Selected WorksBooks
A World Made of Fire
Stella and Jacko, a witchy night of the soul V for Victor
Victor finds a monster in Mobile Bay, 1944 Tender
A boy (not Elvis) and his twin, and a magic guitar... Crazy in Alabama
Peejoe and Wiley, Uncle Dove, Aunt Lucille... Gone for Good
Superman isn't careful what he wishes for. One Mississippi
All about high school Movies
Crazy in Alabama
Sometimes you have to lose your mind to find your freedom. Billy and Jimmy
A movie project currently stuck in Development Hell Read to me, Mister!
Books for Kids
Two Joshua stories, one Bobbity story |
This article (c)2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved. What it means to miss New Orleans Tribute September 4, 2005 ALL week we've been watching the immersion of a great old city. We imagine another city, less peculiar, will arise in its place. But I have this feeling it will never be quite the same nontoxic gumbo again. For outsiders New Orleans was a place to party and eat food that is way too rich. For the folks who live there it's more complicated - it's home. Eighty-five percent of them were born there, and they're not going anywhere permanently, so forget this idea they're going to move the city somewhere else. It's not going to happen....  St. Ann Parade, Mardi Gras 2005 ...New Orleans is the opposite of America, and we must hold onto places that are the opposite of us. New Orleans is not fast or energetic or efficient, not a go-get-'em Calvinist well-ordered city. It's slow, lazy, sleepy, sweaty, hot, wet, lazy and exotic. I had a house there, up until three weeks ago, when I sold it. My friends say I'm lucky. I don't feel lucky. Here are 22 reasons America needs New Orleans, the national capital of eccentricity: 1. The turtle soup at Galatoire's is presented in a white porcelain tureen, then ladled into your bowl by a waiter who reveals with a wicked smile that the turtle's name was Fred. 2. The hats in Fleur de Paris, a shop on Royal Street, are perfectly frivolous and ridiculous, beautiful visions of silk and lace. 3. Nowhere else in the country do so many Roman Catholic churches coexist peacefully with so many voodoo shops. 4. If you are a grown man, this is the only place in America where you can step off an airplane, and be guaranteed that within 30 minutes a respectable woman unknown to you will call you "baby," as in, "How you doin', baby!" If you are a grown woman, you will be called "darlin' " whether you are the least bit darlin' or not. 5. The beads of sweat on the unlined face of the conductor on the St. Charles streetcar. 6. Mardi Gras beads, but only the ones you catch, thrown by an actual masker on a float. The ones that hit the ground don't count unless they bounced off your hand or arm first. 7. The Lucky Dog is a venerated local frankfurter that has come a long way, culinarily speaking, from the days when Ignatius J. Reilly peddled them to tourists in "A Confederacy of Dunces." Now they are really good, especially if it is 4 a.m. and you are hungry. 8. I once met Thelma Toole, mother of John Kennedy Toole, author of "A Confederacy of Dunces," who asked if I would buy her a "very expensive meal at the finest restaurant." This lady rolled her R's like an 1860's stage actress to indicate her intellectual superiority to the rest of us. I took her to the restaurant of her choice, and by evening's end she had all the waiters gathered at our table, spellbound by stories of "Kenny." "My son was a genius, with a large and oddly-shaped head," she boomed. Imagine what other great books Kenny might have written, she said, had he not killed himself in a car on that beach in Biloxi. 9. Every Twelfth Night, Henri Schindler, a local historian and Mardi Gras curator, holds a magnificent masked ball on the second floor of the Napoleon House, at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis Streets. White curtains blow in and out of the large empty rooms as masked figures glide past on a cushion of mystery. 10. Locals go to the Maple Leaf and Tipitina's to hear music. Also to Frenchmen Street, a cluster of 10 or 12 small bars and clubs featuring, on any given night, 10 or 12 kinds of music, about 8 of which will be funky. (The other four will be too loud.) Usually at the better places there's a Neville involved, or a Marsalis. 11. My friend Martha Ann Samuels, a real estate agent, revealed to me the actual location of Stanley and Blanche's house on Elysian Fields Avenue, a secret she learned from Tennessee Williams himself when she helped him buy a condo in the Quarter. (I'm not telling.) 12. Oyster loaf at Casamento's on Magazine Street. The crunchy local French bread showers crumbs on your hands. Each bite contains bread, mayo and the delectable local bivalve, breaded and brilliantly fried. Casamento's closes down for the summer because oysters are better other times of the year. 13. At JazzFest, citizens happily stand in long lines in the blazing sun for a chance to eat crawfish bread, white boudin sausage and alligator gumbo to the thump of Rockin' Dopsy from the Congo Square stage. (Could someone please put the JazzFest committee in charge of the Superdome?) 14. You can stand at the foot of Ursulines Avenue and watch a huge oceangoing ship slide by above the level of your head. 15. Along the promenade where the river passes Jackson Square, tourists still fall for one of the oldest New Orleans scams. A friendly fellow proposes that for a dollar he can tell you where you got them shoes. When you accept the bet, he says, "You got them shoes on your feet!" He keeps the dollar. 16. It has the only airport named for a jazz trumpeter, the indelible Louis Armstrong. 17. In the Confederate Museum near Lee Circle is a crown of thorns said to have been woven by Pope Pius IX himself, and sent as a gift to Jefferson Davis while he was imprisoned shortly after the Civil War. For me this artifact represents the height of Southern absurdity, and must be preserved for those future generations who will not believe it. 18. Every Thursday night at Donna's on Rampart Street, Tom McDermott plays the fastest, wildest ragtime, Brazilian and stride piano you've ever heard. It's scary how fast his fingers move when he gets going. His feet come up off the floor. 19. Rich people live on the high ground. Poorer people live on the low ground. Last week some of the rich folks' houses got wet, too. 20. Piety Street is one block over from Desire. Not a long walk at all. 21. On a foggy night the moon grows fat and full, and hangs in the sky above the big old river. It pours light on the water and makes a magical brown glitter that doesn't exist anywhere else. The water is the reason the city is there. The full moon pulls the tides into Lake Pontchartrain. 22. The city's sanitation department is considered among the finest in the nation. Its work during Mardi Gras is legendary. Can we please get this water out of here so they can get to work on this mess? The sooner the better.  Costa Rica, Pura Vida The first time I landed in Costa Rica, I stepped off the plane and stood around in the musty airport at San Jose, feeling doubtful, waiting for the customs guy to stamp my passport. Everywhere were signs welcoming me to “El Jardin de Paz,” and indeed it was all that Garden-of-Peace propaganda and Costa Rica’s reputation as “The Switzerland of Central America” that made me want to see the place for myself. That, and the enthusiasm of a friend who had just come back from Manuel Antonio, on the Pacific coast. “The most beautiful beaches in the world,” he said. “Go. See if I’m wrong.” “Have a good time in Puerto Rico,” my mother said. I explained that Costa Rica is not a Caribbean island, but a country about the size of West Virginia, tucked between Nicaragua and Panama on the skinniest part of the American isthmus. Great beaches, no army, universal education and health care, the Garden of Peace and the Switzerland of etc. “That’s nice,” said my mother. “Have a good time anyway.” I spent the first night in San Jose, which I had pictured as a leafy old city full of old men dozing on park benches, and faded examples of Spanish colonial architectural glory. There are a few glories remaining, among them the small, perfect Teatro Nacional in the city’s central plaza, but it’s hard to appreciate them when you’re standing beside six lanes of smoking, honking traffic. The old men are too busy hawking lottery tickets and dodging taxis to doze. I found it all very foreign and interesting. The next morning I rented a car and got out. Driving south on the Pan American Highway, I felt the country spreading out around me, the air growing sweeter. San Jose sprawls through a broad highland valley, surrounded by ranges of jungle-covered mountains. The country beyond the city is green, green in profusion, a million different kinds of green. I turned off the highway on the road to Orotina and entered a series of different worlds, each greener and more lush than the last. The foothills are scattered with modest estates beautified by generations of gardeners. Huge sprays of bougainvillea spill over white walls. The road climbs into coffee country, where green shrubs in waves describe the contours of the mountains. Cresting the ridge, I pulled over to drink in the view: behind me the valley, spread before me the hills marching down to the blue shining Pacific in the distance. A pale mist drifted up between forks in the mountains. A man on an oxcart clopped by, with a wave and a grin. It didn’t look a bit like Switzerland, but it was lovely. Three hours later I was bumping along a rutted road, dodging my thousandth pothole, surrounded on all sides by vast plantations of African palms, and wondering why I hadn’t just stayed on that mountain. Right off I’d learned the most important lesson of traveling in Costa Rica: getting around is not as easy as it seems. The condition of the roads ranges from okay to awful, and just because a place looks close by on the map does not mean it will not take forever to get there. I was sweaty and tired when I pulled into Quepos, the ramshackle port town that serves as a tourist gateway for the beaches of Manuel Antonio. The sight of fishing boats on a placid inlet lifted my spirits, as did my first taste of Imperial cerveza, the national brew. Manuel Antonio is a geological oddity, a string of high hills rising from a stretch of low coastline. Land meets ocean in a dramatic confrontation, densely forested hills plunging to the sea -- rather like the coast of northern California, if western Marin County were covered with tropical jungle. The folds in these hills are lined by rocky coves and perfect white beaches. Three of the best beaches are protected within the boundaries of a 464-acre national park. The road from Quepos to the park runs along the summit of the hills, and most of the small hotels and open-air restaurants are arranged to take advantage of the views. Within ten minutes I was stretched out in a hammock, gazing fifty miles out over the Pacific at a sky full of drifting pink clouds. The swell of the ocean was audible, far below. A mild breeze carried the scent of jasmine and ylang-ylang. A dozen squirrel monkeys were making a noisy feast of the berries in a huge deciduous tree just beyond my balcony. The air was full of butterflies and pink light. I thought: this is the place. I drove down to the beach. Just at sunset I stepped out onto a wide stretch of white sand fringed by coconut palms and mangroves, a mile of beach-lover’s heaven. A gathering of rock islets stood offshore, like whales with backs of jagged gray stone. The warm blue Pacific rolled in even white lines, a long rolling curl crashing around the ears of surfers. The támbalo in the national park -- a former island connected to the mainland by a thread of jungle-covered sand -- and the range of hills behind me gave the beach a sculptured shapeliness, a dramatic Bali Hai dimensionality that took my breath away. I thought it was the most beautiful beach in the world. Seven years later, I’m still here, and I still think so. I built a kind of treehouse on one of those hills, just above a rocky cove. If your idea of heaven is standing on a high hill in the jungle, looking out across the Pacific with a breeze and good surf and a year-round water temperature of 82 degrees, you might find it agreeable here. The weather is always warm and humid, in the range of 80 to 90 degrees, occasionally hotter, but generally there’s a breeze from the sea. Costa Rica has two seasons, rainy and dry. Dry is the high season, verano or “summer,” December to April, when tourists from the U.S. and Europe come to broil themselves in the all-day tropical sun. (A local term for a scorched tourist is langosta, or lobster.) The rest of the year is the rainy, or “green season,” as the hoteliers like to call it. Tourists are fewer, beaches emptier, prices lower. Usually the sun will shine hot all morning. After midday the clouds stack up over the inland mountains, and bring a gullywasher before sunset. Five inches of rain in one night is not uncommon, and the lightning storms can be spectacular. All this sunshine and rain and humidity makes for the astounding diversity of life in a coastal-zone tropical rainforest. On this land bridge between the Americas, the variety is too rich to count. Manuel Antonio is famous for monkeys, which abound in three species: the mono titi, or squirrel monkeys, the carablancas, or white-faced, and the congo, or howlers. The forest teems with coatimundis, three-toed sloths, raccoons and opossums and armadillos, iguanas and lizards, frogs, iridescent butterflies and some of the largest, strangest insects in the world. I’ve seen a firefly with high beams and low beams, and beetles as big as my hand. I have done battle with ants of every description, among them the leaf-cutters that can strip a whole tree in one day. My yard is a stopping-place for toucans, hawks, macaws, parakeets, pelicans, innumerable hummingbirds. We have a bird that makes a sound like an old-fashioned manual typewriter, complete with the ching! of the bell. I have never ceased to be amazed by all this fecundity. In March of last year, I scraped some papaya seeds off a plate onto the ground. By June, the papaya tree that grew from the seed was five feet tall, and in September I picked the first ripe fruit from that tree. A hummingbird is nesting right now in the lime tree beyond my kitchen window. In a nest the size of a doll’s teacup she has laid two minuscule eggs, perfect white lozenges. This morning I glanced in the nest, and saw one tiny egg and a brown thing the size of a bean, with some prickly hairs on one side. Leaning close, I saw its tiny heart beating. The world now has one more hummingbird. On mornings like this I feel lucky. In the years since I came here, I’ve explored other parts of Costa Rica. As Columbus observed, it is a rich coast, big for its size and incredibly gifted by nature. I’ve spent unforgettable days paddling down whitewater rivers through mountain rainforest. Riding a rickety bus through endless banana plantations on the Atlantic slope. Sitting, steaming, in a natural volcanic spring while Mount Arenal spews lava into the night sky. Witnessing the miracle of two dozen newly-hatched sea turtles making their first triumphal waddle down the sand to the sea. Dancing to electric reggae on the beach at Cahuita. Watching the fireworks marking the peaceful ascension of a new president in Central America’s longest-lived democracy, where election day means a wild party. Slowly I am coming to know the Ticos, as the Costa Ricans call themselves. They are a beautiful, prideful, hard-working, warm, slightly cryptic people, intensely proud of their country, friendly to strangers but hard to know well. Inherently peaceful, they seek to avoid conflict and anxiety, a national trait expressed in the all-purpose phrase for “good morning” or “terrific!” or “see you later”: Pura vida. It means “pure life,” and is more a thing to be wished for than a statement of present reality. The philosophy of pura vida has served the Ticos well in leading other Central American countries down the path of peace. It also means that everyone will cheerfully offer directions to where you’re going, whether or not they have the slightest clue, and they’ll say anything to keep from disappointing you. Friends and I once sat in a restaurant for thirty minutes, studying the menus we’d been graciously offered, before the waiter worked up the nerve to tell us they were all out of food. Keep in mind that in Costa Rica, as in many Latin countries, mañana does not mean “tomorrow,” it just means “not today.” The Tico approach to preserving their country’s natural wealth is an impressive and fairly recent development. In the days before ecology mattered, many of the country’s virgin forests were clearcut, with American encouragement, to make way for banana plantations and cattle pasture. On a bus through the breathtaking mountain passes of Braulio Carrillo National Park, I noticed a sign that asked riders to please maintain the cleanliness of the bus by throwing their trash out the window. And yet Costa Rica has done more to preserve its natural heritage than any other developing nation, with very little outside help. The chain of national parks and reserves that grew in the 1960s and 70s now covers twelve percent of the nation’s land mass, and is the pride of the people, the heritage they will hand to their children. I am hardly the first gringo to have discovered Costa Rica. The first wave of surfers and backpackers came in the 1960s, followed by retirees in the 70s, ecotourists in the 80s, and now, in the 90s, a new species of visitor: the movie star. Marlon Brando and Woody Harrelson spend time here. Ditto Michael Keaton, Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, and Jimmy Buffett, all of whom breezed through Manuel Antonio recently. Costa Rica seems to attract stars who like macho vacations: sportfishing, sea kayaking, and whitewater rafting are the preferred diversions. If you’d like to be join in, you’ll find yourself welcome. Ticos are famously hospitable, and kind to gringos with little Spanish. It’s easy to wander off the tourist track and make yourself at home. You can get lost on a beach, or in a cloud forest. Don’t come expecting a great deal of luxury; many first-time visitors think they’re coming to a kind of Central American Hawaii with fancy cuisine, fine roads, lots of swanky hotels. If you're looking for great archeological ruins, stick to Mexico or Guatemala. If you don’t like rice and beans, if potholes annoy you excessively, you won’t care for Costa Rica. But if you’d like to see what a beach looks like when it’s completely alive, you might like it a lot. P.S. Just checked the nest. Make that two hummingbirds. Pura vida! (c) 1999 by Mark Childress, all rights reserved. Note: I left Costa Rica in 2000 for another jungle: New York City. But I still go back at least once a year to lie in a hammock in the jungle, an experience I recommend to you. |
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