The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Pontchartrain RV Park, New Orleans

I find the Voodoo queen of New Orleans online. She sells a love candle for $575, but clearly states that the money is only for the candle and that the spell is complimentary. I’m uncomfortable with online “gris-gris” so I decide to make a real gambler’s gris-gris for my gambler friend Chris . It’s made of chamois, a piece of red flannel, a shark's tooth, pine-tree sap, and dove's blood. I mixed blood and sap together, and used this mixture to write the (undisclosed) amount that I want Chris to win on the chamois. Then I wrapped the chamois in the red flannel with the shark's tooth between the two layers and sewed it all with dead cat's hair. This charm needs to be worn in the left shoe to bring good but uncomfortable luck.



On Bourbon Street a desperate man asks me for $5 to buy crystal meth. We walk the street at night and I eye the girls dressed in scanty outfits. Mrs. Phred points out that most of the girls, while attractive, are actually men with strong legs and relatively flat muscular chests. I regard it as impolite to take pictures.



We do the Katrina tour and get a little more insight about the lingering disaster. The City is, of course, in a huge swampy bowl that sits about six feet below sea level. Lake Pontchartrain on the North and the Mississippi (which flows though the City) is twelve feet above sea level. There are canals cut though the City, one of which connects the Mississippi to the Inland waterway at sea level.



There are levees and walls everywhere which are intended to keep high water out of the city. A barge broke though a wall in the lower ninth ward and flooded a third of the city at varying depths. Most of the damage was due to wind blowing South on Lake Pontchartrain in Katrina’s NE quadrant. Fats Domino, age 78, spent two nights on his roof and was picked up the third day. A lot of the dead fled to their attics and drowned or died of heat exhaustion.



The houses sat in a lake of putrid water laced with motor oil, sewage and dead bodies for over a month while the Corp of Engineers pumped it out. The heat produced thick layers of dangerous mold within the homes as well as a later of mud and filth. The contents of refrigerators were unimaginably foul. Each house has to be gutted and dried out, rewired and re-plumbed before it is habitable.



Brad Pitt is helping to construct a number of new homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. I know where he lives, but I’m not telling. Here's one of the Pitt homes in the lower ninth ward.



To put this in context, the bodies here are buried above ground because of the water table. To build a house, you drive in 80 telephone poles and pour a concrete slab on top of the poles. Even so, houses sink, sidewalks sink, roads sink, walls crack and you have to redo everything again about once every ten years (including shoring up the house). We hit the casinos, took a steamboat dinner cruise on the Mississippi, went to the aquarium and IMAX and the WWII museum. We also saw some fine antebellum mansions, a few cemeteries and wandered the French Quarter.



Our RV Park is Pontchartrain Landing. It’s very nice, with a pool, cable, book exchange and runs a 10 minute shuttle to the French Quarter three times a day. It’s Passport America, so you can get a nice spot for about $30 a night. We could spend another week here, but we have reservations in Abbeville tomorrow.



If you get a chance, come to New Orleans. It’s still a lot of fun and they could use your tourism dollars to help the recovery.

Roadside Relics

Port Sulfur, Louisiana – December 8, 2006

It's crisp and clear here where we are camped on the Tchefuncie River in St. Tammany Parish, which flows into Lake Pontchatrain. Big cypress trees line the banks and grow out in the river shallows. The big lake has a 25 mile long arrow-straight causeway leading south to New Orleans, where the levees broke.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move
- Led Zeppelin

Katrina rolled over the Louisiana bayous 100 miles southeast of New Orleans on the way to smash the Mississippi coast. There wasn’t much on the news about this area and I wanted to see and document what happened.



We drive though New Orleans, past the convention center, and 80 miles down the peninsula toward the Gulf. There appear to be very few repairable structures. Large shrimp boats ended up in fields. FEMA trailers are everywhere. Katrina came though this area at full strength. The refineries and heliports that carry workers to the rigs are about the only things that are repaired.



At the very end of the peninsula a sad collection of broken music boxes, a porcelain Santa, and various small figures are placed on a seawall. A boy’s bicycle and an upside-down SUV are in the rubbish near the seawall.


We drive back to New Orleans and have dinner in the French Quarter. This is Friday night so we want to try the mango daiquiris. The businesses in the quarter are back, but the tourists don’t yet know that the city is open for business. We were the only diners in the restaurant we chose.