This man, Christopher, he was like Schrödinger’s train kid: He stood, a dirty shirt, ripped jeans, and long hair in a ten-ish-person crowd of dirty shirts, ripped jeans, and long hair, a guitar strapped over his shoulder like the guitar strapped over the shoulder of the guy next to him, the guy who introduced himself as Alphonso, whose face tattoos bespoke a life dedicated entirely to travel.
But Christopher was also clearly not one of the train kids: While all the rest stumbled or slumped against the wall on Decatur Street in drunkenness, Chris watched intently, I’d say solidly, as the drunk woman next to him read my palm.
“You’re doin’ well,” she said, tracing the line at the base of my thumb, “see? It gets deeper here.” Griffin and I walked on down Decatur, politely denying an offer to take my palm-reader home with us. Chris came with us, told us he’d retired from the army recently, that he’d been settled in New Orleans for six months now, that he’d worked at a Domino’s for those six months to pay off some old debts but was gonna quit at the end of December to dedicate himself entirely to playing guitar.
“I traded my guns for a guitar, y’know? They had me stationed as a recruiter, but people ended up recruiting me to leave the military instead. So I’m just gonna sit out here on Jackson square and play my guitar and try to draw people out of violence instead of sending people into it.” Louisiana’s had the US’s highest murder rate for 28 years straight. Chris is fighting an admirable fight.
* * *
A couple days later, I sat on the Mississippi river levee in Harahan, just southwest of New Orleans. Down at the bottom it looked like the river: leaves floating, the dark surface of the water seemingly stationary under a thick, humid night. Grasses piled up on the opposite bank so that they seemed like they might fall in at any moment, and the trees above them were still almost completely green, even whippy.
I thought I heard an owl in one of them, but it was too far away to tell: Could have been a person moaning. Who knows what they do here? Another owl nearer to me answered the first. They called back and forth for a few minutes, and I walked down the levee to pee into the water before driving back home.
It wasn’t water. A scraggly bed of grass separated the sloped concrete of the levee from the trees and their owls. Where’d the river go? I swear I even heard water flowing by earlier, something splashing. And why would they put a levee beside a bed of grass? I pissed in the fake river and wondered whether the owls I heard had been laughing at me.
I thought again, Who knows what they do here? I’ve lived longer in North Carolina now than I lived in Louisiana before. So much for “finding my roots.” Some swamp plants don’t even have roots. Maybe I’m one of those.
* * *
Around 11:00 on the night of December 25th I sat at the bank of Alligator Bayou. I knew for sure it was water this time: The moon had grown since my night in Harahan, and it turned the ripples on the bayou a bright white. The cypress trees towering over the swamp looked like inverted redwoods—tall, but with their branches angled upward, goblets trying to catch the moonlight. I think they were cypress trees…
The wind passed over me, and I shivered. I’m powerless against the cold here, wet as it is. The inverted redwoods rippled in the wind as if there were actually redwoods growing across the surface of the swamp, and the cypress trees were their reflections on some vertical surface of water I couldn’t quite make out. I wouldn’t doubt it. Who knows, right?
Behind them the sky burned the color of peeled carrots. I’d almost forgotten the city, only a few miles behind the swamp. I heard that last year, during the floods, they had to demolish a couple of the roads that led into the bayou so that the water could flow out.
And so the city and the swamp, close as they are, became even more separate. I feel some symbolism in that, though I’m not certain how to word it. In all of it, really: The fact that the trees look upside-down; that the sky was carrot-colored rather than simply orange; that the moon painted the ripples on the bayou so that they looked like a scene from a particularly crisp dream, even through the trees that tried to catch its light.
