With all New Orleans has been through and the creeping, viscous, bistre nightmare now threatening to engulf her, the town’s longtime unofficial motto “let the good times roll” seems like an especially bitter bit of sarcasm.

Five years ago we all watched in horror, sometimes guilty, morbid fascination, as a national treasure fell victim to many of the things that so clearly distinguish it. Both the famously high water table (which is still giving rise to endless tales of caskets floating eerily to the surface) and the nearness of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Delta in concert with an annually angry Gulf of Mexico finally yielded a Big Easy dis-eased. As early as 2000 the American public was beginning to hear hints of just how devastating a hurricane’s direct hit on New Orleans could be. In a coincidence that turned out to be prescient, NBC Nightly News aired a piece in early 2005 reiterating many of  the concerns in the above linked article and bringing the point home with computer animations. While our beloved home of jazz and the most distinctive accent in the country had seen serious damage from the likes of Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969, Katrina promised to be far worse – not only because she seemed hell bent for Cajun shores but also for the fact that every year the “City that Care Forgot” sinks further. By 2005 New Orleans was so far below sea level that experts considered it a foregone conclusion the storm surge from a major hurricane would yield flood waters reaching twenty feet.

The years of foreshadowing delivered as reliably as any popular piece of femme fatale fiction. In those dank, half-impoverished neighborhoods tourists were advised to avoid were also clubs – legal and not – overflowing with the sort of genuine, Cajun and Creole and Black Indian derived, spectacular New Orleanian culture that gave the town and the surrounding region its true value. Of course, almost all of those structures were built with spit and a prayer. When Katrina came a-knockin’ those dingy, dirt-floored yet sparkling monuments to etouffee and gumbo, Dixie and zydeco, muffalettas, voodoo, and fais do-dos – places that would have been homogenized by the infusion of capital, governmental oversight, and less Caribbean-esque standards – all splintered in the wind or died watery deaths. Every living resident, every single one excluding the sixty thousand trapped in their homes or on their roofs, went scrambling for the Superdome sometimes leaving their dead where they splashed as a matter of personal survival. When they did, when those living shrines to the heart of the Crescent City took flight in the only way available, we were forced to witness many of them dying dehydrated, beaten, starving, raped, and in their own excrement. When a few tried to escape that fuming hell to the neighboring town Gretna, they were fired upon halfway across the old Greater New Orleans Bridge (now the Crescent City Connection) by Gretna police.

A year ago, we all couldn’t help but admire the resilience of this most unique group of Americans. Lagasse was a bit less prone to “Bam!!!,” New Orleans and Cajun jazz seemed appropriately spiced with a touch more melancholy, and the populace as a whole appeared to have shed their attachment to unrestrained self-promotion. Instead they were concerned with recovering their dearly loved pets, rebuilding the remnants of their family homes into houses that paid homage to their former selves, rescuing waterlogged and battered landmarks, and finding the money to bring home wives and daughters, husbands and sons, grandpas and grandmas and great-grandmas who had been dispersed all over the country in a Federal rescue effort – organized by the now infamous former FEMA director Michael Brown – that was bereft of provisions of any kind to one day return the Crescent City’s refugees.

Our products and services provide the freedom to move, to heat and to see.

– BP, plc

I find myself reflexively staring at this map of the oil spill. Transfixed by the sheer girth of that great gray mass representing millions of gallons of unrefined fossil fuel, I’m compelled to compare it to Lake Pontchartrain at center top with her comparatively trim figure. I think of what that relatively small lake did to the Lower 9^th Ward and wonder what that same neighborhood (or what remains of it despite the impassioned efforts of well-heeled folks like Wynton Marsalis and Brad Pitt) would look like painted top to bottom in brown, cloying goo. With such scientific mainstays as specific gravity seemingly falling wayside in this baffling, averse-to-alleviation disaster, one is forced to wonder what plot the oil has mapped out. Should that giant oil slick manage to snake its way up the Mississippi and into the lake with sufficient presence to displace the native waters – as it appears capable of doing despite such things as thoroughly peer reviewed, accepted-by-consensus, scientific precedence – “NOLA,” I’m afraid, could be done for.

Should it get anywhere near(er) to the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain while an engorged, inflamed, global warming-enraged hurricane dances about in the gulf, I fear the damage wrought by Katrina and the efforts to cope with it will soon come to be viewed as a mere practice session for dealing with the genuine, all-encompassing devastation of a truly catastrophic environmental disaster.

How bad is it really? Google, Inc. quietly launched a site called “If It Was My Home.” In the first few seconds of the page resolving – depending upon your connection speed at the moment – you’ll see the breadth of the disaster superimposed over its home location in the Gulf of Mexico and above the outermost shores of Louisiana. An instant later a harmless IP tracker built into the site will zero in on your real world location and display the overwhelming extent of the spill splayed across your own neighborhood, city, and likely most (if not all) of your state in addition to portions of its immediate neighbors unless you live in a boundless gargantuan like Alaska or Texas.

I may be worried more than necessary. I may be letting doomsday scenarios get the better of me. But, despite BP’s seeming recent success with hampering the flow of oil, I think it better to be overprepared if only mentally.

Those estimated 100 million gallons of oil are still out there and the slick is continuing to grow. Restaurants nationwide are already finding creative ways to inoffensively advertise that their seafood comes from any place on Earth other than the Gulf. In doing so they inadvertently crush the livelihoods of countless New Orleanian fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and their families while simultaneously casting a pall over the mere notion of visiting Emeril Lagasse’s place much less the lesser known yet quite excellent restaurants in NOLA’s every nook and cranny. Boycotts against BP, plc (at one time the British Petroleum Company) have begun if falteringly. For the most part, participants seem unaware that patronizing an Amoco or Conoco – the former an acquisition and the latter a re-branding – is equivalent to continuing to finance BP.

As always, the story here in the real world becomes more complex. A boycott or sit-in or “be-in” in 2010 is not what it was in the 1960s. Depriving BP, plc of income in the U.S. compromises its ability to meet its responsibility, as mandated by Federal Law, to clean up the monumental mess it has made. “Docking” BP’s check forces the company to reconsider the amount of manpower it has committed to cleaning Louisiana’s shoreline and shoveling tar balls from Florida’s beaches. Giving BP a “pink slip” is sadly nothing other than also depriving many thousands of everyday, working class, Louisianian rig workers of the means to support themselves. Even more sobering, everyman has virtually no ability to substantively influence his target. BP is so massive, globally entrenched, and financially and politically powerful that only multi-lateral government action could make a dent.

President Obama is poised to make the speech of his life tonight. It is said it will be more important than the keynote address he delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. According to all the pundits, his legacy and (most importantly of course) his chances at a second term may hinge on his ability to not only introduce a heroic plan to clean up the oil spill, save the affected wildlife, and rescue the Louisianian, Alabamian, Mississippian, and Floridian livelihoods quashed by BP’s astronomical blunder, but to also follow through successfully on the strategy over the coming two years. Should he fail, according to the wags, he’s as good as done and might face a more intense flavor of the sort of retroactive revulsion his predecessor experienced for his response to – poetically enough – Hurricane Katrina.

I congratulate BP’s engineers on their tenuous success (nevermind the neverending public gaffs of BP’s outrageously-paid Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward), but this game of spilt oil, and devastated wetlands, and ruined livelihoods is not over. Despite the American public’s understandable exhaustion and wavering interest, it’s nowhere near over. It’s only just beginning.

As the newspapers prove again each day, there is something fascinating and subtly disturbing about a photograph of a person open-mouthed in speech. The effect can be comic or ludicrous or tragic, but the root cause is the same. Life has been arrested.

– John Szarkowski speaking on Richard Avedon’s experimentations with portraying time

When you shoot an image – especially if you’re someone who makes a living doing it – there is some sense that you’re recording time. It is however a fleeting sensation if one feels it at all. As in most things involving commerce, the practical soon becomes paramount and such esoteric considerations as the historical significance of a single photograph out of perhaps hundreds shot on a single day fades from consciousness faster than oil spraying out of the Deepwater Horizon well.

All other concerns I may have had back then set aside, shooting New Orleans in August 2004 was a singular, thoroughly educational joy. While the foliage was surprisingly, comfortingly similar to what I’m familiar with here in Virginia, the heat and humidity was… simply shocking. Businessmen strolled the streets sans jacket in sweat-soaked shirts and ties. City workers and pedestrians alike went about their business with white hand towels hanging over the backs of their necks in order to more easily free their eyes of blinding perspiration. My Jeep’s engine – well-accustomed to often oppressive Virginia summers – came dangerously close to overheating during short sprints around town. Only time on the interstate and the steady flow of wind it provided seemed to supply my poor, beleaguered vehicle enough relief to survive. (I swear I heard it sigh gratitude when we passed back into Mississippi.)

The exquisite, painful, motivation-sucking sear of the sun even in the shade was as omnipotent as T.J. Eckelburg. It was an entity that whispered its influence of what you were doing or viewing or eating into your subconscious. Within a sphere of apparently hot-rodded yet strained air-conditioning, one could never for a moment forget the predator laying in wait outside.

And yet, shooting New Orleans was still bliss. No city I’ve ever been to – not St. Louis, not Atlanta, not Chicago or even New York – served as host to characters as diverse and unique and occasionally disturbing as those found in the Crescent City. In 2004, when I visited, it was positively brimming with just as many oddities as described in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil… multiplied by a thousand. (Savannah, matchless as it may be, is simply too genteel to have the raw, sexual, nasty, to-the-bone peculiarity of the Big Easy.)

Walking through the French Quarter, it was impossible not to notice that it looked just like what everyone’s seen in photographs. Outlandish shop window displays and neon signs, absolutely politically incorrect in every way, were everywhere wearing overhead balconies of ornate, turn-of-the-century ironwork adorned in vertically descending greenery. The wet heat and ageless scum on the streets and aroma married to odor and blasting music converged with the bewildering scenery to create a dizzying, sometimes disconcerting, often dazzling array of all the far flung parts of Louisiana condensed into a kind of habanero-strength Cajun/Creole Disney World.

When I shot the place – one year prior to Katrina almost to the day – there was little thought given to the notion I might be recording a New Orleans that would never again be. Now that 100 million gallons of oil may be heading her way – perhaps surfing in on the shoulders of a storm surge born of another horrifying hurricane – I wonder if we may be forced to reach the quite reasonable conclusion that the Crescent City is no longer worth saving in the event major areas of commerce like Canal Street and the French Quarter become mired knee-deep in oil. I fret, more plainly, that we may be witnessing the last days and the first fall of a major American city. I worry that these images may turn out to be some of the last of her in an open-mouthed smile.

The gates of Heaven must be open,

I think I saw an angel just walk by.

Hey, the gates of Heaven must be open,

I think I saw an angel just walk by.

– Buddy Guy, What Kind of Woman is This

The remainder of this post is composed only of photographs I made of New Orleans in 2004. To my mind it is the best and most honest way I can pay homage to a great city that care seems to have once again forgotten.