The First Mardi Gras After Katrina
New Orleans, February 2006
It was after dark when our train pulled into the Big Easy. The last 30 hours had been a long, continuous blur down from Alexandria. We steam-rolled through Virginia, dipped into both Carolinas and paused in Atlanta. Then we cut across Alabama into the black swamps of Mississippi, passing tiny places like Cuba, Chunky, and Toomsuba.
Joe and I made the most of the downtime in our train cabin with a bottle of Old No. 7. We swapped stories which became more outrageous the further south on the map we sunk, with us waxing poetic, howling, and forgetting that his tape recorder had been switched on the whole time. Ginnie snuck passed the attendant in the coach section and joined Joe and me in our cabin for all the fun. She grew quiet each time footsteps were heard outside our door, figuring that she’d be busted and condemned back to steerage.
We were in our mid-twenties; old enough to have real jobs and supposedly function as adults, but not quite responsible enough to resist the lure of Mardi Gras.
On the last leg of our trip, a young Japanese guy sat at the table beside us in the dining car. His eyes…
