in by green-mesh-covered chain link.

FEMA
Originally uploaded by yellowjacket186

One day I watched a couple kids run along the row of gravel between the trailers and realized they probably have no home to hope to move into. Perhaps their house was washed away. Perhaps they were renting, and the post-Katrina housing crunch has priced them out of the market. Either way, they are likely to spend a lot more of their childhood playing on gravel and sleeping in a mid-level RV.

happy birthday to me...

Gumbo at Liuzza's.
Dinner at Jacque-Imo's.
Rebirth at the Maple Leaf.

All good.

NOLA

I've spent a fair bit of time in New Orleans. I lived in the city for one glorious, liver-damaging summer. My post-college job was 100 miles north, and I made sure to spend as much time down in the city as I could. I spent most of my time in the French Quarter-to-Uptown crescent of the city, the oldest part of New Orleans and the closest to the Mississippi river. This is, of course, the part where all the tourist highlights are, but it also incorporates plenty of local neighborhoods and authentic New Orleans character.
I tried to get out and see the rest of the city, as well. Driving the streets, taking random turns, seeing the areas I never had reason to visit. There are few cities as easy to get lost in as New Orleans; the streets have no 90-degree angles or grid pattern. When I lived here, I had experiences of trying to simply go around a block and ending up in the city's suburbs before I could re-orient myself. This is maddening when you are trying to find something in particular, but a quite agreeable trait when you want to soak up the city.
Before Monday, however, I'm fairly certain I'd never wandered into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The area gained national infamy during the Katrina coverage as one of the hardest-hit areas after the levee breaks.
Before heading to the Ninth Ward, I'd gotten a feel for just how raw the Katrina damage, how much the devastation must continue to affect daily life for so many people. On the train ride in, driving around town, I saw the rows of houses boarded up, gutted, abandoned. I saw residential blocks with rows of FEMA trailers in every front yard.

Ninth Ward, New Orleans
Originally uploaded by Harrison414

But nothing I saw compared to the sheer devastation present in the Lower Ninth above Claiborne. Nearly two years after the disaster, much of the debris has been picked up. Streets are not lined with houses, not even damaged houses. Streets are lined with weeds, through which you can grab glimpses of concrete foundations, steps which once led to now-missing houses. Blocks might have one, or two, or three house shells remaining, serving to accentuate the missing. This was once a residential community. A community with problems, with poverty, but a community with people and with homes. Now it's a ghost.

Much of my old New Orleans is up and running. The old and relatively high-lying areas around the river - the French Quarter, Downtown, the Garden District, Uptown, Magazine Street - look much as they did before the storm. The Superdome and Convention Center leave no clue of the horrible days the displaced endured there. There are signs of the storm - every other building on Canal Street remains boarded up, as do many elsewhere. A tourist in town for a few days, especially one in town for the first time, could leave with the impression New Orleans has put Katrina behind.

In a way, it's a shame so much of the damage occured so far from the New Orleans the rest of the country knows. The tragedy New Orleans endured and is enduring, has, I think, faded from the national consciousness. Outside, Katrina was a tragedy, was a horrible thing.
Inside New Orleans, you can tell, it still is.

Originally uploaded by mr_nightshade