In the Vieux Carré
(17 Related Photos in Photo Gallery)
You feel it as soon as you drive around the curve and down the off ramp; there is no mistaking it - this place is different! Never having been there, I arrived at the Vieux Carré ("Old Square" in French) with a ton of preconceived perceptions and well contained excitement.
Enter the French Quarter and one of the first things you learn is that the rules, as you have known them, have made a major shift. Behavioral boundaries, social filters, pleasure limitations, and even law enforcement, all have changed. This is why people love, and fear, being in New Orleans. The locals, with their well honed survival skills, navigate with intention, street smarts and savvy. The rest of us meander around the Quarter gawking, eating, drinking, dancing, laughing, spending money, savoring each unique moment until we have to return to the world that isn’t New Orleans.
The French Quarter is both larger and smaller than it looks in either still or moving pictures. The entire Quarter is larger than I’d expected; however, the size of individual streets and each individual block is much smaller than imagined. Getting around feels manageable and the space feels intimate, so intimate you feel as though everyone you see was invited to one party, something I never feel on the streets of other major cities.
The French Quarter quivers with the vibration of music. You can’t move more than a few yards without walking into another musical experience. On a narrow side street stands a lone man playing hammer dulcimer, further down the block, tucked into a dark doorway sits a young street musician playing hard rock on a guitar as passionately as if this gig was professionally booked specifically for him, on this date in this venue. A few hours earlier, a young Asian woman and a fellow with dreadlocks performed in front of a crowded sidewalk amphitheatre; she was playing an electrified violin and sounding like she just stepped out of Julliard. He accompanied her on guitar. In a large open-air café a New Orleans jazz band finishes their set while nearby musicians unpack their gear to take over where this group leaves off. Back to back gigs and performances, all day, all night; they keep the music going, there’s no two o’clock bar call in THIS place. I stuck my head in the doorway of a corner nightclub to hear a clarinet solo, Pete Fountain style, then returned to a bar on Bourbon Street where I saw the best live Cajun band these virgin Yankee ears have ever heard. Have I mentioned the marching band at Jackson Square? All of this within a period of about four hours, and I haven’t mentioned the musicians I intentionally came to see at Preservation Hall. (I’ll write separately about that.) I remarked, “There’s more fun happening here tonight than happens in a month where I live”.
Though you love being in this place, the possible threat of crime or danger lurks at some level of your awareness unless you are stoned or drunk out of your conscious mind, or perhaps spiritually or psychologically evolved. I was none of these things on the night I was there. People took little notice when a few feet from us, out the open door of a corner nightclub, blue lights flashed brilliantly from the top of a cop car. Blue circled around and around creating a strobe effect on the interior of the building where we sat, communicating clearly that there was trouble to some degree so close we could have walked a few feet and become part of the scene. People never left their seats, the music never stopped, little attention was paid. Soon it was over without any of us ever knowing what prompted the police to appear. In New Orleans it could have been a crime of any degree, and having the police around isn’t much comfort since their reputation for corruption is widely known. Jeanne and I had our own minor brush with injustice which I will write about later as that story deserves it’s own telling.
In addition to music, the area is a visual feast. World renowned galleries sell paintings for thousands only a few feet away from primitive street artists trying to make a buck. There’s performing art and still art. Bright color abounds. A strong spiritual theme is in much of the work, Catholicism rules large in New Orleans, so does Voo Doo. Music and musicians are also common subjects in the art. I didn’t scratch the surface of the art world here.
Weeks ago I wrote of my anxiety about having to drive across a twenty-seven mile bridge to get to New Orleans. The experience was not as horrendous as it could have been had I allowed anxiety to rule my thoughts that day. As Jeanne put the car in cruise mode, I coped by going into a mental cruise mode as miles of water lay before me, on either side of me, under me. I opened the window so if we went down, that water pressure thing you learn about on survival TV shows wouldn’t prevent my escaping the car (I can’t swim, so little good this would have done for me!). The only pang of panic I had was when the road elevated. We drove up a gradual incline, and when we started back down there was an illusion that you are driving directly into the water. I looked another direction! We crossed that bridge three times, once was late, in the black of night, an entirely different experience. We could see only the highway ahead lit by our headlights; unless I intentionally focused on the truth, I could deny that the surrounding blackness was entirely water.
The morning after my first bridge crossing my friend’s brother walked from the garage into the kitchen and with urgency in his voice, he emphatically reminded her that her tires were “delaminating” (means the tread is separating from the tire!). I turned from the coffee pot, my voice rose a few octaves, “You took me across that twenty seven mile bridge with tires that were about to blow?” Honestly, I felt like I’d won the lottery to be so lucky we hadn’t ended up in the lake! I'm certain I owe this fate to my loving religious friends scattered throughout the Midwest who know that my feeble prayers and convictions are all too few, folks who I imagined were surely praying in unison over my travels on that particular day!! However, I must tell you, as soon as I got over my horror about the delaminating tires, the incident became hilariously, ironically funny to me. You'd have to know how fearful of a person I can be to see the humor and irony in someone like me crossing twenty seven miles of water on tires that could blow at any minute. It was kind of a Woody Allen moment; well, I mean the Woody Allen moments we older folks used to have before he did all that stuff that makes us think other thoughts now whenever Woody's name is mentioned! Today I’m still laughing about all this, and feeling grateful I'm here to write about it!
I loved being in the French Quarter. An expression of all that humanity is is this place, a moving, breathing work of art. What a miracle it wasn’t washed away four years ago, it came so close to being eradicated. I was altruistically, compassionately grateful that it was spared before I saw it; after going there, I am passionately and selfishly grateful.
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