In the By water

In New Orleans, the air smells like standing water, fried food, rotting garbage, and gasoline. Traffic rumbles across the beat-up asphalt. Air conditioners rattle out of house windows, dripping yellow slime onto concrete below. Despite the live oak trees lining St. Charles or Esplanade Avenue, shade is rare in most of the city. Dogs wander down the hot sidewalk and turn around after a block or so, ready to go home. A flat, bleached-out sky hangs low over everything: the crisscrossed metal of the Industrial Canal's drawbridge; the long blocks of shotgun houses and the stretches of boarded-up shops; the bends of the Mississippi River, where cargo boats stacked with boxcars seem like the only swift-moving things in the world. When a storm is finally conjured up--usually around three o'clock in the afternoon--you can see the entire cloud formation as it moves in over the river, purple and gray in three dimensions. The rain is brief and hard, cooling the air for half an hour or so. And then the city, bathtub-shaped and full of steam, feels twice as hot as before.

Sarah and I moved to New Orleans in August, a few months after we got married, both of us in the final year of our twenties. I had two teaching positions in the city. One was in Uptown, instructing the partygoing undergraduates at Tulane, most of whom were wealthy and not from Louisiana at all. Downriver, closer to where I lived, my other job was teaching creative writing to high school juniors and seniors from the New Orleans school system (or what was left of it), kids mostly from poor neighborhoods. On some days they liked me and were eager to read me their poems. On other days they regarded me with deep suspicion. Sometimes they fell asleep during class. The air conditioner roared in the window of our classroom, competing with the sound of my voice.

All week I crisscrossed these invisible borders of the city, from down104 town to Uptown and back again, for work. At the end of each teaching day, I was exhausted. I would drive home and shut the door behind me, peeling off my work dress and my sweat-soaked underwear and putting on the most lightweight clothes I could find. I did not want to turn on the stove or the oven to make dinner. I lay on the cool, beat-up floorboards of our rented shotgun on Desire Street and dreamed about going swimming somewhere.

Wherever I am living, so long as there is water, I find a way to swim. And in a city like New Orleans--warm and party-happy, and surrounded by water--this seems as if it should be easy. But the river itself, of course, is dangerous and illegal for swimmers, not to mention full of industrial traffic. Lake Pontchartrain, the large estuary north of the city, is also considered risky: a higher salt content (read: global warming) has lead to reports of shark attacks, especially...