another accidental tour of the ruins
Jan. 8th, 2006 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashWe went out across the lake today to visit Jennie and Jason. It was a pleasant visit. Jennie finally decided there was no way she's going to return to the waistline she had before having two kids, and offered me what ended up being a large portion of her wardrobe from those days. She's a little taller than I am, so her clothes work on me. The overall feel is a bit more hippie/80s-riffic than I tend to, but I can certainly integrate it into my look - and my wardrobe grew to something like five times its previous size by this!
We chatted about this and that, Jason helped me reformat my mom's new laptop (so as to flush out all the garbage the factory installation of Windows includes), we gave some books I was going to dispose of to their kids. Then we left.
After we stopped for dinner at a very overloaded Applebee's in Covington, we took a wrong turn. Instead of heading across the Causeway, we went around the lake through Slidell, and back through New Orleans.
Or, rather, back through the corpse of New Orleans.
We drove across the entire parish* in near total blackness. There were the streetlights on the freeway, and the occasional line of streetlights visible from there. Now and then the lights on the freeway were out.
I think I saw one lighted sign on a business.
In the night, we might as well have been driving through the swamps as through New Orleans. The I-10 doesn't go through the parts that the flood spared. I could only tell we were in the city by the silhouettes of houses mixed in with scraggly wind-torn trees against the far-off lights of what city remains.
After about a half hour's drive we came into the lights of a city. We were in Metairie. We had gone completely through New Orleans at night without ever feeling like we were in a city. Now and then I'd see a row of apartments, or houses, lit by a few lights, by the lights of a car dealership across the Interstate, or by the reflections of the passing cars. We should have been in the middle of a vast, yellowish glow of artificial light. We were on a road through the darkness.
Every time I go through the desolation, some part of my brain starts trying to rewrite "California Dreamin'" to be about the state of the city. All the leaves are gone/and the ground is grey... I'm not even a fan of theBeach Boys Mamas & The Papas, but these mutated lyrics unwind through my head. Maybe I really, really wish I was still in California, far away from all of this.
Jason had showed us a map he'd printed out at work, on the large-format printers there. It was of New Orleans back in the 1800s or so. Everywhere I've ever lived in the city was in the middle of a vast area labeled "CYPRESS SWAMP".
* "county" to the rest of America. Down in Louisiana, the state's split into parishes, not counties.
We chatted about this and that, Jason helped me reformat my mom's new laptop (so as to flush out all the garbage the factory installation of Windows includes), we gave some books I was going to dispose of to their kids. Then we left.
After we stopped for dinner at a very overloaded Applebee's in Covington, we took a wrong turn. Instead of heading across the Causeway, we went around the lake through Slidell, and back through New Orleans.
Or, rather, back through the corpse of New Orleans.
We drove across the entire parish* in near total blackness. There were the streetlights on the freeway, and the occasional line of streetlights visible from there. Now and then the lights on the freeway were out.
I think I saw one lighted sign on a business.
In the night, we might as well have been driving through the swamps as through New Orleans. The I-10 doesn't go through the parts that the flood spared. I could only tell we were in the city by the silhouettes of houses mixed in with scraggly wind-torn trees against the far-off lights of what city remains.
After about a half hour's drive we came into the lights of a city. We were in Metairie. We had gone completely through New Orleans at night without ever feeling like we were in a city. Now and then I'd see a row of apartments, or houses, lit by a few lights, by the lights of a car dealership across the Interstate, or by the reflections of the passing cars. We should have been in the middle of a vast, yellowish glow of artificial light. We were on a road through the darkness.
Every time I go through the desolation, some part of my brain starts trying to rewrite "California Dreamin'" to be about the state of the city. All the leaves are gone/and the ground is grey... I'm not even a fan of the
Jason had showed us a map he'd printed out at work, on the large-format printers there. It was of New Orleans back in the 1800s or so. Everywhere I've ever lived in the city was in the middle of a vast area labeled "CYPRESS SWAMP".
* "county" to the rest of America. Down in Louisiana, the state's split into parishes, not counties.