ANGUS LIND A 1966 graduate of Tulane, Angus Lind spent more than three decades as a columnist for The Times-Picayune.
O R L E A N S
mike meadows
N E W
A Balmy Nod to Fall by Angus Lind Following are some thoughts after spending many enjoyable hours over the summer reading professor Lawrence Powell’s excellent and entertaining The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Published by Harvard University Press, the book’s been called “the definitive history” of this city’s first century. National accolades have been heaped on the Tulane history scholar’s effort, which ultimately clues us in on why we are what we are today. We find out that by the 1730s, the band of renegades, convicts, drifters, con artists and smugglers deported here had provided not the utopia envisioned back in France but, rather, backward if not degenerate society. The 18th century was hardly the era of 24/7 news and analysis, so misinformation and propaganda guided many poor souls across the waters to New Orleans, where the local governing authorities and other schemers somehow overcame themselves and manipulated the king’s rules to provide for the populace’s meager survival. Even if the heart of the economy was smuggling and gambling, the city somehow also fostered a scientific, literary and celebratory community. This is all gross oversimplification and merely snippets and interpretations of Powell’s scholarly and exhaustive research. For instance, let’s fast forward to the 1790s, to a revelation near and dear to my heart: “New Orleans in 1791 had twice as many tavern keepers as it did merchants. On a per capita basis, the ratio of bars to people was off the charts.” A planter who traveled Louisiana and Florida, writes Powell, conducted a personal survey that concluded, “the city abounds with tippling houses.” It wasn’t much, but it was something to hang its hat on: New Orleans is the name, booze is the game. “If there was a wetter town anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it had yet to be found,” concludes the author. And he wasn’t talking about the weather, although he could have been. Somehow, however, the peculiarities of the city’s climate and environs never were quite adequately communicated to prospective settlers.
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FAL L 2 0 1 2 TUL ANE MAGA ZINE
FALLING LEAVEs
Autumn in New Orleans has many delights but trees changing colors are not typically among them.
Earlier in the city’s history, among promises of “gold in the streets” to allure unsuspecting investors here, there was an even more ridiculous boast: “A climate so balmy it vanquished old age.” You read that correctly. That’s “balmy,” as in pleasant or mild. Surrounded by water and marsh, we have a city six feet below sea level built on a mosquito-ridden, snake-infested, flood-prone swamp beset by thunderstorms, hurricanes, excessive heat and relentless humidity. This is what defines balmy and pleasant and mild? Well, there were all those bars to dull the senses. All of which is a long-winded segue into a few additional thoughts on what is undoubtedly the most delightful season of the year in New Orleans—fall—the only season that could possibly qualify as balmy. I recently read a travel promotion that described the onset of fall: foliage turning bright with oranges, reds, purples and yellows before falling to the ground, fresh cool autumn air whistling through canyons, geese in flight, slopes ablaze with color and mountain tops dusted with snow. A trained observer of many things including falling leaves, I immediately realized this was no promotional brochure for New Orleans. There is undoubtedly a technical, complex scientific answer to the phenomenon of colorful fall foliage, so obviously I know nothing about it. So I turned to Chris Franklin, WVUE-TV Fox 8 meteorologist, for assistance. “During the process of preparing for winter, most plants begin removing the chemicals that give their leaves the green color. This lack of chlorophyll allows other colors to break through,” said Franklin. “But who needs to prepare for winter in New Orleans? So our foliage remains green until the rare occasion when the cold strikes.” (Our three days of winter.) Autumn comes slowly in the Crescent City. Grass stubbornly remains green. It is warm, not hot. “The average high in New Orleans during December, January and February (our winter), Franklin points out, is in the low 60s. “Umm, not exactly brutal.” A dusting of snow, he said, “sends us into chaos.” So what do trees and plants here do when it does get cold? “Freak out and drop all their leaves,” Franklin said. “That’s just my opinion,” he adds, “I’m not a botanist.”