Bourbon Street 1

My first time visiting Bourbon Street was very different from most visitors. In early October, someone in the technology group decided that we all needed to make the drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to go to Bourbon Street. We had heard that there were a few bars and clubs open again, but that was about all we had heard. So, someone created a sign up sheet and passed it around our group. Fifteen, maybe twenty of us signed up. We had a Ford cargo van and a Chevy Impala, but somehow we managed to all fit; granted one of the smaller guys and a tiny girl were crammed in the cargo area and my butt was half on the seat and half on one of the guy's laps, but we all managed to fit.

The drive down was fairly uneventful. I remember passionately discussing how I really needed to find the sound that the communicators on the old school Star Trek (aka the good Star Trek) made somewhere on the Web so that I could download it to my new flip phone. This led to a discussion about Star Trek’s influences on technical design throughout the past few decades. (Remember, I was part of the Response Technology group; many of our group members were in fact volunteers because they had made their fortunes Silicon Valley Pirates style and were now retired, free to devote their time to other interests.)

As we got closer to New Orleans, we were able to see a bit of the unbelievable damage before it got dark. Near the La Place exit on I-10, we started to see crazy wind damage to almost all of the trees. It wasn’t that they were all broken, although a good many of them really were, but they were leaning. Everything growing thing, not broken, had a slant to it. The ground is so wet in Louisiana that it was easy for the powerful winds to simply move the centuries old cypress and oak trees, roots and all. Rather than uprooting them, the wind simply nudged them a bit. Considering Katrina knocking over countless buildings, his is a testament to the strength of the plants.

The sun was almost set as we flew out of the vegetation at the Bonnet Carre’ Spillway beginning to cross Lake Ponchartrain. I had absolutely no idea that the lake was this large (looking back, I suppose that looking at a map may have cleared this up for me). The railroad tracks parallel I-10 at this point, and they were a mess. Some places were flooded, and some were mangled. It was a crazy sight. But things kept getting more interesting.

There was a blue house (I think it is still called a house, despite its obvious use as a fishing camp) once on stilts in the soft earth beside the freeway. There was a dock, and an outbuilding. The house was not destroyed, but was knocked on its side, everything shoved off square. It looked like a rhombus (if I remember my junior high geometry correctly). A very strange site to see. And, the last time I crossed Lake Ponchartrain, almost two years later, the rhombus house was still there exactly as it was the first time I saw it.

By the time we made it across the lake, it was dark, very dark. It was so strange. There were only a handful of other cars on the road, and there were plenty of buildings around, but there were no lights, and no people around. . This was one of the strangest experiences I have ever heard. It felt so strange to see all of this abandonment, and this was only a taste; a few days later I would experience the desertion even more so. I realized technically where all the people were, but where is everyone still played through my mind over and over again. The feelings of confusion at something this horrible being allowed to happen to American citizens flew through my mind again and again, but we were dealing with these issues all day everyday, and this was supposed to be a night out, so we all quickly turned back to the plan for the evening; going to Bourbon Street and imbibing as much alcohol as humanly possible before our ungodly wake up call at 5 the next morning.

As the interstate went deeper and deeper into the city, there were fewer vehicles, and most off ramps were blocked with incredibly young looking National Guard soldiers with big guns and even bigger vehicles. But this wasn’t a problem for us, we weren’t any evacuated residents trying to go back to our homes, we were volunteers, our Red Cross emblem on the windshield explained all of this for us. Because we were Red Cross, we could go anywhere, Bourbon Street included.
We took the Esplanade exit and headed directly to the French Quarter. We parked on the sidewalk on one of the still dark streets near Bourbon, because that’s what everyone was doing; it was like the volunteers, FEMA personnel and military officers had completely lost contact with simple everyday things like how to park like a normal person.

We all piled out of the van and made arrangements to meet up later in the evening so that no one was left behind.