Usually before I go to a place I’ve never been to, I’ll pick up its vibe a few days before I go.  It will hit me sometimes two days before I leave, but it’s also happened as much as two weeks beforehand.  It’s hard to explain, but I’ll see it, smell it and feel it.  Then I have an idea of what I’ll encounter before I get there.  An understanding.  I don’t know why this happens.  It’s been like that my whole life.  Picking up The Vibe.

I think that the vibe is mostly about the history, or experiences of a city, town or land.  The residue of time.  I’m not sure.  I always thought it was normal and that everyone did this until I found out that it wasn’t.  Most people do not do this – getting The Vibe before going to a place.

In the past few years I have had a vague desire to go to the South.  I wanted to see spanish moss hanging from trees in swamps.  I am a Californian.  I had no idea what that would look like, or smell like.  I assumed it would be something along the lines of muggy and musty, watery and mossy.  Or not.   I wasn’t sure what it might be, so when I decided to visit my son in New Orleans, I really wanted to experience spanish moss and swamps and look at the Gulf of Mexico.

Hearing music and seeing the French Quarter sounded exotic to me.  Eating a shrimp po boy and sitting in City Park with a cup of coffee and a bag of beignets, while watching spanish moss blow in the breeze seemed pretty cool.  I wanted to go into the cemeteries where the dead are laid to rest in tombs above ground because of the high-water table.  The cemeteries are called “Cities of the Dead”.  I wanted to see it all.  Experience it.  Understand it.

Weirdly, however, I was not picking up that vibe I always get before leaving town.  Even the day I departed I had no feel for New Orleans.  I couldn’t scope it out.  There was nothing.  When the plane landed, there was still nothing.  I was excited, however, to fly over swamps on the way in to land at the airport.  I got to see them from up above.  That was extremely cool.

When my son picked me up, I told him, “This place doesn’t feel like anything.  It’s blank.”

“You aren’t in New Orleans yet.  You’re at the airport.  Just wait.”

We stopped at the market on the way to his place to pick up a few things.  I still was not feeling anything.  Then as I rounded a corner near the coffee aisle, I suddenly had a loud thought that said, “New Orleans has secrets.”  I understood why I wasn’t picking up The Vibe.  It didn’t want to be found.

I said to my son, “It just occurred to me that New Orleans isn’t giving me it’s Vibe because it has secrets.”  He said, “Yes.  It does.”

My son moved to New Orleans over a year ago, and this is the first time I have visited him.  He was too busy, and things didn’t gel right for me to go until now.  October seemed like the best time to visit an old city rich with history and unusual cemeteries.

His house is over 120 years old in mid-city, surrounded by other century-plus-old homes and apartment houses, each with its own character.  Some have ornate wrought iron, others have elaborate, gingerbread woodwork, while other homes are simpler and more symmetrical with no-nonsense trim.  Each is old and carries the history of the families who have lived inside of them for decades.

“This house makes sounds, so…. Just so you know.”, he warned me.

The house has very tall ceilings and windows and beautiful peach and lavender leaded glass over the door.  There’s a porch in front where he can sit with a cup of coffee and say hello to his neighbors when taking a break from doing research.  He knows all his neighbors.  He watches their dogs and cats when they are gone.

He told me that one thing about New Orleans is the people.  It has good people.  He has made great friends there.  It’s not easy to make friends in Los Angeles.  New Orleans is different.

In the back yard of his house there is a large pecan tree that looks at you through the kitchen window when you stand at the sink.  The kitchen is all original with the kind of chicken wire tile you’d see in homes from the early 1900’s.  There are stairs that go down from the kitchen to the laundry room.  If the door to the outside of the laundry room opens itself, the pecan tree blows its leaves inside, to remind you that it’s there.  Crumpled, brown leaves are everywhere.

He showed me where the cable car goes down Canal Street, just a couple of blocks away, and I could catch it to go to the cemeteries.  We passed the cemeteries on our way in from the airport.  Row after row of above-ground tombs.  I wanted to get out to see them.

“The dead can’t be buried, so they’re on the same level as you.”, he said, which I thought was an interesting statement.

You don’t really look down on them like in a regular cemetery.  People aren’t six feet under you.  They are at eye level, mostly, so it’s as if they won’t let you think of them as no longer being here.  You cannot dismiss them. They are there. In front of you.

It wasn’t long after getting to his home that I started to pick up The Vibe.  It came to me slowly, like fog drifting in off the Mississippi. It’s a heavy energy filled with layer upon layer of something that feels like pain.  Suffering.  Sadness.  It’s dark and always there like an open app that’s running in the background of your senses.

When I told my boy this was my impression of what I was feeling from New Orleans, he said, “Yes”.  He also agreed that the feeling is there 24/7.  Even after being there for over a year, he is still aware of it.  It never turns off.  I decided that it’s kind of like a bass guitar in the background of life.

All old cities have an underbelly of darkness.  They can’t help it.  It comes with the territory.  New Orleans isn’t any different.  It’s very old, with an extremely layered history, and not all of it is great.  Some of it is downright evil.  New Orleans was a main slave trade port where human beings – people – were bought and sold in the South, some made to work in the sugar cane fields nearby.

The horrible pain that people experienced is not gone.  It’s still there.  It lingers.  It will remind you of itself like that pecan tree blowing its leaves in the door and looking at you through the window.  It’s not going away.  That history is alive.

But on top of that sadness is a resilient layer of people.

On the way to the post office one day, I stopped to take a picture of one of the long, bending limbs of the live oaks that grow throughout the city.  Some of the live oaks have ferns growing on them, which to me was simply amazing.  But I suppose the humid, damp air makes it easy for plants to do things there that would never happen in my area where it’s hot and dry.

While taking the picture, a woman walked by me and started a conversation.  I found out that she had been a horse identifier for over thirty years at Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, California, where I grew up.  The conversation effortlessly turned deep and spiritual.  No smallness could possibly find a crack to sneak in.  She was Choctaw and Cherokee and loved all things “horse”.  Never in my life have I ever started talking to a stranger and have the conversation immediately become rich and meaningful as if I’d known that person all my life.  She walked with me to the Post Office where she opened the door and said goodbye and good luck with a big smile.  Then disappeared before I could ask if I could take her picture with a live oak.  She was gone.

It was one of those encounters that sort of gives you faith that sometimes you will meet people who understand you.  Out of the blue.  But they’re not necessarily meant to stay. They appear to make you feel “seen”.  My son told me that he has never felt so seen and heard as he has living in New Orleans.  The people see you.  You are at eye level. I could understand why a person might want to live there.

When I rode the cable car to the cemeteries it was hot and humid, and a storm was coming in.  I knew it was not the best thing for me to do, to walk around in the hot sun in a cemetery, but I did it anyway.  I had to.  I wanted to experience it, see it, feel it, photograph it.

The funny thing is that the cemeteries did not have that kind of heavy feeling that some cemeteries do.  They aren’t sad and depressing, or creepy and scary.  They are beautiful.  The tombs are interesting and imposing.

Some of the older tombs have ferns growing out of them, which, once again, I find amazing.  You’d never see that in Los Angeles, or in the desert.

I got to go to City Park in sprinkling rain and had my cup of coffee with a bag of beignets while sitting on a park bench, looking at spanish moss.  My boy and I went to the French Quarter, saw Bourbon Street in the night.  I had a firecracker shrimp po boy, which is the Nirvana of Life, at Parasol’s Bar and another roast beef and shrimp po boy a few days later at Parkway Bakery. Along with tons of other food.  New Orleans is the place for amazing eats.

I did not do all the tourist things that a lot of people do when visiting New Orleans.  I didn’t want to.  I did a few things, but what I wanted was to quietly walk the streets, sit and observe, and feel it.  Try to understand it.  Go to the market and buy basic items for my son, to do the things that he does, so I know what his life is like in this city so foreign to my own.  Maybe walk in his shoes for a minute.

When it came time to leave, I felt like I knew New Orleans.  A little bit.  It takes time to get to know a place.  I will have to return so it can tell me more about itself.  So I understand.

I did not get to see the Gulf of Mexico from the shore.  I’ll have to save that for a future visit.  But I did get to see it from the plane on the way home.  For some reason it made me happy.  It had a good vibe.