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My past self and my current self are helping each other out this week. I’m publishing past-self’s travel story she never got to share, and she’s giving me a break while I juggle a mess of other projects. I have tales to tell, but I have anxiety baths to take too. It’s all a part of the voyage.
This essay was written when I was 24, right after my first visit to New Orleans. I was very taken with it. As a result, this writing is kind of a swamp of sentimentality. I can see the ways I’ve grown as a writer when I read it. But it still feels like my voice, which makes me happy.
“But where would he go? They were surrounded by water. Their world had been eaten by the river.”
She lost one of her dogs. There were two, a big one and a small one. Big dogs are always clumsier, she tells us. She couldn’t get to him in time, before the waters took him, she says. She tells us this story with a soft, reminiscing face. Her eyes look out through the flat windshield, squinting against the bright, overcast sky. No self-pity, no regrets, no anger. Just gratitude for being alive and back in New Orleans, her home. The only tears being shed on this streetcar are coming from my sensitive ducts.
“He was mighty scared, though,” she says of the little dog. Hard to hold on to, he kept squirming. And they waited on that rooftop for two days. The whole time, he tried to get away. But where would he go? They were surrounded by water. Their world had been eaten by the river.
She looks straight ahead, her hands on either side of the wheel, as wide as a bass drum in a marching band. At each stop, she swings back the lever that opens the doors to her green streetcar. People trickle in through the front door and out through the back. There are locals going about their day, carrying bags and wearing headphones. There are tourists, fanning themselves with brochures, checking their watches and reading street names. They’re making their way through the Garden District down St. Charles Ave. on this early 19th century piece of transportation, using their $1.25, 1-day travel stub to see it all. We pass big, pastel, antebellum homes with pillared porches; yards scattered with ferns, flowers, palms and willows; and a garden of above-ground tombs at Lafayette Cemetery, where the sun beats down so hard it melts the corpses.
Thick heat barges in on us every time she opens the door. The air that sweeps in is hot enough to make you sweat the second you step into it. Today it hosts big, fat raindrops, warm like the hour-old cafe au lait in my hand.
At the pause that comes with each stop, she looks at us, smiling with the familiarity of a childhood neighbor. Her forehead glistens in the heat, and she wipes it with a green handkerchief—green like her streetcar.
“Y’all are a nice couple. Y’all are gonna have a good time down here in N’awlins,” she says.
We smile and thank her for being so sweet. I gush a little about how much I love the city, before preparing to move back to my seat. Surely she’s sick of hearing how much the tourists like the French Quarter? Wouldn’t the residents be tired of all the voodoo doll-buying, beignet-eating visitors?
“We are happy to have you,” she says genuinely while closing the doors, thus ending the blast of heat from outside and my neurotic thoughts all at once.
We press on to the next stop. New Orleans is good place, with good people, she says. Hardly anybody around here wouldn’t stop to have a conversation with us. Everyone’s happy to shoot the breeze—it’s what they do. It’s the nicest place she’s ever been. “Where are y’all from, anyway?” she asks, turning to us at the next stop.
“Ohio,” my boyfriend and I say in unison. We look at one another shyly. The awe of new territory tends to make home states seem forgettable.
Our driver disagrees. She squeals a little. “I know all about Ohio!” she says. That’s where they took her, once the helicopter finally came and rescued her from that roof and transported her away from all the wreckage Katrina left behind. They brought her, her sister and her little dog to the Cleveland Convention Center. There was food, shelter, a sense of community. A local salon even gave free haircuts and stylings to the victims of the hurricane.
“They did my hair for me, no charge! Mhmm…Ohio. Second nicest place,” she laughs jovially, her body bouncing in her seat as she turns to us and assures us that any Ohioan is a friend of hers. She pushes the doors open at another stop. The sweltering heat of a New Orleans August day comes at us again. Don’t fight it—you’ll just sweat more.
In the end, I don’t mind the heat. It’s bold and unforgettable, like its city. Everything there seems well-matched—spices, colorful art, jazz, stories of ghosts and wild moments in history, $2.99 Hurricanes. The temperature is in tune with the city’s loud character.
“What you’re going to do,” she says, “You’re going to get off here at this next stop. Walk just up the road a little ways and it will be on your left—you’ll see it. Best beans and rice, best po’ boys. It’s a good place.”
We make a mental note of her food recommendation. After all, that’s why we came and stood next to the driver to begin with. But no matter how good the jambalaya would prove to be, it could hardly hope to top our unexpected acquaintance with this woman.
I knew I would never see her again, which made me a little sad. It seems like during our 20 minute ride she shared everything with us: conquering trauma, relishing in the generosity of the world, the glory of returning home to a blank slate and building it all back up again. Still, one of the joys of meeting strangers in travel is leaving them behind, because it comes with the reassurance that there are good people out there, like her, doing their thing day by day, and making the world a little sweeter in the process.
Such good writing!