The train into New Orleans slows way down a few miles out of the city. It clanks along languidly, always many hours late. The “arrival time” on the schedule is merely a quaint formality. The greenery is lush and dense as you roll through the Cypress swamps. The train stops mysteriously now and again, sits for a long, long time, hissing and sighing, then starts up again just as mysteriously. The best place to be on the New Orleans approach is downstairs, where the car steward has opened the top half of the door. He’ll usually bend the rules, especially if you’ve already made friends with him, which you’ve had plenty of time to do, and let you lean out a little.
We stop for a while next to a drainage ditch near the tracks. A dead tire and a grocery cart repose in black water, the oily surface shimmering with peacock-feather iridescence. And on long slender stalks, growing right up out of this poisonous-looking pool, the most beautiful delicate waxy white science-fiction flowers you ever saw.
This is Friday. We left Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. The thing about the train is that it takes you through the ass-end of every city. You see the unlovely backs of factories and chemical plants, you see feedlots, refineries, vast elephant graveyards of dead cars, trucks and buses, mountains of scrap metal, interesting slums. There’s a fine tradition, as old as the railroads themselves, probably, of dumping the worst, ugliest trash down the embankment near the tracks. You see plenty of garbage bags of regular household trash, but what’s impressive is the big stuff that’s harder to get rid of, civilizational detritus like mattresses, tires, televisions, sofas, carpets, water heaters, washing machines, refrigerators, and cars. Sometimes these dumpsites are in what would otherwise be pleasant leafy glades, and seem to be making a definite statement. I knew a man, an environmentalist, who had a theory about why humans trash nature. He said his idea was regarded as heresy among fellow environmentalists and usually caused them to recoil in shock when they heard it: humans trash nature, he said, because they know that nature is ultimately going to trash them. I think he was on to something.
On the way out of L.A., the train passed behind some office buildings. We on the train could see what someone working in one of the buildings couldn’t—that in a series of open garage-sized spaces under the building, people have set up housekeeping. Some of the spaces are shipshape, homey and cozy-looking. One guy reclined on a Barcalounger and watched television. He’d carpeted the dirt floor with salvaged hunks of rug, and he even had some pictures on the walls. You could see the ingenious system he’d set up to pirate some electricity. He’d hung shower curtains across the front of his little home, but they were pulled aside. He was not at all concerned about the faces at the train windows peering in at him as we rolled on by. Further along, where the urban sprawl petered out and gave way to eucalyptus groves, scrubby palms and cacti, we saw dozens of encampments, men sleeping on mattresses on the dry reddish ground. The ones whose faces we could see had the fried, depleted, windburned look of Everest summiters. Even asleep, they looked tired, so tired. It wasn’t at all hard for me to imagine the utter opulence of an old mattress of one’s own, a prize, found and dragged out here to the edge of the city among the trees, where you could be left alone and just sleep.
It’s eight hundred miles from L.A. across Arizona and New Mexico to El Paso near the Texas-New Mexico border. Then there’s eight hundred miles of Texas before you get to Louisiana. El Paso and Juarez are the flip side of each other. From a distance, approaching from the west, you see gleaming glass towers like a giant Wurlitzer on your left, and disappearing to infinity on your right, parched dirt and low ramshackle pink, blue, green and yellow buildings and houses. There’s nothing gradual about the transition. The Rio Grande is the line of demarcation cutting right through the center. And there’s nothing grand about the Rio Grande here. The train comes in on high ground, so you look down at the river. It’s shallow, with concrete banks, in some places just pools of standing water, some stretches of it deserted, looking as if you could walk across it in about thirty seconds. Plastic bags are everywhere, snagged in the barbed wire, in the brush, high up in the trees, in the water, blowing around like tumbleweeds.
Edmund Wilson wrote in one of his diaries about looking down into a New Orleans cemetery from a train and seeing skeletons lying in their violated, grave-robbed tombs. The tendency, discovered a couple of centuries ago, of the New Orleans earth to disgorge buried coffins during floods put the cemeteries above ground. The “cities of the dead” perfectly reflect the social divisions of the city of the living. The mausoleums of the rich are marble, iron and granite temples with pillars, carvings, statuary, fancy ironwork, grand staircases and huge heavy doors. The poor get stacked in crowded wood or cement tenements. I’ve seen pictures of New Orleans-like cemeteries in the Philippines where the living have moved in with the dead in their fancy mausoleums, whole families, cooking, eating, sleeping, hanging laundry, using the coffins (some of them glass-topped so the corpse is very much present) as dining-room tables.
Surely there are tomb-dwellers in New Orleans. But I picture something quite different from the cheerful, populous, bustling cemetery society of the Philippines—something furtive, nocturnal and throat-slittingly dangerous, New Orleans-style. All the big cemeteries in the city have warnings prominently posted: Don’t go in alone, don’t go after dark. A fine and private place.
They first started talking about a railroad bridge over the Mississippi into New Orleans around 1892. They almost dug a tunnel instead, and once they settled on a bridge they almost made it a drawbridge. There were endless delays while they wrangled over where and how to build it and how to pay for it. There were big problems with underlying clay strata (called “gumbo”) along the banks of the Mississippi, and cement foundations for the bridge had to be sunk 170 feet below the water. The crash of ’29 slowed things down again, but then they finally got to work in 1932, and of course by then it had to also carry cars and trucks. There were two labor strikes in the summer of ’33, but they finished it in December, 1935, a few months after Gov. Huey P. Long was assassinated, and they named it after him, which not everyone was happy about. But it really is one hell of a bridge, and an altogether fitting monument to the Kingfish. It’s almost four and a half miles long from end to end, and even though it clears the river by 135 feet it still gets hit by ships from time to time. It’s a wonder of technological, geological and architectural innovation, and it’s dangerous and poorly designed at the same time.
I drove a car across it once, a Studebaker Hawk that belonged to a friend who lives in New Orleans. It was a beautiful old car. It was also riddled with mechanical and electrical glitches (the heat was stuck permanently “on;” we drove it through the French Quarter in August, the admiration we attracted well worth the risk of hyperthermia; il faut souffrir, and all that) and had a tendency every once in a while to just quit for no reason at all. So there I was, hurtling over the Huey P. Long, high, high above the river, two narrow lanes in each direction built for 1930s traffic with no shoulder whatsoever, boxed in on three sides by tractor trailers, their monster tires taller than the car and roaring along a few inches from my window, their huge snarling radiators filling up the rearview mirror, in a classic Studebaker, decaying but elegant, that might die at any moment. It was such a….well, such a New Orleans experience.
I recall an essay by a travel writer who said he’d like to go to Japan. But the Japan he wanted to go to, he said, was not the Japan he’d get to after eighteen hours on a jet. The Japan he wanted to go to lay at the end of a different kind of journey, one that would start with a four-day train trip from New York to San Francisco. Then, a couple of days in San Francisco, acclimating, in a good hotel on the hill overlooking the bay, before boarding an ocean liner for the nine-day crossing; evenings on the deck watching the sunsets and then looking at the stars and breathing the changing winds of the vast Pacific, setting his watch back a little every day, then eventually spotting shore birds, and finally, glimpsing the mirage of land on the horizon. That was the Japan he wanted to go to. The New Orleans I like to go to is the one you roll into over the bridge on the Sunset Limited, in obsolete, anachronistic stateliness, swaying, creaking and rumbling, hours behind schedule, maybe a little stiff and weary but reviving fast.
The steel train trestle of the bridge starts its long, gradual ascent two miles from the west bank of the river while you’re still in the swamps. It’s like a strange dream of slowly, slowly taking off in a huge ponderous plane. Soon you’re above the treetops and looking down into the opaque green water. You see flat-bottomed wooden swamp boats tied up on the banks and odd little houses, gardens, animal pens and chicken coops in the clearings, like looking into another century. You see occasional ancient cars rusting peacefully here and there. The air is sultry with moisture and fecundity, river smells, smoke and diesel, the sky gray and glowering with thunderheads over the gulf. Then you’re up over the Mississippi, looking down on Russian freighters, Titanic-sized cargo ships, oil tankers, barges and paddlewheel party boats. The car steward is relaxed and cheerful and getting a certain look on his face. The two-and-a-half-day trip is almost done. He’ll get a layover before he turns around and goes back. And this ain’t Des Moines we’re heading into.
It’s N’Awlins.