Over and Under A Horizon Or Two

January 19th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Blog |

(Note: I’m cheating with the timestamp on this, backdating it to when I actually finished writing it, last night)

At the moment, I am writing from a Days Inn outside of San Antonio. I left New Orleans yesterday morning, after spending the previous day there, and took the scenic route through southern Louisiana to Houston, meeting up with Anthony at Johnson Space Center around four in the afternoon.

After my day in the Big Easy, I tried unsuccessfully to write about it. I couldn’t find a train of thought I could track onto. I’m still not sure how to describe the day. A simple timeline of activity seems woefully inadequate, but any attempt at relating my impressions of the place simply failed to produce anything not deserving of immediate deletion.

In trying to figure out how to describe the city, all that would stick in my head were two words: sad and beautiful. New Orleans is a beautiful town. Having seen it now, I am truly regretful that I had never visited before Katrina, because even two and a half years after the fact, the devastation is still readily apparent; a gaping wound only slowly and tortuously being stitched up. My first night on the road, I made it to the outskirts of New Orleans and stayed at a hotel there (the aforementioned hotel room with no balcony door handle). The next morning I drove into the city and past neighborhood after neighborhood that looked completely abandoned. Once in the city I parked near the infamous Superdome and just proceeded to walk around, first walking down to the riverside (and visiting the aquarium there), before walking around the French Quarter, including a photography gallery with original Ansel Adams prints, among others (anyone have a spare $80,000?). I had lunch and took a tour of the city, which included the French Quarter, Jackson Square, one of New Orleans’ famous above-ground cemeteries, the 17th Street Levee (the one that failed and is famous for a picture of a helicopter dropping sandbags onto its breached wall), and many of the neighborhoods affected by the flooding.

Sad and beautiful.

So much of the town is still abandoned, for sale and lease signs everywhere – homes and business alike – houses gutted or demolished, waterlines on many houses and buildings that you can watch rise and fall as you travel from neighborhood to neighborhood. But there’s also construction; people renovating homes and business, construction crews in the city streets and in the neighborhoods. We passed one house under construction that was still only a frame – but a steel frame. The owner was obviously a committed resident, and a determined one at that.

After the tour, I walked around the French Quarter some more, but already tired from a great deal of walking and not wanting to be out too late by myself in an unfamiliar city, I headed back to the car and got back on the road, stopping at a hotel not far west of the city.

In the morning, I got on the road and took the scenic route through southern Louisiana, dipping through the bayou and marshes, before climbing back up on to I-10 and crossing into Texas. Somewhere along the way, it started to rain…again. It was raining still as I pressed into Houston and followed Anthony’s directions to Johnson Space Center, getting there around 4 PM. Anthony gave me an amazing tour that including the training mockups used for the Space Station, historic Mission Control that some guys we know did some pretty cool things in, Space Shuttle Control, which we actually got to walk around in (seeing as there is no active space shuttle mission at the moment), and International Space Station Mission Control, which is where Anthony actually works.

Afterwards, we had dinner at a nearby Mexican place where an older gentleman who was assuredly quite drunk told us, very sincerely, that he thought Anthony and I made a very cute couple. Who says they’re narrow minded in the South? After dinner, Anthony showed me around town a bit and we went to one of his favorite bars near his apartment. We didn’t make it to Cloverfield or a midnight showing of Rushmore, as my sheer exhaustion eventually got the better of me.

After a glorious night of sleep on his surprisingly comfortable futon mattress we spent the morning watching Apollo 13 even though both of us have it on DVD and…well, we know it pretty well. Afterwards we had lunch and I went on my way. Not, however, before he returned my jWin DVD player, which I had lent him so many years ago and which he has now upgraded from. Go ahead, look up the brand name, “jWin.” I have no idea what you’ll find, but suffice it to say, it’s the kind of DVD player that you get for free when you buy 10 DVDs from a mail order catalog.

So I have that, which is cool. And with my jWin DVD player in tow, I started west again, making it to San Antonio before sunset and deciding to stop for the night. West of San Antonio is the Hill Country of Texas, which is supposed to be the especially beautiful section of, and not something I wanted to drive through at night and therefore miss it. Also, somewhere to the west of here are the fabled massive wind farms of West Texas, another sight I wanted to get a proper look at.

So I called it quits in San Antonio (west of, ever so slightly), making it a rather early night, and decided to see Cloverfield and that tantalizing Star Trek teaser in front of it. Going to the movies by yourself is not something I would do often. Seeing a movie in a theater, and watching movies in general, is a communal experience meant to be shared, not just with the strangers around you, but also with somebody who you can share the experience afterwards with. Every now and then though, seeing a movie by yourself can be a treat, especially when coupled with the gloriousness of a long, solitary road trip.

I’ll wait until I have some file to point you to before discussing the teaser, and I’ll try to avoid any spoilerish discussion of Cloverfield (mostly because I intend to wrap this up and head to bed). But for now, all I’d like to put to paper is that I do not understand, though admit to fully being a part of, the propensity of the masses to watch our cities (New York especially) to be demolished time and time again. Independence Day, Armageddon, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, I Am Legend, and on and on and on are some kind of schadenfraude directed at the pinnacle achievement of civilization – the modern city - and, specifically, the pinnacle achievement of that pinnacle achievement – the Capitol of the World herself, New York. Even after 9-11, where cruel reality became Bruckheimerian for one terrifying day, we still love to watch New York City be demolished. Is it some kind of subconscious self-loathing of what our modern world has accomplished, a tiny bit of Wahabian radicalism inside us? Or just that same thrill you get when you slam your creation with disaster after disaster in SimCity? Does Osama bin Laden watch the myriad of films in which New York is trashed (and much more thoroughly than he was able to accomplish) and sigh wistfully? Why did I spend so much time building a totally awesome LEGO monorail set when I was a kid only to play Godzilla and wreck the thing, the LEGO National Guard utterly helpless to stop me?

Alright, sometimes it is better to have somebody to share a film with when you walk out.