erstwhile The old River Road, entering into New Orleans, takes on the distinctive qualities of the roads of that great city: it becomes a six-lane divided boulevard, with the extreme lanes reserved for parking, the sort of streets that form the neighborhood boundaries throughout the city; and it takes on the name of St. Claude Avenue. Black men sat on the stoops of the shotgun shacks lining the road; cat’s claw (Macfadyena unguis-cati) crawled over the rotting filigree of abandoned houses askew on their mud-planted foundations; aging white men with long hair and jeans got into their pickup trucks shouting parting jests at shopkeepers; young hipsters on old bicycles, sporting plastic-rimmed glasses and broad-striped shirts or summer dresses, pedaled awkwardly in the right lane; groups of shirtless black teenagers with the shorts pulled down around their thighs stood by the doors of corner bodegas. Temperature is defined as the movement of particles in a given area. All throughout St. Bernard Parish, as you approach New Orleans, you can feel the human temperature of the streets increasing: more and more people interacting, bouncing off each other, all moving within the field of vision. Now inside the borders of New Orleans it was beginning to boil. New Orleans has half the population it once had, but no matter: you still see more people than in any other American city besides New York, because in New Orleans they live their lives outdoors.
Tāsgaon The street names were weird and amazing; all over America, streets have names like Oak and Chestnut and Washington and Main and Third; coming along St. Claude Avenue I found Lamanche, Tricou, Delery, Alabo, Caffin, Lizardi, Forstall, Egania, Piety. Even the names were unlike any other place. Some of the combinations seemed irresistibly poetic. Meet me at the intersection of St. Claude and Desire.
I had contacted my host from the Chalmette Battlefield, and was heading straight to his place at Louisiana and Lasalle. St. Claude Avenue grew increasingly familiar as I approached the French Quarter; it then became Rampart Street, and I saw the grand old oaks of Esplanade Street; remembered by seeing again how empty and desolate the north part of the Business District was; rode into the Garden District, where Tara still sat cheek-by-jowl with Port-au-Prince: mansion was the tentmate of crackhouse, and weedy vacancies the neighbor of aralia and tree fern. I saw the neighborhoods grow nicer and nicer as I headed uptown, while the roads stayed just as cracked and dismal and uneven (no city in America has worse pavements, due in part to poverty and in part to the subsiding mud the city is built on).
I rang the doorbell and was received with the warmest hospitality. And then, there I was, at a friendly house, the first stage of my trip done, Gulf to New Orleans; my odometer read 110 miles. I had done it in three days, seeing what I wanted to see, and in good health. I needed to average 40 miles a day to complete the river in two months; but this was close enough. I knew my body needed to start slowly: I hadn’t cycled 110 miles in the previous three years, and now I had done so much in three days. My back was starting to feel better, but my legs did hurt; I would take at least the next day off from my bike entirely.
“I don’t know if you’re tired,” my host said, “but I have a crawfish boil to go to right now, and then there’s a party right after that I’d like to go to as well. But if you want to sleep or just rest or whatever, you’ve got my cell number, you can meet me at the party later, or just stay here, take a bath, however you’d like.”
“Hell no!” I said. “Let’s go to that crawfish boil right now!”
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