Termination Shock

Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder. It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.

Willem pulled off the highway onto an access road leading to the spillway, just so he could check his messages and spend a few minutes watching the cranes gliding along pulling the wooden timbers up. It had been a wet year to begin with. Now, rains in the hurricane’s wake had sent huge flows coursing down the Mississippi and so they were opening the spillway full bore. He got a few curious looks from the workers, but once again the white pickup served as industrial camouflage.

Hugh was on vacation in some cooler and drier clime, but he referred Willem to Dr. Margaret Parker, a colleague in the same department at Tulane, who agreed to have coffee with him. Ten years ago they would simply have met on the campus, but her lab had been downsized in the pandemic and never re-upsized, and she worked out of her home. It was just as convenient for her to meet him at a café in the French Quarter. She knew of a place with a second-story, open-air gallery that looked out toward the river.

The Bonnet Carré Spillway, which he now put in his rearview mirror, was the upstream bulwark of The Wall, aka HSDRRS (Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System): a system of flood defenses, largely invisible to the non-expert observer, that encircled greater New Orleans. Dutch experts had been brought in to consult, and this was how Willem had come into occasional contact with people like Hugh and Margaret.

Once he had pierced The Wall at Bonne Carré, he saw no more of it as he drove twenty miles down the road—which eventually became Tulane Street—into the center of the city. Most of what he saw out the truck’s windows just looked like any other place in Outskirts, USA. After a while, though, the buildings got bigger and less commercial. He drove through the downtown campus of Tulane University. It gave way to that part of New Orleans that answered to the purposes of all big-city downtowns: high-rise hotels, convention center, stadium, casino, and a cruise ship port along the river. Willem passed through it as quickly as he could and got an impression of many tents and RVs, cars that looked inhabited, plenty of private security at doors of buildings and entrances to parking structures.

But then he was in the old part of town. The truck got him to within a block of the café, then politely suggested he get out and walk. He opened the door and stepped down to a three-hundred-year-old cobblestone street. The truck drove away as fast as it could, which around here was little better than walking pace. It would park if it found a space, or circle the block otherwise.

Margaret had sent him a token that tagged him as having a reservation, so a hostess swung the door open for him as he drew near, plucked a menu from a stack, and led him up a rickety ancient stair and down a narrow hall to the open gallery above. This had probably looked out over the Mississippi when it had been constructed. Willem guessed it was over two hundred years old, maybe pre-Revolutionary. Nowadays the picture had been complicated by other buildings, waterfront facilities, and constructs forming aspects of The Wall. Even so, once Willem had taken the proffered seat beneath a large umbrella, he was able to see brown water sliding slowly by, sparkling in the afternoon sun. For better and worse, he could now smell the French Quarter on a warm summer’s afternoon in the wake of a hurricane. It took him a full minute just to take in the olfactory mise-en-scène. More than anything he’d seen or heard, this took him back, made him a sixteen-year-old boy again, loitering self-consciously outside the entrance to a gay bar, wondering what would happen if he stepped over its threshold. So Margaret found him with tears in his eyes. She gave him a moment.