New
Orleans
Memories
The Lady
of the Lake
|
This is a rough sketch of my neighborhood's backyard. I grew up in Metairie, Louisiana (a suburb of New Orleans), on a block bordered by dead-end streets on two sides and by levees on the other two. One of those levees contained the Bonnabel Canal and its pumping station; the other, Lake Pontchartrain. |
Lady Pontchartrain joined my personal pantheon during the kite-flying, mud-pieing years, for all that I still hadn't converted to a religion that allowed Goddesses. And of course She was a Goddess. Lakes are. I still don't know who they named Her after — some historical explorer or maybe a town in France — but it makes no difference in my mythology.
Hindu legend always has the Gods pitted against the demons in battle. My Lady of the Lake never lacked for an adversary either. During my myth-making years, they installed the Bonnabel Pumping Station, a mysterious, hulking freak of machinery whose parts sat for a year virtually in my back yard, providing an illicit playground for kids all over the neighborhood. Once assembled, the station roared and rumbled like an underground dragon herd, its noises following no schedule I could discern except that dawn awakened it at its loudest. The Goddess and the demon at eternal war: it trying to tame Her waters and protesting in unearthly tones its failure.
The lake is not large, as bodies of water go, but at twenty-four miles, the bridge that crosses Her is the longest in the world. The Causeway lifts off in the south next to the Doubletree Hotel and lands in the relative wilderness of the north shore in Covington. For some former city-folk, even Jefferson Parish is too close to the N'awlins, so they flee in droves across that bridge, relocating to huge houses in Covington, Mandeville, and other Northshore suburbs.
Most of my Mom's family have followed this evacuation trend. Every Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving involves a forty-five minute drive to the appropriate relative's house and back. The backseat boredom that ensues is what headphones, books, and little knotted bracelets are for.
The Doubletree Hotel used to be a Sheraton. I'm not sure when the building changed hands. If you walk down Lakeway One, the little parking drive that winds between the two towers, you might be hear the small breezes singing to you.
"in the canyons of the city,
you can hear the buildings cry..."-Rush, "Available Light", 1989
The Shereton's grand opening way back when was celebrated in a spectacular display of fireworks, adding to the general excitement one can usually watch "safely" by strolling along the top of the deserted levee on New Year's night. One might also walk down the 1400 block of Melody Drive and maybe get hit by whatever the folks are blowing up this year - strings of "Black Cat" crackers hanging from the telephone wire, "Jumping Jacks" that chase after your ankles, M-20 dynamite sticks rattling windows within a half-mile radius. Some years I'd rather risk a mugging.
In the interest of safety as well as beauty, they (you know, that omnipresent They) recently bulldozed all the undergrowth and many of the older trees that grew along Linear Park, the bike trail that winds between levee and Lake shore. Now there's no place for criminals to hide in wait for passing victims — and no place for passing victims to hide from pursuing criminals. A sign posted near the Rigdelake Drive area labels the park "BIRD SANCTUARY", but the little sparrow silohuette painted under the words is a tad lonelier now with less places for mourning doves to roost.
You get the best view of the Lake if you stand at "The Point", as the neighborhood kids called it. A slim little peninsula stretches out to mark the boundaries of the Bonnabel Canal where it escapes the Pump Monster and spills into the Lake. At its tip, a circle of cement boulders, similar to those lining the beachless shore, once formed a ring of rough benches. "The Circle of Stones," I called them. They surrounded a small boulder meant as table, or perhaps as an altar, depending on who muscled the rocks into place. Many talk of Stonehenge and its elusive origins, but no anthropologists pause for these kinds of neighborhood mysteries.
In the daylight, the place dons a mundane face, pretending to be a popular fishing spot. I'm not fooled. Even a genuine Cajun would be more likely to lose the bait to a needle-noser than to land a trout there. Instead, Lady Pontchartrain opens Her doors at night, when the high school kids sneak out to smoke and drink and chat on The Point, or to howl at the moon, hold ritual, and go skinny dipping in the warm, shallow water. (You know who you are, my dear friend.)
This is where I grew up, and where I return from time to time when I get homesick. There are more stars visible from here than any other place in the Greater New Orleans Area. In early spring, there are more purple martins swarming under the foot of the Causeway Bridge than there are bats leaving Carlsbad Caverns. There's no other place like it in the world, and it pleases me to share it with you who happened to stumble across this page.
Thanks for stopping by. May you go in peace.
back to table of contents
