Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [96]
The project could cost $2 billion, or much more. But the alternative is landscapes like the one at the Mississippi’s mouth. To get there you drive mile after mile along a highway tucked snugly between levees that extend like a copper pipe into the Gulf. The river is between the levees, too; it’s a river in the ocean, maintained only to protect the navigational channel, its banks clustered with helipads and industrial facilities. And at the end, the loss of the coastland is glaringly, horribly obvious: skeletal oaks stand dead a half mile offshore, set firmly in sunken land.
In August 2005, bored enough to read up on Eight Easy Fashion Tips that I never intended to use, I spent part of a flight home from Boston leafing through Men’s Health. One of the magazine’s features was a list of endangered American places to visit, among which was New Orleans—it had a huge termite problem, the author explained, and besides, much of the city was gradually sinking, and the system of levees was old and ill maintained. Hurricane Katrina landed less than two weeks later. And there was President Bush, saying, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”—except (he neglected to add) for the crack team of hydraulic engineers employed by Men’s Health.
We know what the problem is. We have at least a good idea of how to fix it and how much that might cost (it’s a lot; it’s also a lot less than the cost of doing nothing). And if the wetlands go, if New Orleans becomes a coastal city, if a hurricane then strikes dead-on, this time let’s at least not act surprised.
As he steamed toward New Orleans for the first time in more than twenty years, Twain overheard two “scoundrels” talking about their businesses: one was an oleomargarine manufacturer, the other a counterfeiter of olive oil. Slashing a knife into his “ostensible butter,” the oleomargarine maker declared that “you are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can’t find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, outside of the biggest cities. . . . We can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it. Butter’s had its day—and from this [day] out, butter goes to the wall.”
One well-placed pistol shot would have made Twain a national culinary hero. Instead he listened to the man’s companion describe the process for removing the “one little wee speck . . . in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that gives it a smell, or a flavor.” The oil could then be bottled, marked with an imported label, and sold as olive oil. “Maybe you’ll butter everybody’s bread pretty soon,” the man gloated, “but we’ll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, that’s a dead-certain thing.”
Twain was appalled. But, he found in the city, not every change was bad. There was ice in New Orleans—ice! There were even ice factories: the city that had once needed to ship ice from the distant Sierras now pumped it out in August. Twain visited one “to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics.” He didn’t understand the process, but he was impressed by the large ice blocks, meant as centerpieces to decorate and cool a room, that held bouquets and French dolls frozen as behind plate glass.
And in New Orleans he could eat the food he loved best. He rode with his friends to the hotels beside Lake Pontchartrain and had dinner on a veranda over the water. “The chief dish,” he said, “was the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.” Even better, perhaps, was the pompano at a city club, where the fish “was in his last possible perfection . . . and justified his fame.” Along with the pompano was “a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish—large ones; as large as one’s thumb; delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait, also shrimps of choice quality,