[New Orleans and Slidell, Louisiana]

[Valentine’s Day 2025]

Last night I saw the witch again

She was riding her white alligator

Her eyes were big as moons

As we looked upon the future she trembled and disappeared.

And then I thought:

Was she my dream, or was I her nightmare?

A pure blur of fridged Chicago Cold, lugging luggage and car booster seats and twin four-year-olds through a gauntlet of shuttle buses and terminals. A plane from O’Hare directly over the Mason-Dixon, to Louis Armstrong International Airport.

The only path through the American Gladiator obstacle course is to catch a happy mental trolly. Sometimes you have to sit in agony, Lexapro coursing through your veins. A sprinkle of blood on the door frame to let the time pass over you like the Angel of Death. The offset is the idea that you might get to sit down at a cool restaurant or brewery at some point on the trip.

Oftentimes the capstone is the notion that instilling culture in your kids at a young age would have to at least top the insane tension of traveling with them in the first place.

This might be the last family travel essay that begins this way. But I don’t fucking know, man.

We were handed the keys to a white Jeep Wrangler in New Orleans by a sympathetic Enterprise employee. We hadn’t ordered a Jeep. We ordered some sort of family sized SUV.

Regardless, without asking too many questions, we tore out of the parking garage and switched off interstate options in Waze. We wanted to be directed over The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway – the longest contiguous bridge over water in the entire world.

Twenty-four miles long. This insane span, opened in ’56 has fifty-six hundred pilings and multiple manmade islands in order to support the bridge structures.

A large house on a bayou in Slidell was our residence for the week. It was originally torn to shreds by Hurricane Katrina. The home was rebuilt in the hope that I might show up to sit out back near the swamp with Kurt Vonnegut and an expensive cigar and a wonderfully crafted IPA.

I’m here to tell you: 1) I read the entire novel Slapstick that week, a little bit every morning before the kids were awake, and 2) every Kurt Vonnegut book that I read becomes my new favorite Kurt Vonnegut book.

The first morning we geared up to head to City Park, a location that was used for dueling in the 1800s. No… like, gunshot dueling. Don’t gloss over that. Government sanctioned one-on-one combat, legally settling petty disputes with pistols.

We inadvertently still had the interstate function turned off on Waze, and that morning it took us on an intriguing voyage back through the underbelly of New Orleans.

We skated Almonaster Ave, hitting every train track, pothole and bascule bridge the city has to offer. Passing Gentilly Landfill we got to see mounds of mattresses and pile after pile of old car tires lining the road. Refuse rejected by the landfills leaving the exhausted truck drivers with no other option than to just drop the load somewhere generally near the dump site, just so they would have to return to wherever they came from with a full bed of garbage.

Pyramids of ancient civilizations of the unhoused. Encampments and hoboglyphs pepper the cracking bridge abutments. 

Bordering the Lower Ninth Ward, downwind from the industrial canal, between road forks and towers of trash, we pulled off in a gravel lot. Somewhere near Cash Money Records we had to stop and perform one bush wee per child. A Chinese fire drill of two bush wees if you’re keeping tally.

At City Park we walked through the sculpture garden to get to Storyland, a nursery rhyme park of pastel and notable, generational lore. Poetry, Salt of the Earth. Whimsical Tales of Golden Eggs shared by Mother Goose.

As I stood there I cycled through literary devices, Lewis Carroll, Micky and the Beanstalk, wavy mirrors, chutes and ladders and mind numbing repetition of my kids climbing up and sliding down the same slides one million times, over and over. I don’t care.

The Angel of Death appears, gliding over and through me as I re-establish bloody second after brutal moment that I am no longer living for myself. I’m reminded I haven’t been in charge of my own life for years. Not only do I no longer function on a plane of anything approaching self-gratification, but most of my basic needs are not even being met. I no longer yearn for much more than a whisp of a memory of a time when I didn’t have to watch movies on my phone at night in eight-minute increments.

The kids on the swings, and my hands in my pockets, the children all squeal for strawberry lockets.

I now aimlessly wander about the bleak tundra putting my own self-interest infinite levels beneath other human beings. With a smile. Other human beings who have already begun to call me names and laugh at my beer belly. Other human beings who will continue to call me names for a decade longer, until the day they decide to ignore me completely. Or so I’m told. I would die for these small human beings who scream in my face if they get the wrong color solo cup at a backyard birthday party.

We did go to Cafe du monde at City Park. Their beignets with powder sugar are as good as I remember.

…

Hot Garlic Shrimp at Lula Distillery alongside a Lula Old Fashioned – house distilled bourbon and sugar cane, was an escape. An enclave of tangy herbs and crushed garlic over a mound of fries. I snapped into a giant shrimp while his friend eyeballed me from my bowl of creole spice. It’s the second time I’ve had that meal there, and it’s still in the top ten favorite meals I’ve ever consumed.

This may come as a shock – and I don’t care what they tell you; The French Quarter is not child friendly. But we tried. Even in broad daylight it’s drunken tomfoolery, groups of partiers with hand grenades, and pissed off car drivers cascading over the cobblestone streets. It’s an abject jungle for four-year-olds who already, by default, act as if they are drunk, twenty-four-seven.

The Magical Krewe of Mad Hatters Parade started at sunset, just as we set out to head back to our Slidell Bayou house. We didn’t do research ahead of time, but I’m also going to go out on a limb and express our assumption that “hey, just because there is a parade, doesn’t mean that we simply won’t be able to make it home. Gee, there would have to be an alternate route set up with a detour.”

The long ass, slow ass parade snaked around every single exit and entry way imaginable. No one seemed to care about our stress levels and our childrens’ temperaments. The crowds, fueled by fermented sugar cane juice, forged into the roadways blocking any semblance of hope in getting through or around.

We shifted to looping residential streets to byways and industrial corridors, constantly checking Waze and Googlemaps, from multiple hot, dying phones. At every turn we seemed to be blockaded into a rude celebration of inebriation and flags and air horns and orange cones and crossing guards.

We encroached upon a stalemate. My chess skills chimed in. “You know… if we jump this curb and traverse this grassy inland, we can cut through to this other road.” You see, the other part of the equation was the Jeep Wrangler. We had yet to take advantage of it.

We said, “fuck it” and we mounted the curb structure and took off over the plane of non-street, the 4×4 kicking up mud as we sped in an off-road Army-level expedition flying by hungry alligators and water-logged river rats. When you can’t get through or around, I might suggest a life axiom of just going over.

We made it home to the backwoods swamp just as a Gardner snake greeted us inside our foyer. It slithered away into the wall. We were so exhausted I can’t even remember seeming to mind. At one time in my life, my biggest fear was snakes. My current levels of weariness, fatigue and depletion called for a subconscious longing to be bitten and set free by a venous reptile.

I no longer fear snakes. I no longer fear death.

…

We followed that night by venturing to the Insta-Gator tour in the AM. The guide told us that there are 3.5 million American alligators in the State of Louisiana. There are only four million American people there. The kids got to hold baby alligators, and we were able to feed popcorn to a festering barnful of the giant slimy dinosaurs, snapping and hissing the entire time. I’m going to be honest – I did not feel completely safe in the understanding that one of the gators could have potentially easily lopped off a child’s appendage if they were to make a bold move of dangling too closely over the rail.

We set off for the Global Wildlife Center in Folsom. A trolley-led safari, with over two thousand, free-roaming exotic animals. Kangaroos, camels, bison, llamas – any strange animal you can picture, endangered or otherwise. They were all there, running up to the vehicle together in unnaturally combined herds, ready to be hand fed.

In a surreal tableau, packs of hundreds of wild dogs and ostriches and sheep and crooked-eyed devil goats roamed as one. Completely unafraid of humans, giraffes craned their necks to fit their heads inside the open-air bus. Black tongues leaching out for morsels and treats of kernels and feed, inches from our faces.

We stopped for dinner at a place called Pink Agave. Faux neon for all your basic-ass moms night out. Enchiladas, sugary rum-based drinks with flowers and bendy straws.

…

I brought the kids to French Truck Coffee one morning. This location was on Dryades Street somewhere between the Carrollton and Milan neighborhoods of New Orleans. The big yellow house was a juxtaposition to the original location I had visited years before, which was actually just a French truck.

This larger location, airy with wooden interior and exposed rafters, was another repose and another reminder of why I’m motivated to travel.

The kids with their pastries, and I with my beans, exploring the vacuum siphon machines.

After looking at the tiny old beat-up truck outside, we sat on the rocking chairs on the front porch in a glimpse of laid-back charm and warmth of southern hospitality. You can’t piss on hospitality. I won’t allow it. ⁽¹⁾

Back in NOLA, we visited Audubon Aquarium. I feel spoiled being in Chicago and having the Shedd Aquarium close by… but man. The Audubon kind of puts Shedd to shame. They have this giant tri-level tank where you sort of start in the middle somehow, and it’s set up as if you are under a submerged steel trestle, covered in green algae. Sharks and swordfish effortlessly sail about. You make your way to the top where you can see down into the makeshift Gulf.

At some point you end up at the sand base where aquatic animals burrow and the full vision shines through. It’s honestly brilliant.

They have a big pool where you can reach in and pet Cownose Manta Rays as they glide by. They feel like large mushrooms.

…

Audubon Zoo capitalizes on local witch lore and Louisiana Voodoo in an award-winning display of the 19^Th Century deity Blanc Dani. Venerated around the Bight of Benin, altars of Mary Laveau, and a plethora of animals of the buggy marsh – ZooDoo. Material charms of healing and cursing. Bowls of stones and prints from the Dark Saints of Dauphine Street. 

As we turned the corner of the ethereal display we were stopped dead in our tracks.

Behold! The Witch’s White Alligator.

The leucistic dragon starred us down like Satan’s warlock as it read our every move in telekinetic unsettling thought.

The bellowing of an alligator

Live oaks draped with Spanish moss

A snow-white egret silhouetted against a dark bayou

Zydeco, fais do-do, filé for the gumbo

This is Louisiana

…

…

1. Only the real ones will know the movie Troll 2.