Do not cry for the Crescent City.

• Author: Malone, Christopher
• Position: Life in America

THE LOVE AFFAIRS we share with cities are secret things. Mine begin with their connection to the waters that nourish them. The crooked canals of Venice and the narrow walkways chasing after them, closed in like a picture frame. Camps' Bay Beach in Capetown, when the immense magenta dusk opens its mouth to swallow the cobalt colored stones of Table Mountain. The emerald waters of the Bosphorus dissecting Istanbul at dawn, as the lights of the Blue Mosque fade with the morning call to prayer. The fog and wind sweeping over San Francisco Bay at noon on an impossibly sunny day in the middle of winter. Even New York, where I work and live, where nature has been exiled and replaced with jagged skyscrapers rising from the ground like gigantic tombstones--this desert of concrete and iron also is a series of islands dependent on its rivers and harbor.

Then there is New Orleans--my home. New Orleans is nothing without water. New Orleans is water--a city in a swamp where sea is not distinct from land, where, more than any other city, water defines a way of life. Everywhere you turn there is water. In New Orleans, we breathe water; we drink the air.

Anyone who has been there in the summer knows this lesson well. On this side of the street, the blinding sun; on the other, a violent brief thundershower hits the cement producing steam that rises to burn the nostrils. When this happens, we like to say that the devil is beating his wife. Everywhere, humidity wraps itself around you like a hot, wet towel. Winters are no different. One January, I watched the rains fall ceaselessly for three days from the inexhaustible sky until the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, soaked like sponges, finally begged for mercy. When the rain stopped, the city was cloaked for another three days in a tragic fog.

The geography of a city shapes the psychology of its people. Lake Pontchartrain lies impassively to the north. On its march to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River slices due east as it approaches the city, juts to the north, then to the south at the western suburbs, forms a perfect crescent around downtown, makes one more bend north before winding its way southeast through the fertile land and waters of Plaquemines Parish and spilling into the Gulf. New Orleans is called the Crescent City because of her relation to the riverbend. More accurately, it is the Cradled City as it rests comfortably in the muscular arm and murky waters of the Mississippi River.

The Lake is a massive muddy puddle 24 miles wide, no deeper at any point than 15 feet. While connected to Lake Maurepas to the west and Lake Borgne to the east by small tributaries, Lake Pontchartrain is unvarying--or better, stagnant. Little enters; less exits. Only on the windiest of days do tiny waves lap against the thick black silt that passes for a shore. All other times it is tranquil, motionless, lifeless, its coastline ill-defined.

The river, by contrast, is ever-changing and dynamic. How could it not be? The Mississippi Valley covers two-thirds of the North American continent, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, from New York to Idaho. A valley bigger than Africa's Nile and India's Ganges, China's Yellow and Europe's Rhine. A river longer than the Congo and the Amazon. At New Orleans, one would think the River would become exhausted after its long journey. On the contrary: Within its sharp flawless curves, the Mississippi's current is alive, roiling and restless, swirling, chaotic, the undertow sucking everything beneath the surface.

The Lake and the River--they shape more than this landscape. They inhabit the recesses of the New Orleans mind in all of its contradictions. On one side of the city, stability, stagnation, resistance to change. On the other, unpredictability and a constant state of flux. On one side, the natives of the city in sleepy neighborhoods where families live for generations without moving, where children are born and grow up to buy the shotgun house next to their parents, where the dead are buried in the same above-ground tomb in which the entire family, going back generations, rests--where little changes and nothing seems to happen. This New Orleans is punctuated by perennial questions: "Where y'at?" or "How's ya momma and dem?" or "Where'd ya go to high school?" Someone always knows someone who knows someone who went to high school with someone.

On the other side, the "visitors" to the city--tourists, convention goers, students, artists, musicians, writers, vagabonds, squatters--bring with them their stories, music, culture (or lack of it), art, dereliction ... delicate pieces of their lives that are deposited during their stay. Departure, when it comes, means that they take a piece of New Orleans with them. Like the waters of the Mississippi, this river of...