Travel Reference
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selling them to benefit breast cancer research. She suckered us, but charmingly so, and
the hats had a cute logo.
I have a strange history with this city, much of it, oddly enough, revolving around
weddings. Catherine's brother got married there; well, it was in Baton Rouge, actually,
but afterward Catherine and I drove to New Orleans, where we broke up for the eighth
or ninth time.
The first time I arrived there, in 1991, was on a bicycle, in fact, after a three-day ride
from Jackson, Mississippi, where my brother had gotten married. I was still a fledgling
bike traveler at that point, and for a New Yorker in the deepest South it felt like a brave
journey. I anticipated adventures in culture clash—cotton fields, willows, sleepy Main
Streets, and suspicious, big-bellied sheriffs wearing opaque sunglasses leaning on their
cars on the side of the road, chewing toothpicks and watching me, making sure I pro-
ceeded out of town with dispatch. Of course, there was none of that—well, maybe a few
willows. It was a pleasant and not very eventful ride, a couple hundred miles through
rural Mississippi fields, mostly, in my memory, untilled and empty, as if waiting for
people to come along and pay attention. Now and then an isolated building—a motel,
an adult bookstore, a warehouse, an auto body shop—underscored the impression of a
human outpost on a distant planet.
As I entered Louisiana and got closer to the water, there were bogs and a soggy wild-
life park, and then the isthmus between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf, and finally
a surprisingly long, trafficky lead-in to New Orleans itself. Looking at the map now, I
see I must have ridden just above, if not through, the Lower Ninth Ward, the eastern
region of the city that I next saw after its obliteration by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I
remember that first passage into the city fuzzily, the area seemingly down on its heels
and a little ramshackle but stubbornly upright—modest shotgun houses whose front
yards were scrubby and burnt yellow from the summer heat, flanking a main drag with
a grassy center island that needed mowing. A struggling American place, an undistin-
guished American place that would later be made memorable by its destruction.
I went straight downtown to the train station, packed up my bike and shipped it
back to New York. Then I met my parents for a couple of days of good eating, the only
time I ever went to Commander's Palace, the celebrated restaurant in the Garden District,
where I had my first Sazerac and, I'm pretty sure, the only bowl of turtle soup I've ever
consumed. I remember my parents were happy, one son married, the other with them on
vacation, both of them seemingly distracted from their usual burdens. That was a rare
thing. It's a good memory.
I reported from New Orleans twice, once when the excellent art museum was celeb-
rating the French painter Edgar Degas, who had an uncle and a couple of brothers in
