Wet Bank Guide

While the strip of New Orleans' City Park that runs along City Park Avenue is looking something close to its old manicured self--the lawns trimmed and the great oaks leafing out-- if you wander far enough to the north (less than a mile in this 1,300 acre urban greenscape, say north of I-610, you leave behind an urban park and enter a feral urban wilderness where wild boars recently roamed.

I remember a time when much of the north end of City Park was such a place, before the north course or the new driving range on Filmore, a time when Filmore did not bisect the park at all. The land north of the West Course and behind the riding stables was a wilderness of tall grass and weedy trees, camphors and Chinese tallow, a place where packs of wild dogs roamed on well-worn paths. I lived just across Robert E. Lee and would sometimes venture just a short way in. Not too far, for I was young enough to bring Tonka trucks to the great piles of earth that rose up as the lagoons and golf terrain of the North Course were excavated. But I heard the stories from older boys, ones who would venture far into that wild place armed with trusty BB guns.

That tangled wilderness is long gone, just like the ski jump that once sat in the lagoon along Marconi before the Filmore causeway was built, back when water skiers were a frequent fixture on that long and narrow stretch of water. Gone as well is the man who used to launch his amphibious sports car at the same ramp used by the skiers. That was another park, another era, a time like that described by Walker Percy in The Moviegoer, when the girl who rode in passenger seat of that water-born car no doubt wore the same sort of tight, one piece swimsuit as the water skiers, the sort of little skirted number you could trace all the way back to the noses of bombers in the 1940s.

Am I really that old? At fifty, enough people who seemed not so old are suddenly dying off like flies. Its the sort of age when you start to look at the obituary page not because you expect to find friends from high school there, but just to start to place yourself in the mathematical distribution of age and cause of death, to look at those pictures that might have been next to yours in the high school yearbook, to see them depicted in the grey and grainy tones of the photos of ghosts.

I've been in such a rut lately--kids to school, into the swirling vortex at work, back to get kids and run them around in the early evening; chores on Saturday then collapse on Sunday--that I rarely get off my well beaten paths. I noticed those lost golf tracks through the encroaching wilderness just as the subject of the article on the lost world of City Park North did, as I crested the Wisner overpass one recent day as I drove my daughter out to Ben Franklin High School at the lakefront. Crowds of track runners passed bicyclists following a path through the tall grass of the newly wild north side. I need to get out there, I told myself, even before I found the Times-Picayune article I missed courtesy of Bayou St. John David.

Driving my daughter to Franklin on Saturday (my wife's weekday chore), I found myself taking a wander through another bit of urban wilderness: Gentilly. As I wandered down Mirabeau on my way over to St. Roch, I was struck as always unrelieved prospect of desolation. So little has changed since I came home last year. Sure, there are new debris piles as I travel around Mid-City and Broadmoor, and yard signs pop up touting this or that contractor along the way. It is not as if I don't know that I live in a disaster zone. Still, I might as well be living on Audubon Place for all I get out into the real Debrisville lately. It would be so easy to stay in settled Mid-City or the sliver by the river and forget just how desolate some neighborhoods remain.

City Park may be hauntingly beautiful in its slow decay back into a natural state, but Gentilly is not beautiful, even in a haunting way: haunted is more like it. I almost forgot how disconcerting those empty blocks can be, ones where sagging houses stare through glassless windows onto unkempt lawns in a scene that seems to repeat infinitely to the horizon like a trick with two mirrors. Has it really been more than two years, and so little done? Did Berlin look like this in 1947? Hiroshima? Is this how far we've fallen in one or two generations, that we leave half an American city to rot, its people scattered? We are not as our mothers and fathers were, not by a long shot. The World War II museum here should close as a matter of general principle, lest the few remaining survivors of that conflict come by and confront what a failure the nation they once served has become.

Some of the city, I fear, will ultimately revert just as the park has. I worry about the hardiest pioneers on the frontiers north and east along the lake. Here from my little atoll of City Park, at the edge of the archipelago of dry spots sometimes called the Isle of Orleans, I wonder as I did a year and a half ago how those who return to the emptiest neighborhoods will cope. The idyllic neighborhood of flowerbeds and children on bicycles they remember are gone, replaced by a wilderness that lacks the beauty of City Park's rampant greenery, but instead offers a parade of peeling sideboards that reminds one of the abandoned farmsteads along rural roads, signposts along a way of life that no longer exists; the greying brick facades which smack of the stone piles by the side of the road one finds in Europe, the leavings of cultures past.

These dark thoughts swarm around me like termites around the glaring lights of Metairie, engulf me sometimes like that first measure of syrupy weather as you step out of the cold airplane just arrived from the chilly north and step into home, into New Orleans. Yes, much of this place is trying to revert to the wilderness settled by our families hundreds of years before.

Still, it is the landscape we know, the one we have glimpsed driving down Highway 300 to the End of the Earth Marina, the barrenness vaguely familiar to those of us old enough to remember when there was were raw new subdivisions west of Causeway but this side of the airport, when the East was the empty land between Chef Menteur and Morrison Road.

It is not the wilderness I wandered in for nineteen years, the place we call America. I've lived in places where culture was an ad in the newspaper listing a half-dozen events in a year at the local college, where the restaurants were all careful clones of someone's imagined Italy or Mexico replicated a thousand times over. Life was safe there, predictable. I could plot my future out with the certainly of someone who knows how many more trips to the store it would take to collect enough Yellow or Green Stamps to claim that RV at the back of the redemption catalog.

It was not terrible there. To suggest otherwise would not be fair to the people who lived there, the ones who marched on St. Patrick's Day in D.C. or danced on Syttende Mai in the Nordic Midwest. To them, it was home. Over time it became to me a flat landscape without relief, the desert of the Isrealites without the comfort of a fanatically certain Moses, or even the wan light of a volcano bellowing a column of fire in the distance.

There is a certain safety in the cities of the diaspora. I know that, having found it a dozen years ago not far from the other end of the Mississippi. But at some point the wilderness will find you, even as it creeps over the greens of City Park or claims abandoned bungalows in Gentilly. Even among the high rises of Atlanta or Houston the same chill feeling the endless steppes of North Dakota sometimes stirred in me will grab a hold of you, will make you wonder why you stay there. Over time the void that can't be filled anywhere else will overpower all the reasons to stay away, and the growing wild places of New Orleans will be reclaimed by those who left, or by their children.

I may not live to see that day, but I am as certain as Moses that it will come to pass--if not for me then for my children. And that is enough.


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