IN THE RUINS.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-SEP-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

HURRICANE KATRINA

Nicholas Lemann talks with Daniel Cappello about the fate of his home town, New Orleans.

From 1992, James B. Stewart on his Illinois home town, threatened by floodwaters from the Mississippi.

New Orleans is an affront to nature, and nature isn't shy about reminding New Orleans of it. Lots of other places are affronts to nature, too, but, if they are in the United States, they usually have the hermetically sealed feeling of high-rise beachfront condominiums and desert suburbs and houses perched on mountaintops. New Orleans is too scruffy ever to achieve that. Tendrils of vines poke up through the floorboards. Paint flakes, wood rots, stamps self-adhere, and chunks of concrete must fly out of the roadbeds in the middle of the night (how else could they have disappeared?). The air is wet and heavy enough to slice into chunks and carry out of town in shopping bags. Streams lose their coherence and turn into swamps. Rats and roaches and snakes sashay through the gutters. Southern Louisiana is the site of many environmental depredations, but one of them will never be a feeling of locked-down sterility as an appurtenance of human habitation. Nature has the upper hand.

Natural disasters are always lurking somewhere close to the front of the New Orleans mind--especially aquatic disasters, and most especially hurricanes. Hurricanes are an eternal theme in the literature of New Orleans, for reasons having more to do with New Orleans than with literature. Lafcadio Hearn's story "Chita," about the famous hurricane of 1856, before hurricanes had official names, got down the rhythm that never changes: the palpable gathering of the storm, the largely unheeded advice to flee, the howling climax, the debris and the looting afterward. His description of the storm...

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