I’VE NEVER BEEN TO... NEW ORLEANS
Despite hearing Louisiana dimissed as a ‘flyover state’, John O’Ceallaigh longs to visit this city famous for its jazz and Southern charm
I imagine the Germans have a word for what it means to miss a place you have never been, but I’ll need to make do by telling you that a figurative piece of my heart lies in New Orleans. It annoys me that I never made it there before the pandemic, despite travelling to the United States a lot. Back then, work often took me to New York – a heaving, overpriced metropolis that I always considered overrated as a city, and to chi-chi spots in the likes of Miami and San Francisco.
I remember a decade ago hearing supposedly woke creatives in those coastal enclaves speaking disparagingly about the “flyover states” they would leapfrog on jaunts east and west. There was something so clearly insidious in that term, a dismissal of their neighbours that perhaps foretold some of the divisions in American society that are now so plain to see.
Maybe the urbanites’ apathy once made an impression on me, but as my own coastal visits lost their charm I began to wonder about the beauty and complexity embedded in America’s South. The idea of travelling to New Orleans offered a kind of poetry. I would follow the meandering Mississippi before drifting languidly into Louisiana, thick with the sultry heat of summer, and getting gently sozzled on cocktails
in some old French jazz bar on Bourbon Street. The place always struck me as a good-time city.
Though its most famous street pays tribute to a regal French family rather than the liquor, its name titillates with the promise of a sort of louche debauchery. Looking at pre-Covid pictures, that promise was clearly delivered during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras festivities, though I wonder now if I have missed
my opportunity to enjoy the revelry.
With so many of the pleasures of life compromised at home, America’s borders not opening for another month, and New Orleans still in the fledgling stages of recovery from August’s devastating Hurricane Ida, will the carefree, hedonistic pleasures of my imagination still await me? Rather than pursuing poetry, maybe my eventual visit there will be a futile chase of fantasy.