THE PARADES HAVE LONG LEFT CANAL STREET, and the beads have been, for the most part, picked up. It's hard to believe, really--because they were everywhere. On Lundi Gras the street was a shiny purple and green gravel road; it crunched under my tires as I drove around the CBD.

Looks like they didn't put FEMA in charge of bead cleanup, at least. At midnight on Mardi Gras, police and garbage trucks swept down Bourbon Street, ending the holiday for good, as they've done every Mardi Gras since time immemorial, when God invented New Jersey and said go forth to New Orleans and see some tits.

This year, it was different. The locals historically flee the city to go skiing or go to Mexico on what is, if your boss does not hate all that is good in the universe, a guaranteed four-day weekend, but this time they've stuck around. And tourists, who usually come to Bourbon Street to act like what they imagine locals act like, have for the most part stayed away. When my flight lands on Monday at Louis Armstrong International Airport, there is an eerie lack of high-fiving. Local time is 10:30 AM. Set your watch back one hour, Philadelphia travelers. Heck, set your watch back six months, and save yourself a little heartache.

The drive downtown is uneventful. I-10 is as miserable a highway as ever, its power to choke the spirit of all who travel it undiminished. Perhaps it's different headed East, out of town, to Baton Rouge--that side has carried most of the load of late and so is more likely to be feeling tired and defeated. Anyway, it is a testament to the bad judgment of Katrina that it destroyed so much but left this highway alone--a hurricane who knew anything about New Orleans would have started here. Nothing's different as I speed along, but for the sea of blue FEMA tarps you can see on every third house from here to the horizon.

When I lived in New Orleans in 2000, the city was just fine--as far as New Orleans goes, many locals might hasten to add--but I was a mess. I was in a job I hated, in love with a girl in Philadelphia, and though I loved New Orleans I was depressed to a degree that even its policy allowing its citizens to walk around with an open beer could not fix me, though how I did try.

I did make some good friends here, namely my boss Jason; our bond was strong enough that it withstood my utter incompetence. After fifteen or so years in the Crescent City, Jason applied for immigration to Canada the day George W. Bush was re-elected, and a week after Katrina petitioned the sympathies of the Canadian parliament to have him and his girlfriend Laura moved up the eleven-month waiting list. A few weeks later, they were living in Toronto.

Last week I wrote Jason and Laura and told them I expected New Orleans to be generally sad, but that it would add an acute sting to be there without them. They wrote back: "we're here." They were among many evacuees who came home for this. Everyone knew there would be a time to go visit their sick friend-city in the hospital; Mardi Gras was visiting hours.

After settling in, I find Jason and we head to Lakeview dead set on a little Devastation Tourism. We pass a helicopter taking off from the jerry rigged emergency medical center they have set up in the parking lot of the Superdome.

There are so many things here that you can't tell if they are actually worse or just seem worse in a post-Katrina context--New Orleans didn't exactly have its shit together before the flood. Did the street lights ever work before? Was this building abandoned? Was that one? Did the Superdome feel so much like a tomb? No, that I remember, we always said it looked like a giant spaceship.

Lakeview: a white FEMA trailer in every direction, and shipwrecked pleasure boats in the neutral ground (the locals call medians "the neutral ground" and I find anything that sounds like we're talking about a war zone feels right). When the 17th Street Levee broke, the floods headed across Lakeview and onto other parts of town. We're the only ones in the neighborhood, so far as I know. It's just home after home, empty and marked with spray paint. Every building has an "X" like the one you see to the left--the numbers and alphabet soup tell you how bad the damage is, whether or not anyone will be inhabiting the home again, and how many bodies were found inside. The number on the top of the X is the date the home was surveyed. I saw 10-10 on one, meaning no one got there till October 10th.

In areas with people, you see t-shirts commemorating Katrina everywhere. The official "New Orleans: Proud to Call it Home" tee is worn with new resonance, and some say "STILL Proud to Call it Home." There's "NOPD: Not Our Problem Dude," and the locals seem really fond of "FEMA: Fix Everything, My Ass." I tell Jason I think it'd be really cool to make t-shirts with the spray-painted X on them. He agrees. An hour later we see some guy wearing one. If there is a clever way to face the hurricane, someone here has already thought of it.

Everyone wants to know if there will be a New Orleans in five years, in ten years. For the locals, it seems like a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma: if everybody stays, things will probably be okay, and if some people leave, but some people stay, the place people are staying in will fall apart. But maybe people are bluffing when they say they're sticking around. Some are taking steps to communicate their devotion to their neighbors. Take this house in Lakeview:


This guy wants his neighbors to know he's invested in staying. That red stop-sign-looking sign says "Santa Stop Here," which when you look through this house and see clear through to the backyard, you feel was pretty unlikely. The fact that people were celebrating Mardi Gras at all this year, and the way they were celebrating it, was a big sign in the front yard of New Orleans : We're back, We Have Electric + Roof, Please For the Love of God Don't Give Up on This Place.