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• LITHOSPHERE
When the tiny settlement had first been established on the salty verge of the Gulf of Mexico, tall ships wearing high-top wings of white sailcloth had to ride the tidal flow through a measureless, reedy delta in order to reach it. Negotiating the shifting channels took a good pilot. Still, the new trading post lay within easy reach of piping seabirds. Sailors at anchor could hear breakers boom against sand bars.
The port was meant to be a point of contact between three worlds — freshwater, saltwater, and the continental ocean of prairie rumored to stretch beyond the western hills. The village thrived in this role and became a town. The town, a metropolis. Time crawled by, as inexorable as the river.
Once a city has grown great and venerable, it takes on its own justification. Centuries passed. Eventually, the original raison d’etre for New Orleans hardly mattered anymore. A living thing, it fought to survive.
Logan Eng strolled a levee watching barges glide past sunken abandoned docks. Once, this had been the second-busiest port in North America, but today cargo ships passed on by, toward the big tube-reloading stations at Memphis, for example. This muggy evening, the main redolence was of mint-scented pine oils, added by the city to cover other, less pleasant aromas. Environment Department launches sniffed each barge suspiciously. But according to Logan’s ex-wife, it wasn’t bilge dumping that gave the river that greasy brown pungency, but the town’s own creaking sewers.
Of course, Daisy McClennon never lacked for causes. As student protestors, long ago, they had shared the same battles. Those had been great days to be young and on the side of righteousness.
But time affects relationships, as well as cities. And Daisy, the purist, found it ever harder to accept Logan, who had in his heart something called compromise. Their first big fight came early on, when Alaska, Idaho, and other holdouts finally began taxing household toxics like canned paints and pesticides, to encourage proper disposal. Logan had been elated, but Daisy wrinkled her nose, detecting a sellout. “You don’t know string pullers and deal makers like I do,” she had declared. “If they gave in so easily, it was to forestall bigger sanctions later. They’re experts at testing the wind, then giving you moderates just enough rope…”
Logan came to envy other people, whose marriages might wither or flourish over mundane things like money or sex or children. For their part, he and Daisy had always earned more than they needed, even in these tight times. And their lovemaking used to be so good that even in middle age he still thought her the most desirable woman alive.
How absurd that little differences in politics should come between them! Differences he, personally, found inscrutable.
He still vividly recalled that final, bitter evening, wiping biodegradable dish soap from his hands as he tried to catch her eyes. “Hey! I’m on your side!” he had pleaded.
“No you’re not!” she had screamed back. A handmade plate shattered on the wall. “You build dams! You help irrigators ruin fertile land!”
“But we have new ways…”
“And every one of your new ways will just bring on more catastrophes! I tell you, I can’t live anymore with a man who sends bulldozers tearing across the countryside…”
He recalled her eyes, that evening ten years ago, so icy blue and yet so full of fire. He had wanted to hold her, to inhale her familiar scent and beg her to reconsider. But in the end he went out into the night… a humid night like this one… carrying suitcases and a feeling ever afterward of exile.
Ironically, Daisy had been as good as her word. She could tolerate him, if not his views, just so long as he didn’t live in the same house. Shared custody of Claire was handled so easily, Logan had to wonder. Was it because Daisy knew he was a good father? Or because the issue simply didn’t loom as large to her as the latest cause?
“People talk as if the old days of capitalist rapists ended on the beaches of Vanuatu, and with the sack of Vaduz,” she had pronounced just last Sunday, over a dinner of neo-Cajun blackened soycake. “But I know better. They’re still there, behind the scenes, the profiteers and money men. Anti-secrecy laws just drove them undercover.
“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’… what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”
This from a vegetarian, who thought it murder to harm a perennial plant! At one point during the meal, Logan’s daughter caught his eye. I just have to live with Daisy till college — Claire’s look of commiseration seemed to say — You had to be married to her!
Actually, a part of Logan perversely enjoyed these monthly exposures to Daisy’s fanaticism. Among his engineering peers he so often took the pro-Gaian side in arguments, it was actually refreshing to have the roles reversed occasionally.
Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.
Take the scene from this levee. Logan found it hard to get excited over simple sewage. It was only biomatter, after all, headed straight for the gulf. Not something really serious, like heavy metals in an aquifer or nitrates in a lake. The brown stuff out there wouldn’t make pleasant drinking water. (Who drank from the Mississippi anyway?) But the ocean could absorb one hell of a lot of fertilizer. No cities lay downstream, so officials looked away when the Old Dame… leaked. New Orleans had special problems anyway.
From atop the splattered dike, Logan spied the massive flood barrier city fathers had built to fight aggressive tidal surges. The price for that impressive edifice lay behind him — a town still elegant and proud, but wracked by neglect.
Logan had toured Alexandria, Rangoon, Bangkok, and other threatened cities, assessing similar panoramas of grandeur and loss. Sometimes his advice had actually helped, like at Salt Lake, where the rising inland sea now surrounded a thriving sunken municipality. More often, though, he came home feeling he’d been battling mud slides with his bare hands. The death of Venice, apparently, hadn’t taught anybody anything.
Sometimes you just have to say good-bye.
Here in New Orleans, earnest men and women worked to save their unique town. He’d recently helped the Urban Corporation anchor seventeen downtown blocks against further sinking into the softening ground. Tonight they were rewarding him with a night in the old French Quarter, still gay and full of life — though now the Dixieland strains echoed off these riverside barricades, and barges rolled by even with wrought-iron balconies.
At one point he just had to get away, for his ringing ears to cool off and the fiery cuisine to settle. Excusing himself, he left to stroll the muggy, jacaranda-scented evening, stepping aside for lovers and wandering groups of Ra Boys on the prowl. The Big Easy had class all right. In decline, there remained an air of seedy blaisance, and even the inevitable bandit types believed in courtesy.
He listened to the barge horns and thought of the manatees that had inhabited this area, back when La Salle’s men first poled their way through endless marshes, trading ax heads for furs. The manatees were long gone, of course. And soon… relatively soon… so would New Orleans.