A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Visitations

Anticipation. It’s more than just Carly Simon longing for a splurch of ketchup.

My experience as a traveller isn’t terribly extensive, but I’ve been around a little bit. I’ve learned enough to view a journey in one of three ways. The first is obligatory, personal or professional business. The second is a revisit, I’m familiar with where I’m heading and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m in for. The third is the most adventurous, an unfamiliar destination. A goodly portion of the fun provided by a trip like that unfolds long before “wheels up.”

Since the covid pandemic kind of went away, Ann and I had been passing the puck back and forth in our own end, speculating about that selfish third destination, some place new to gawp at. We were all over the map, Memphis and Nashville, Dublin, Paris… Certain close personal friends who know me a little too well understand that I can sometimes be a little persnickety. Chaos is disruptive and the world is so full of it. If everything’s not in its place, it’s askew and that is aggravating. I’m not uptight, I’m just a bit particular. Beach holidays are fine for half an hour, but, man, the sand gets everywhere.

Potential destinations are akin to radio chart busters, hooks required. Every place in the world has a history and I’m always intrigued to learn about it, but if its history has already been a source of intrigue to me, so much the better. The arts in whatever form and in whatever tense are always a lure. If they don’t define a culture, they frame it.

Ann and I identified a fall window, a short one between the Doobie Brothers and Bruce Springsteen complete with a respite from standing commitments, a prime time to flee before winter locks us down. Edmonton is a long way from many places. A flight from its international airport is generally a short leg to somewhere else, the first baby step of an actual, proper journey. The opportunity cost associated with all travel is obvious: no hassle and no money spent. When Ann and I plan trips - our post-pandemic skills are rusty, we try to expedite the expediency of our expedition, attempt to alleviate our anxious, abject acquiescence to all ensuing annoyances. It is what it is and so we do what we must.

Ultimately, we elected to head down the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico. What could possibly go wrong in a port city situated below sea level at the tail end of the hurricane season over Halloween? Once Ann and I have dealt with the devilish details involved with any trip and before we research our destination, I review my preconceptions of the place – whatever the source of them.

Back in the early seventies about when my age first hit double digits, my older brother bought me a subscription to Sports Illustrated, one of those gifts of tacit reciprocity: We’ll both enjoy it. My introduction to New Orleans then was hosted by Saints quarterback Archie Manning who begat Colt Peyton and Giant Eli. The football team’s nickname was musical, like hockey’s St. Louis Blues, an American standard. The theme was perpetuated by the jazz funeral opening sequence of Live and Let Die. “Brown Sugar” was a salacious sketch of the Confederate States of America’s major metropolis, an electrified time warped piece of travel writing, but I couldn’t decipher the slurred lyrics garbled through a cheap AM transistor radio speaker back then. That song has since been condemned by pearl clutching revisionists, but history demands relativism because it never flatters its subject.

My high school Canadian history courses glossed over Britain’s deportation of the Acadians from its Atlantic provinces. I learned more about that paranoid policy listening to The Band’s “Acadian Driftwood.” The dispossessed regrouped in French Louisiana of which New Orleans was the capital. The French colony became a Spanish possession before flipping back to the French who sold it to the United States in 1803. I know this because a favoured restaurant in Edmonton was Louisiana Purchase and that ersatz Cajun establishment has either moved from its downtown premises or closed; I’ve no idea. And for some inexplicable reason, Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” was a loudspeaker staple at the ballpark when Edmonton was home to the Triple A Trappers.

How could I not buy a book called In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead? The Antebellum South pulses like an overripe abscess in the crime fiction of James Lee Burke. Americana, a memoir written by Ray Davies of the Kinks dealt with his stay in New Orleans. Mostly, he got shot, painfully aware while recuperating that in Elysian Fields and other city cemeteries the dead are necessarily buried above ground.

A Streetcar Named Desire, the drama by Tennessee Williams is set in the French Quarter. The play’s something like Mardi Gras, I’ve never seen it performed. The “Hey, Stella!” celluloid snippet we’ve all seen is probably the only line of dialogue Brando never mumbled. When I was still living in Montreal and cable TV was fettered access to American border stations, 60 Minutes broadcast a piece alleging the New Orleans heat was the most corrupt police force in the United States. Wages were paltry and ethics, like sewage, flowed downhill from there. The Big Easy, a noir film starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin played on the documented sleaze a few years after Clint Eastwood got kinky in Tightrope, the French Quarter again.

Contemporary history, the news of the day, is frequently presented as unprecedented and as such could precipitate an existential crisis: “Today the (insert noun) changed forever.” Climaxes are soon folded into a narrative that’s been unfolding for centuries, worthy of a paragraph or perhaps a full chapter. Hurricane Katrina was two and a half presidential administrations ago; pundits don’t speak of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans anymore, just as they no longer view Louisiana state politics through the fiction lens of Robert Penn Warren.

Underpinning our anticipation, my impressions and Ann’s impressions (and hers are different), is the music, which has lasted longer than some of the levees which protect the city from being swamped: Dixieland, zydeco, blues, funk, soul and barrelhouse rock’n’roll and whatever else may be stewing in the gumbo. I feel like we’re going to a place I already know pretty well. I cannot wait to stay out late listening to music and finding out just how wrong I am.                           

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.