We fish out of New Orleans in late April. We fly in early on the day April 21, and fly out late in the day on April 22. Quick trip, but we had booked the guide in November for the big redfish moving into the marsh to feed, but had to postpone because of weather. We had our best weekend ever fishing in Galveston.
It’s cheap to fly from Houston to New Orleans because Houston and New Orleans are physically close, it’s only a six-hour drive, and they’re close in other ways too, like siblings who love each other but are a little astonished at the craziness their sister’s up to. If Houston is the great melting pot, the place where whites and blacks and Asians and hispanics are jumbled into the little engine that’s not little that thinks it can, New Orleans is the pot that never exactly melted, and where the most foreign folk of all may be the local white people.
What we share: The energy industry. the Gulf. Food. What we don’t share: Ambition (for Houston), history (for Louisiana).
I used to think there were two kinds of Texans, Texans who went to Santa Fe and Texans who went to New Orleans. For me growing up in West Texas New Mexico was only a long car ride away, as was everything else, and I know it and love it. What I first remember from New Orleans was walking past the strip bars on Bourbon Street, eating Beignet and drinking chicory coffee heavy with cream at the Cafe du Monde, and tasting crawfish etoufee. I think I was 14. I thought at the time the etoufee was bland. I’ve never quite figured Louisiana out.
Houston’s got the ambition, New Orleans the history. Oil and the Gulf may be self explanatory, maybe, but Etoufee is no longer anything extraordinary. There is a Brennan’s in Houston, and it was here long before me. I can get good red beans and rice or etoufee by walking from my office across the sky bridge and standing in line at Treebeards. Every seafood place in Houston sells a pretty decent gumbo.
It’s easy to look at Louisiana and feel self-satisfied. Our education system, sorry as it may be, is better. Our politicians may be crazy but they’re not corrupt or as incompetent. Our history, incredibly blemished as it is, is not the slave block or the quadroon ball or Storyville. On the other hand we weren’t the birthplace of jazz.
A young friend of mine is a lovely young woman, Princeton for undergrad and Harvard for law school, a Houston city council member. Someday she will be in at least Congress, and she is one of our city’s stars. We went to lunch a few months ago, before Hurricane Harvey I’m certain because the restaurant, Reef, hasn’t yet reopened. She shook what I swear was a half bottle of Tabasco–she said she preferred Louisiana but they didn’t have it–into her gumbo. “You know my family’s from Louisiana?” It surely would have perked up that Etoufee. I think us Texans just never quite get it.