New Orleans and Old Stories, written late October 2013

New Orleans and Old Stories  October 30, 2013

I love that there are some operating streetcars in New Orleans' transit system, and I rode one at the end of the day after a walking tour of the Garden District:  a section of huge old homes built to impress "the neighbors" in the mid-1840's after a Frenchwoman sold her plantation.  The streetcars were fun to ride.

Odd to walk the city thinking what it must have been like just after Katrina, and also noting all the stark contrast of privilege and oppression.  But I found it a friendly city with a sense of humanity (unlike Houston, which felt creepy to me…. urban sprawl, corporate greed, asphalt and mining the earth without thought of the impact and the future). 

Before walking the Garden District, I took the bus (I loved the city's great public transportation!) to Audubon Park near Tulane and Loyola campuses, intentionally to see what they call "The Tree of Life".  It is a live oak called the De Bore oak that they estimate was planted in Audubon Park in 1740.  Here it is.  I sat up against it for a while and imagined the stories it has witnessed.

My hosts Grace and Harvey are an English-as-a-2nd-language teacher and a city permit/planner with the New Orleans Water Board, respectively, with a love of old trees.  Harvey is an amateur dendrochronologist who has been working energetically since 2003 (that was 200 years since the Louisiana Purchase) to register old bald cypresses in the state that pre-date the Purchase.  His efforts help educate owners to the wonder of preserving such long-lived and slow-growing trees.  One of them is almost 19 feet in circumference and dates to be at least 800 years old.  

Harvey and Grace's house is just south of the Garden District and near the Mississippi River, and was built before 1850 in this old working class neighborhood.  Again, I wondered about the stories going back into past centuries.

Two coincidences of interest:  Grace and Harvey had stayed with the same Servas couple in Sandpoint that I stayed with who are sailors and very involved with smart growth and the Idaho Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance, and liked them as well as I did.  And Harvey did his graduate work in Cincinnati in the late 70's, when I first lived there, and was quite interested in the Urban Ecovillage work there of my friends the Schenks that I stayed with this summer.