Читать книгу A New Orleans Detective Mystery - Ken Mask - Страница 4

The Deep South U.S. space termed New Orleans is that kind of unique arena which can best be described with a collection of carefully chosen words by someone with language command saved for a few piercingly discriminating thinkers. The capacity of this correspondent to reflect on the texture of the place and to appropriately translate the well of thoughts into a body of material that will do the area justice is suboptimal and, thus, I arrest my energies.

But wait. I’ll try.

The two, straight, two-lane highway entrances to New Orleans from either east or west via Interstate 10 are characterized wonderfully with large, lengthy, very carefully and delicately constructed bridges that speak volumes of the special dedication to settle here despite the terrain. A causeway comes in via the Covington suburb, but inhabitants consider anything in the 60-mile radius to be ‘New Orleans.’ Folk always claim New Orleans, even as far away as the Mississippi border, and then some.

‘There’s water in them there plains.’ The surrounding landscapes are actually waterscapes: marshes, swamps, canals, bayous, rivers, lakes, and low-lying wetlands. The great, magnificent city, however, does not demonstrate the type of anxiety to impress in order to enjoy life that is found in many places. The land is a superb mixture of waterways, green foliage, light tan sandy dunes, and natural levees, as well as Mississippi dark mud-caked wetlands.

Land meets ocean in this cove, seemingly ‘created’ to let folk know there is a God and He/She wants you to take a moment sometimes to live and dance and play and interact. This port city brings a smile to all. It can rightfully claim the title of ‘World’s Most Lively City,’ though no one there would be so corny as to state that.

The long stretches down Interstate 10 carry you along approximately 40 miles through settings, the names of which offer the kind of respect to Native American villages and mixtures of European history and cultural influences that should blanket all the United States. Places with names like Tangipahoa, Ponchatoula, La Place, French Quarter, Vieux Carre, Baton Rouge, Elysian Fields, Gentilly, Treme, and Pontchartrain. Once you reach the end and take the crescent curve flow along the Mississippi, you find one of the world’s most unique spaces.

Enough said. The wonderful architecture and luscious environment of its parks, hanging-oak-lined streets, waterways, bayous, and canals are the type seen on postcards used to show off a place. Yet with the naked eye, they are truly amazing. With no airbrushing needed on photographs!

“What do you think of this, Smooth?” A typed letter-to-the-editor was placed on the dark maple desk/table sitting in the north corner of the busy detective office. It was in bold letters in a short, column-length newspaper style. “I wrote that last night on my way back down here.”

After a few moments of reading the text and a dramatic pause to absorb the contents and reflect, he replied, “Yeah, Luke. Send this in. It’s good!”

“Yes. I told him the same thing. He doesn’t listen to me anymore! We’ve been reading morning newspapers together, absorbing the data, sometimes critiquing the writers, and debating the stories while enjoying all of the lighter sections for a while now. It just seems to me that we need a voice there once in a while. That’s why I keep telling him to write more, to get in there! It’s something that he’s been passionate about for ...” She stopped when it appeared that the statement was running into a banal tone.

“News drives this city, man. You know that and folk pay attention to the media unlike no other time in our history! Let your voice be heard. You’ve got the attention of the city. Right now they’re fascinated with you ... and ...” The sideman arrested the statement and rose from sitting on the large, leather, worn-out Mexican antique sofa. He opened the door to get better ear from the others who had meandered into the front secretarial space.

Rosalind, Matt, aka ‘Smooth,’ and our man stood on the porch of the private detective’s office overlooking Bayou St. John as the late afternoon sun shone through the trees of the quiet city.

Letter to the editor, Times Picayune

New Orleans, Old and New

The thing that strikes anyone who knows or has heard about New Orleans is the ‘old’ feeling which permeates the space. The city was settled early in our nation’s history and boasts of some of the most distinguished landmarks around and individuals who have called the place home.

It’s the birthplace of jazz, the location for great food, the keeper of the flame of early and late night ‘good times’ and warm hospitality. The area on the curve of the Mississippi River termed the Crescent City is unique and will remain so. No other city in the history of mankind has experienced a displacement of an entire populous. Not to make light of the extreme destruction of property, loss of life, and altered psyche of all who experienced the flooding as the result of Hurricane Katrina, I merely want to champion ‘the call for hope.’ New Orleans stands out in an outstanding way. The events of the week of August 29, 2005, are a wake-up call for us to treat one another with respect. Rushing floodwaters pounding people’s places and spaces, changing land, minds, and roots presented unpredicted trauma.

I’ve lived and worked in New Orleans for most of my life, although once I left for the Big Apple to study. Other cities I’ve called home cannot compare. The climate is excellent year-round. The landscape is a marvelous mixture of evergreens. The grass, oaks, pines, cypress, palms, ferns, and bright red dogwoods along with the bayous, ponds, and lakes are delightful. The airport is 20 minutes from the farthest point. The French Quarter probably enjoys some obscure distinction for having the most densely confined collection of establishments for having a good time. The buildings in all sections (wards) are wonderful examples of architecture from around the world, and the people living and working there are the type of folk you meet and instantly consider friends and family. That sounds corny and trite, but having been asked by so many people over the past three months, “What do you think about New Orleans? Will they rebuild it? Will it be the same? Will people that you know come back there to live? Will they fix the levees?” I have to say, “Yes!”

I realize now, sitting in an airplane seat at roughly 33,000 feet above the ground, that those and other sorts of questions are silly and foolish. Having just browsed the New York Times Sunday Edition, December 4, 2005, which covers world topics ranging from the war to a book review on Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, I felt compelled to add my opinion to the matter of rebuilding a city.

Diane Raines Ward’s book Water Wars is a fine example of an ‘I told you so’ type of work. In it, she superbly covers the history of flooding, dams, levees, water needs, rivers, lakes, and political musings. The work reads like a novel while discussing topics one usually encounters in textbooks on environmental studies or in earth science classes. Moreover, I have just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country, which is a brilliant collection of his thoughts about the universe. His humor is best summarized in, “What is life all about? We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The two thinkers have set a stage for me to delve into this essay.

New Orleans will be fine. We will have it back in a few years, after folks have moved past the trauma and horror, which were the result of nature and human error. Period. The suffering will continue and the anguish that came from the loss of lives and property will be in our minds forever.

There are groups of people who are using the best of their abilities to come together in the effort to rebuild this city. I see from the vantage point of having lived there, having visited there as a child growing up in North Carolina, and being sent there to vacation with mother’s relatives, that the warmth and eager force with which all inhabitants and journeymen/women who have enjoyed the space and the teams of thinkers coming together now to restore the city will make sure that things are up and running soon. All is not well in Smallsville. The mighty Casey has struck out, but there are other pitchers coming.

That brings me to the topic at hand from a technologic standpoint. The fact that I can write and edit these thoughts on a piece of metal and plastic machinery, viewing the words on a lit screen while traveling in another piece of machinery at 33,000 feet, traversing a distance which would have taken months to do so less than 100 years ago, speaks to my confidence in the matter. Rather than continue with such banal comments like, ‘If we can put a man on the moon …,’ ‘We live in an age of …,’ I say that the Crescent City will soon enjoy the flavorful vitality we all know and love.

There are people here like Matt Dillon, Elmo, Mike Dix, Lincoln Alexis, Mike Dunbar, Glenn and Morris Wilson, John Calcote, and Karl Washington, who are literally gutting establishments, replacing damaged materials in homes and businesses throughout the city, and rebuilding. Also, a man like musician Holden Jones sits at a table which hosts a strategic map of New Orleans. This table is the size of what one would image the Pentagon uses to outline war plans. Holden, however, is assisting in the city’s planning and rebuilding.

It is with sober research, analysis, insight, strategy, and energy that we will have Old New Orleans back to enjoy. The one thing which may just keep us from progressing is the way we treat each other. The storm has come and we are dealing with it. Let’s not continue along the lines we were on prior to the Kat.

Luke Jacobs

New Orleans