theredbaron

It's now five months since the south stole me.
A dear friend and I boarded a train set for distant horizons and desecrated lands.

On the train we met a man named Grover-Cleveland. He worked for the Man, doing some kind of mathematical modeling. He disliked flying.

We just liked the train.



The sleeper had a chess board without pieces. The chair became a toilet, and the seats were a bed. A day and a half on the train, and the window never grew dull.
We cut down the coast, then across the Big Muddy. They wouldn't serve alcohol while we passed through Mississippi.

Within seconds of getting off the train, the humidity had my hair a curly mess. The windows of the train station were cracked and boarded up in places. One of the train tracks had shells in the place of stones between the rails.

New Orleans is all the worse for wear. Downtown, although it feels like a metropolis, is almost devoid of human presence past evening. It's eerie to see a city so empty. "The streets were cracked and broken, and the people wonder aimlessly through the fog." The city hall was overgrown. About half the large metallic letters had been stripped off the building, the drive was broken and comprised more of grass than asphalt. If one were to go even a block off of the 'main drag', the grime was even more pronounced. About eight feet up on the trees and the houses and the factories was a black line of grime roughly a foot thick.

The city had a tub ring.

Our hostel was more like a commune than anything else. Across the way from the place, workers put a cathedral back together.



I guess you could say the Sacred Heart was on bypass.



The French quarter was largely unscathed, as you may have heard. It's on the cusp of becoming a pit of touristy hell. Awful souvenir shops abound, with crap that one can get anywhere on earth. But it isn't gone yet. The back streets are still twisting and dark. The architecture is still genuine, and not reconstituted (like cheap soup). There are more art galleries than I have ever seen. It's charming as hell, actually. And because the place is empty, there are a lot of dirt cheep apartments to rent. Pity that the club scene sucks.











We rented a Vespa. We scooted all around town. We found ourselves surrounded by abandoned factories on a rusting railway; and on to crumbling buildings where a person in rags picked through the rubble. A third world country in the middle of a metropolis.







And I found it from Above.





We went on, looking for the levees according to our ill-conceived plan. We never did find them, but what we did find was a hundred times better. Just beside a public park was a graveyard of industry. Towers, plucked from the water and left to rust alongside machines which looked like they belonged to the industrial revolution. It was our playground.





The south can have me again some day, I am sure.