I’m heading back to New Orleans this weekend. Along with many memories, many friends and favorite eateries are still there. Half of me is saddened as we approach the city through New Orleans East, which, two years after Hurricane Katrina, is still a flattened wasteland. But the half shamefully says, “nyah nyah, I told you so.”

Some parts of New Orleans just never should’ve been built on. The neighborhood south of what used to be the fishing village of Bucktown where the house in which I lived, up until the storm, still stands is one of those places. In my back yard was an impressive, massive cypress tree, even though I lived more than a mile in from Lake Pontchartrain. That means my neighborhood was once part of the now-vanished wetlands that once surrounded New Orleans and kept it relatively flood-free.

I lived a block and a half west of the famous 17th Street Canal, which is now landmarked along with neighborhoods, now familiar thanks to media saturation, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard, Gentilly and Lakeview. Fortunately for me (and for my stuff), my house was a block-and-a-half off the canal in the safe direction. My counterparts on the east side of the canal were swimming.

These places just never should’ve been drained and built. (Just ask the thousands of Irish immigrants who died of tropical diseases and industrial mishaps while digging the canal that is now Pontchartrain Boulevard. Decades later the canal was filled in just by dumping dirt in it. All that water had to go somewhere. People still act surprised that neighborhoods for blocks on either side are sinking.)

And sadly, New Orleans is poised for a repeat when the next storm hits, because local politicos, fearful of reducing their political base, refuse to even contemplate reducing the city’s footprint and restoring the natural protective barriers that used to buffer the city from storms and surges.

I had long thought about leaving New Orleans. The blissful ignorance (which locals try to pass off as “laissez faire”) the rampant corruption, and shady politics get sickening at times. Though I loved my job as marketing manager for the oldest American-flagged cruise line, the Delta Queen Steamboat Company, our Buffalo, N.Y.-based parent company installed their hand-picked management, a group of cronies who never understood the company’s culture, didn’t care, and never tried to learn it. I was assigned the Boss From Hell. It’s no wonder that this work environment coincided with a spike in my blood pressure and the manifestation of a leaky heart valve!

But then came Hurricane Katrina and life turned upside down.

Upside down, however, can sometimes be a fun perspective. I evacuated to St. Francisville, La., a lovely, historic village upriver from Baton Rouge, and spent a delightful three days in the country with my friend Chris at his dad’s home on Lake Rosemound. Then I undertook what should’ve been a five-hour drive over here to Crestview. But with I-10 impassable and gas at a premium, I ended up heading north to I-20, east to Montgomery, and 10 and a half hours later, arrived in Crestview at the home of a friend from our Tulane days, Leon Curenton. Crestview is his hometown. He lives about two miles from the hospital where he was born.

Now Crestview is my home.

But in the aftermath of Katrina, life was uncertain, so I did what every good traveler should do. I took a trip. Leon and I had planned to vacation in Vermont anyway. I figured I can worry about my house and job in lovely Stowe just as easily as I could worry about them down here.

Hmmm…I seem to have digressed. The point is I’m off to New Orleans for the weekend. It has one of the South’s most lively theatre scenes, which, with my friends and the Sun Ray Grill, are the things I miss most about New Orleans. We’re going to take in a little theatre, eat at the Sun Ray, and shop at Whole Foods and Suda Salvage.

I love Suda. I used to hit it once a month or so. They are a salvage grocery. If your grocery store in Des Moines burns down, yet some of the stock is salvageable, it might wind up at Suda. Hence, you can usually find great stuff not typical of the area. I once found blocks of Philadelphia scrapple, a pork loaf I loved as a kid, at Suda. They’re motto is “The neighborhood grocery that’s not in your neighborhood.” You gotta love that. They’re tucked in an industrial section of a New Orleans suburb called Elmwood.

I’ll let you know how my trip goes. Now our publisher, the radiant Kelly Humphrey, is reminding us that we have a paper to publish, so I’d better write some articles for it.

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