Shifting Tides

credit: David Grunfeld

MY office overlooks one of the great bends in the river — no one says the Mississippi here, it’s just the river — immediately below Jackson Square. Every few minutes an ocean-going ship or a tow pushing barges crosses the field of view; often two and occasionally three or even four vessels at a time negotiate the same stretch of water. They churn upriver against the current, or skid downstream around the bend. I say “skid” because that’s what they do, sterns sliding out from under, propellers digging for traction in the mud that passes for water to carry them past a collision with the Governor Nicholls wharf.

In fact, ships collide with the wharf there more often than on any other bend in the river. Sometimes the view is empty of ships, but more often it resembles a railroad yard more than a port. Several legally discrete port jurisdictions combine to make the riverfront at New Orleans the busiest in the world, and most years more tonnage moves through it than any other port in the world.

Tourists don’t see much of this aspect of the city unless they’re out on the river and look up to find a great steel cliff suddenly looming above them, or watch a deckhand check the tautness of the cables lashing barges together, or get splashed by a Coast Guard speedboat patrolling like a motorcycle cop. But the river has, of course, always defined New Orleans, and always will.
When I was young and first came here, it was that layered mesh of marsh, river, sea, and sweat that drew me. The music expressed all that, but the music was symptom, not cause, as were the bars that fed off the port. The Seven Seas, the Pair-a-Dice, and the Greek sailor bars with the unreadable lettering — up a flight of stairs on Decatur Street that did not even open until midnight — were all places that could teach a 19-year-old college kid something he didn’t learn in class (and the tougher he thought he was, the more he had to learn and the faster he had to learn it).

This was before container ships and modern management all but eliminated sailors and longshoremen. Those bars closed twenty years ago, several of them replaced by a single giant House of Blues (complete with gift shop and New York Stock Exchange listing), but the river still gives the city both its languid sinuosity and its nickname. Forty years ago someone overheard a black longshoreman say, “If you can’t make it in ‘the Big Easy,’ you can’t make it anywhere,” and repeated it to Phil Carter of the Greenville, Mississippi, family of journalists. Phil was then working for Newsweek, put “Big Easy” in the magazine, and it took off from there. Of course there’s nothing easy about the city anymore. That, too, is because of the river. The river is why New Orleans exists, and why it sits here, vulnerable if not innocent, like a high school girl drinking too much and trying to look older than she is at her first college fraternity party. But because engineers screwed with the river, the city was violated in the most intimate way in 2005, first by a storm, then by a dozen different governmental agencies, and by the Bush administration. As in most acts of violence, recovery is impossible unless we confront that history honestly and deal with it.