A Creole tune

Bamboula, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 1848 - First learned of this piece reading David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris last summer. Gottschalk was from New Orleans, but wrote this piece in Paris as an attempt to synthesize Creole and African music with classical European piano.

Nothin' to see

Travel has always been a predominantly visually-focused endeavor. We have always wanted to see the sights, or if there were any sights worth seeing. In our Age of Instagram, the visual is even more paramount to the experience of travel. As an aspiring design professional, I am of course biased toward the visual both naturally and as a consequence of my education. In terms of our popular culture, I suppose that means that I could probably get more Instagrams-per-square-inch out of more places than the average non-designer.

But, what happens when there's "nothin' to see." In Louisiana, apart from New Orleans, I was told there was "nothin' to see." On the face of it, that's fairly accurate: "the sights" are few and far between. But, it's often a separate joy finding the poetry in the mundane and the routine - even if it's not visually arresting. You can't photograph the chewiness of a piece of crawfish, described by a friend as "a little dirty shrimp." One can take a photo of the magnificent live oaks that shade the campus of LSU, but you can't depict the joy that they bring to the eyes of a winter-bound Northerner who is amazed that such great green things are such an ordinary part of daily life in some places in the world. And, since I attempted it, you can't really photograph the sense of benevolent enclosure those magnificent trees provide. I'd almost consider moving South just for the trees. And what about the rain? In five days I encountered several species of that multifarious creature. There was the light rain that was largely intercepted by the live oaks, leaving the pathways damp but puddle-free; there were clouds that simply stooped to eye-level and deposited their moisture radiantly; and then there were downpours worthy of Noah, soaking, flooding, washing dirt where it shouldn't be and then washing it clean. Then there were the various sociologist's delights. There was the fraternity house of Delta Chi where I was lodging (my friend - a student affairs Masters student - took a job as their house director) which gave me a few fleeting glances beneath the surface of Greek life. The campus provided further people-watching opportunities. I was amazed at how easy I found it to pick out people who were of French descent - the long Norman faces and often long wavy hair I saw everywhere made it seem like I was looking through my grandmother's old family album. The Cajuns were Canadian before they were Louisianian after all.

Sometimes when there's nothin' to see, I think I come home with a better sense of the place and its people.

Concrete hills

Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I-10 runs its path and neither swamp nor lake nor width of bayou can stay its course. A good portion of the road is a causeway built above the bizarre merging of land and water at the west end of Lake Pontchartrain. Other parts of the same lake are prone to various acts of apparent hubris: a highway bisects it from north to south, power lines stand a mile out in the midst of the flat waters, laughing at anyone who thought that electricity and moisture couldn't be friends. But here lonesome trees claw their way out of the swamp, only to be assailed by Spanish moss. The earth undulates between wet and dry with baffling rapidity. The only hills are concrete - the road will occasionally lift itself over a particularly wide channel of murky water, or it will reach even more remote altitudes launching itself across other roadways. From the summit of these concrete hills, one gets an almost unsettling view of the landscape. One is not supposed to see from up here. This is the privileged domain of the pelicans and the egrets and the cranes. But then you're back to the pancake flatness of the marsh and the traffic, crawling along like an alligator.