46 - Disaster Tourism

I like walking among the moon and stars

I have not adapted productively to the schedule of the household in which I am a guest. It is on a very slow and late West Coast time. Maybe that fits with the typical rhythm of life as observed by some people about New Orleans. But I feel time passing swiftly and with little to show.

Maybe I'm actually on vacation, and it is being on vacation that I have not productively adapted to. Surely the cook and dishwasher and occasional driver has noticed I am not productive. (I do offer, for the record -- but we all know it's easier just to do it, than to try and tell the guest where the dishes go).

The other day I walked from my brother’s house almost to Canal -- to be precise, to the corner of St. Charles and Gravier. This is a walking distance of 3.2 googlemiles. I was trying to walk off dinner from the night before. I could happily have kept going but my brother called to see if I wanted to go to lunch, so I stopped there and caught the streetcar back again.

About halfway along my trek, I was accosted by a tourist. This was not a surprise. It seems wherever I go, tourists mistake me for a local. I've been asked for detailed directions in New Orleans, Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles before I've been there a few hours. Oddly enough, this never happened in Taipei.

Anyway, he smiled self-deprecatingly and apologized for being a bit ghoulish but wanted to know if the Ninth Ward was anywhere near. He was, in other words, a disaster tourist, and feeling bad about it. It told him if he walked from there to the French Quarter, and then continued to walk about as far beyond it, he might get near the Ninth Ward. I knew this from having looked once at a map. I've long since given up wondering why so many people can't or won’t read maps. I guess it's only occasionally a survival skill.

He thanked me and went on but before he did I said something to make him feel better about his ghoulishness. He mentioned that there were good things happening there, green technologies being incorporated into rebuilding or something like that. This much I did not know. But this inspired me to point out that the area was in a stage of rapid evolution, and that is always worth taking a look at. I felt if he wanted to go see it, he should do so without making apologies.

This is an impulse of mine. I want people to feel better, not worse. I’m not consistent about it and I don’t do it dishonestly. I mean, if someone should feel bad about themselves, I’m more than happy to assist with their enlightenment. But this one didn’t merit it. My attitude contrasts sharply with certain personality types I’ve encountered on the internet. The internet, by enabling rapid communication without the natural modification of face to face interaction, allows some people to be mean just because they think it’s fun, or at least to come off as meaner than they really are. Unfortunately, some people really are that mean.

Anyway, if there’s a point to this rigmarole, it’s that I’m not doing any disaster tourism while down here. No trips to the Ninth Ward for evocative pictures of tragic outcomes, symbols of broken lives, any of that. No five-years-after-the-hurricane-porn from me.

But I did get driven up past Claiborne and shown an interesting contrast. The house on the left has recovered. The house on the right has not. Just before August 29, 2005, they looked much the same. Now the abandoned house is just glass and tree parts and, in this tropical climate, fading quickly. Very sad, but without knowing any details, it really just fades into the ebb and swell of people’s lives. We’re a vast cloud of six billion organisms, and at any moment some are less fortunate than others. Later, things change. They always do.

I wonder who's mowing the lawn

Most of this was written before dinner. After dinner I looked at it and went, uh, I should have gone for the brevity. But, to paraphrase Lincoln, I don’t have time to write something brief, and nothing brief comes to mind anyway, so I’ll just add a water meter cover I saw the other day to the top and call it done.